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FEBRUARY 15, 2011 -- Friendly Hands Food Bank was supposed to be a short-term gig, an effort launched to help people make it through a recession.
That was 1991, and there's no end in sight.
Maureen "Mo" Hubert, 62, who created the food bank in the basement of her King Street home, will celebrate its 20th anniversary Wednesday. There may be a cake to mark the occasion, she said, but it likely will be just another day of helping the less fortunate.
The effort grows each year, Hubert said. In 2010, Hubert and her staff of four delivered 115,000 meals, a 40 percent increase from the 82,000 meals given out in 2009. Clients now number 2,500, compared to the roughly 50 to 100 who used the food bank in its first year.
The clientele includes families with young children and seniors. Hubert protects privacy, allowing clients to maximize discretion on their pickup days, in some cases backing cars right to the door for a quick exchange. "I had one woman tell me, 'If somebody saw me, I would die,'" Hubert said.
Hubert knows poverty. She grew up in a former schoolhouse turned tenement, the youngest of four children born to Bill and Lorraine Kincaid. Her father was a tool and die maker. Her mother cleaned houses. In winter, the kids would shovel driveways, earning $30 to $40 a storm, at $1 per driveway.
The old schoolhouse was home to 42 children crammed into eight tiny apartments. Most of those children are dead, now, Hubert said: substance abuse, suicide, cancer. Hubert survived a bout with stomach cancer six years ago.
In the day, they were teased and taunted as "schoolhouse raggles," relegated to the bottom of the social order. Even teachers would tease, Hubert said.
Hubert said her father was abusive, quick with the belt to the point of breaking bones, "a mean, vicious little Irishman." Her mother, Hubert said, instilled in her children this lesson: "You don't have a lot, but what you have, you share it."
The schoolhouse, where rats roamed and pipes burst in winter, creating an impromptu basement skating rink, burned to the ground in 1968. The suspicious fire sparked a day before a scheduled demolition following city condemnation, according to contemporary newspaper accounts.
"I guess I could say I had a tough life, but no tougher than a lot of people," she said.
By 1968, she was married, having chosen "Bashful George" Hubert from a trio of suitors. She was working as a machine operator at Torrington Special Products in Morris, a job she endured. Though she worked her way up to a management post in the shipping department, "I hated every day of that job," Hubert said.
On the day she quit, Hubert locked herself in the room that stored the intercom controls and serenaded the factory with the country hit, "Take This Job and Shove It."
Hubert's sense of humor is well-known, as is her tenacity. Former Mayor Delia "Dee" Donne, who once served on the Friendly Hands Food Bank board of directors and remains a close friend, said the city would be a different place if not for Hubert's effort.
"If she doesn't have it, you can be damn sure that she's going to find it," Donne said.
Donne worries that the years have taken their toll. Each Christmas, Hubert and her staff and volunteers collect, wrap and distribute hundred of presents for children in need. The effort requires many hours and late nights. "You can see she's utterly exhausted," Donne said.
Hubert took a low-paying job driving a Senior Center van after leaving the factory, and loved it. "You got to know all about Torrington, Torrington the way they remember it," Hubert said. In 1987, the director of the city's chapter of FISH invited Hubert to apply for the job managing the homeless shelter.
"To this day," Hubert said with a smile, "I still punch her in the face every time I see her."
A high-school dropout who earned her GED at age 32 without cracking a book, Hubert set to work cleaning house at the shelter, implementing various reforms. It did not end well. On Halloween 1990, Hubert was fired.
Hubert, according to court documents and contemporary newspaper accounts, had accused Nancy Habbal, then executive director of FISH, of misappropriating $11,000 from the shelter's 1989 budget.
Police later charged Habbal with embezzling tens of thousands of dollars by writing herself checks drawn on the agency's accounts. Habbal was sentenced in December 1995 to serve five years probation, but was not required to pay back $28,000, according to newspaper accounts. Hubert won a settlement in a civil suit filed against FISH in 1992.
Later, when Hubert learned Habbal had lost a son, "I actually sent this woman a sympathy card," she said.
"I don't hold grudges, it's not in me. I was put here for a reason."
That reason, she said, would manifest itself in February of 1991, when she borrowed $50 from her husband to buy basic supplies to create a food bank in the basement. The inspiration?
"You want to know truthfully?" Hubert said, of why she did it. "To piss them off."
In 2000, Hubert worked with then-Mayor Mary Jane Gryniuk to secure a $160,000 Community Development Block Grant to purchase a home at 50 King St. that has been the food bank's home ever since. Another $30,000 was awarded by the state Department of Social Services to finance salaries. Hubert runs the shelter on a budget that is mostly financed by donations. The organization's 2009 tax return, filed in May 2010, lists $141,974 in income, with $116,491 in expenses that include Hubert's $35,100 salary.
"See, George, I'm getting paid," she recalls telling her husband, who died in November 2006.
Hubert said the state continues to supply $33,000 a year, and the rest comes from "donations, fundraisers, me begging."
Hubert employs a full-time secretary, two part time helpers and a third person funded through Title V, a federal job program for seniors. Her brother, Bill, also helps out, and there is a long list of volunteers who pitch in.
Hubert has written countless letters to corporations, including food companies and grocery chains, seeking donations, letters that often bear fruit. Hubert keeps the shelves stocked with basic hygiene supplies such as toilet paper that many food banks don't provide, along with school supplies and some clothing.
"You really have to have fundraisers," Hubert said, noting that the annual penny drive has netted upward of $3,000 in change. "If everybody gives a little bit, it adds up."
Hubert works with other city food providers, FISH and the Salvation Army, to coordinate donations and make sure the same people are not getting help from more than one source. But no one goes away hungry, Hubert said. If a person comes without the paperwork required, or Hubert is unable to verify they are not on someone else's list, she will provide a bag of food to tide them over until the details can be worked out.
As for Hubert, she herself lives on microwave dinners, spending most of her free time at home, watching television and fielding phone calls from social service providers and people in need. |
