A Fast Company Tribute: Give Thanks for Bea Gaddy

On scorching morning back in July, Bea Gaddy sat in a plastic chair on the gently sloping sidewalk outside her red-brick Baltimore row house and waited. Under a large tent was a cafeteria-style table covered with loaves of bread and cartons of ice-cold milk and orange juice. Inside the house was the usual array of sandwiches and canned goods, as well as an unexpected treat: several boxes of frozen imitation crabmeat that someone had dropped off.

She didn't have to wait long. Soon, shirtless, sweaty, bedraggled men rounded the corner onto North Collington Avenue and staggered toward the food pantry Gaddy operated out of her home. They were joined by young women who cradled babies wearing nothing but diapers and tugged along weary, sleepy-eyed young children. The crowd featured young and old, black and white, regulars and first timers. They were high on heroin, drunk before noon, and distracted by conversations they carried on with themselves. They were also sober, grateful, and friendly. Whatever their physical and mental conditions, whatever the reasons that brought them there, they had one thing on common: They were hungry.

Another day in East Baltimore, another meal at Bea Gaddy's. "How you doing, Miss Bea?" the regulars said. Gaddy, dressed in her usual black pants and white blouse, waved back with her free hand. She held a cell phone in the other, and it rang every few minutes with a new question, a new crisis. For hours, she fixed one problem after another by phone and with the help of the volunteers around her. Did you get enough food, sweetheart? Take another. . . . Sir, sir, don't smoke around here, please. There's children. . . . How many babies you got at home, dear? Four? Good Lord, somebody pack her a bag. . . . Baby, you like crab? I got some imitation crabmeat today. . . . Who's that boy kissing on that girl next door? How old is she? Oh, Lord, call protective services on that child's mother. . . . This man needs a shirt. Would somebody run inside and get him a shirt? . . . Jimmy, you were just here. Go on now. Leave something for the others.

This was the Bea Gaddy that many people never saw, a woman for whom helping others was a way of life. In addition to the food pantry, she operated a shelter for women and children, a furniture bank, and a program that refurbished abandoned row houses for impoverished families. A cancer victim's center and a drug rehabilitation house were slated to be next. In August, she became an ordained minister, so that she could marry and bury the poor at no cost. Her outreach work in the inner city represented a very personal mission, because the broken lives that she encountered were often reminiscent of her own struggles. She had been homeless, unemployed, and hungry. And once she had a home of her own, she thought nothing of sharing it with strangers living on the street.

Many of her admirers, though, associated her with a single day of the year: Thanksgiving. Who could blame them? Her holiday feast for the poor became legendary. It grew from an intimate gathering for a few dozen needy neighbors to a sprawling all-day affair, with as many as 20,000 people, on the grounds of a nearby middle school. The event made Gaddy, whom volunteers called Shorty (she was five feet, three inches tall), almost larger than life. Known as the Mother Teresa of Baltimore and Saint Bea, she was named one of former president George Bush's "thousand points of light" and once selected Family Circle magazine's woman of the year. Recently, she was featured in Fast Company.

This Thanksgiving won't be the same in Baltimore. For the first time in 20 years, Bea Gaddy won't be around to serve turkey and all the trimmings. On October 3, she died of complications from breast cancer. She was 68.

Born Into Poverty

A half hour before her funeral began, New Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore was standing room only. The service, which lasted three hours, was a reminder of the astonishing number of people affected by Gaddy's work and the dramatic course her life had taken -- from abject poverty to a seat on the Baltimore city council. Among the several thousand mourners were homeless men and women who arrived carrying bags of their belongings as well as state and city leaders, including Maryland's governor and lieutenant governor and Baltimore's mayor (who had ordered that city flags be flown at half-mast the day she died). As one of the speakers remarked, "Only Bea Gaddy could call a meeting like this."

Beatrice Frankie Fowler was born in Wake Forest, North Carolina, outside Raleigh, in 1933. Her family was dirt poor, but she used to say she didn't have time to worry about the Great Depression because she was too busy avoiding her violent, alcoholic stepfather. When there wasn't enough food, he used to throw her and her brother out of the house. As she wrote on the bio that appears on her Web site, "I know what it's like to hunt for food in a garbage can and eat out of a dumpster. As a homeless person, I did it for years. I was left to fend for myself as a child, raped before I was a teenager, and tormented by the bonds of poverty."