The Howard County
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F O C U S
VOL.10, NO.10
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P E O P L E
O V E R
More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
Meals on Wheels still delivers
World War II roots The famous program known as Meals
PHOTO BY MEALS ON WHEELS OF CENTRAL MARYLAND, INC.
By Robert Friedman For the past seven years, Columbia resident Julia Murray has received several home-cooked meals delivered straight to her doorstep each week. Murray, 79, a retired nurse who suffers from arthritis and asthma, said that getting her food delivered at home by Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland “keeps me out of assisted living or a nursing home.” The pandemic has made the organization change its deliveries from two meals a day — one hot, one frozen — to a once-aweek drop-off of 14 frozen meals. Despite the change, the program “still ‘forces’ me to eat a balanced diet,” Murray said. “Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the food has not diminished in quality and quantity one bit. I don’t know how they do it; it’s a miracle.” The pandemic brought “rapid and significant changes” to the program last spring, according to the organization’s executive director, Stephanie Archer-Smith. Requests for services from Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland tripled from 25,000 a week to 75,000. Delivered meals are provided to those who cannot shop and cook for themselves, regardless of age (though the vast majority are older adults). Recipients are asked to pay a modest fee based on a sliding scale. “Every day we were getting more and more calls from people saying, ‘Can you help us?’” With senior centers closed and shelter-in-place orders, she said, “seniors were more vulnerable.” Archer-Smith never considered failure. “For me, it wasn’t about if we could still do it, but how we could do it.” Her staff geared up for greater production, churning out boxed frozen meals instead of the usual hot and cold offerings. Because packing meals became more labor-intensive, many newly recruited volunteers worked shifts from before sunrise to after sunset. In addition to now weekly deliveries of meals outside the clients’ doors, the organization also calls clients a couple of times a week to make sure everything is relatively copacetic.
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Stephanie Archer-Smith, executive director of Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland, packs food in the group’s Baltimore warehouse. Her volunteers and staff are working overtime during the pandemic to meet the needs of an increasing number of Marylanders who cannot shop or cook for themselves.
on Wheels got its start in the United Kingdom during the early 1940s. Nazi Germany’s “Blitz” bombing of English cities destroyed many people’s homes and therefore the ability to cook their own food. In response, a group called the Women’s Volunteer Service for Civil Defense provided food for them. The first U.S. home-delivered meal program began in Philadelphia, in January 1954. Margaret Toy, a social worker in Philadelphia’s Lighthouse Community Center, pioneered a program to provide food that met the dietary needs of homebound seniors and other “shut-ins” in the area.
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Volunteers step up; more needed Today’s volunteers are no less heroic. The spread of COVID-19 resulted in Vince Bittinger being laid off from his administration job in finance at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “I couldn’t just sit around at home with nothing to do,” said Bittinger, 58, a resident of Dundalk. So, since late April, while “looking like mad for another job,” he has also volunteered for Meals on Wheels. He goes two or three days a week to the “kitchen” in Baltimore, picking up food prepared there, See MEALS ON WHEELS, page 12
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