3 decades of thankfully sharing food
In 1939, the Rev. Henry Marbly, the new pastor of St. Matthew’s Methodist church on Chicago’s Near North Side, held his first Thanksgiving food giveaway.
The neighborhood, once ruled by Irish and Italian gangs, was changing. Some old-timers were moving out. African American migrants from the South were moving in. Wherever they came from, a lot of people were hungry.
That year Marbly and the congregation distributed 25 bushel baskets full of food, including chicken freshly butchered by a nearby merchant. It was the beginning of a tradition that his son, Corwin, and his grandson, Arthur, will be keeping alive this year, as attested to by the sign currently on the pantry’s gray metal door:
THANKSGIVING 2019 FOOD BASKET
1 FROZEN HAM WITH
ASSORTED PACKAGES CANS OF FOOD OR 1 FROZEN CHICKEN WITH ASSORTED PACKAGES CANS OF FOOD FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED
“I got some of my dad’s love for humanity,” Corwin Marbly, who’s 94, said when we met in a small chilly room at the church Friday morning. He was sitting in his red rolling metal walker, remembering.
He remembered arriving in Chicago with his family when he was 12 years old. He remembered how they lived in the parsonage next to the grand brick church that had served Swedish immigrants before it housed African Americans. He remembered that sometimes while he, his seven siblings and his parents were eating dinner there would be a knock on the door.
“One of us would go to the door,” he remembered, “and the person would say, ‘I want to see Reverend Marbly.’ We’d say, ‘He’s eating dinner.’ My dad would raise up from the dining table and say, ‘Son, bring him in.’ ”
And then the eight kids would squeeze tighter around the table to make space for the visitor and Rev. Marbly would say, “Mama, would you go in the kitchen and get him some food?”
The moral of the story, which is one of his favorites about his father: “Anybody who came to his door got something.”
The old Swedish church building that housed the Rev. Marbly’s congregation is long gone, weakened in the 1950s by a fire caused when a nearby milk delivery truck collided with an oil truck. Eventually, the church was razed, then replaced in 1971 by a low, angular building designed by the prominent Chicago architect Walter Netsch. It was shortly after the new building went up that St. Matthew’s opened a regular food pantry.
In the decades after the Marbly family arrived, the neighborhood around the church kept changing. The Cabrini-Green housing project, once home to 15,000 people, most of them poor, was built in the mid-20th century. By 2011, all of its high-rises had been demolished and their inhabitants scattered. Expensive condos sprang up. The need for a food pantry diminished.
But the need didn’t vanish, and St. Matthew’s pantry has lived on, run since 1985 by Corwin Marbly, who took it on as a volunteer after 35 years of working for the United States Postal Service. He’s considered one of the longest-serving pantry coordinators — perhaps the most enduring — in the Greater Chicago Food
Depository’s pantry network.
Things he remembers from the 1980s and ’90s:
Women with babies, no money and no husband coming for food. So many men who had no jobs. Old people with nothing. The times wealthy people from the nearby Gold Coast would drop off food or write a check.
He also remembers the rules about who was eligible to receive the pantry’s food and the times he disregarded rules. “We don’t turn away nobody,” he said.
Until not so long ago, Marbly did a lot of work during the weekly Tuesday pantry distributions. He mopped, lifted bags, cleaned toilets. Then arthritis stole his strength, if not his good humor. He had to stop driving. Walking became a chore.
Still, every Tuesday, driven by his son Arthur, he travels north from his distant home in the Roseland neighborhood to preside over the pantry.
“Polish and Russian immigrants who live in the senior center,” he said, waving into the distance, when I asked who comes now. Former Cabrini residents living in the replacement housing come too, he said, along with a dwindling number of Hispanic people.
On an average Tuesday, 40 people may show up. On this coming Tuesday, in advance of Thanksgiving, the pantry is prepared for 150. One thing that hasn’t changed in all these years is that a lot of people are hungry.
Turkeys are more expensive than chicken and ham, and, frankly, not as convenient, so that’s what Thanksgiving visitors will be offered. They’ll be helped by a volunteer corps, many of them older women who once lived in Cabrini.
As for Corwin Marbly, his Thanksgiving will be a quiet one. There was a time when his wife, Garnett, would be clattering in the kitchen at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day. But she died in 2006. Relatives with whom he once shared Thanksgiving have passed on or gotten sick, so he’ll stay home. His son Art will cook. Two of his older sons will join them.
Determined to maintain the standards Garnett Marbly set for her husband and five sons, they’ll pull out the good dishes and the tablecloth, make the candied sweet potatoes.
When they gather at the dining table. Corwin Marbly will give thanks, above all, that he’s been allowed to grow old. He’ll also give thanks for the food and recite the blessing he learned as a child from his father:
Be present at our table, Lord
Be here and everywhere adored
These creatures bless and grant that we
May feast in paradise with thee.