Group Gives Food to 4,000 on Skid Row

About 4,000 hungry people took home crates of food and supplies when televangelist Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing rumbled into Los Angeles’ Skid Row this week.

With Downtown’s skyscrapers as a backdrop, volunteers Wednesday loaded the boxes from eight tractor-trailers into the hands of hungry residents of the blighted community.

Many said they normally get their daily bread from area missions or food agencies.

“I guess there are some good people in the world,” said Willard Carson, 45, walking away from the giveaway with a box of rice, beans, iced tea, chocolate bars and toiletries.

“I’m not working and I need this food,” said a woman who declined to give her name. “God bless the one that brings it and shares it too.”

Before the food distribution began, those attending listened patiently as Robertson called on them to let God “clean up all your sins and give you a brand new life.”

Robertson, wearing a denim shirt and blue jeans, told the crowd that God “has got power over crack cocaine, he’s got power over alcoholism, over broken homes, sickness--whatever oppresses you and keeps you down.”

Operation Blessing spokesman Mr. T, of the 1980s television series “The A Team,” led a prayer with a similar message.

Earlier, he had moved down a line of people awaiting food, urging them to pray and sprinkling his message with such advice as, “Love is the greatest weapon.”

Sometimes, the poverty he has seen during the food drive has driven him to tears, he said.

The Los Angeles stop was part of a three-month, 17-city effort to heighten awareness about hunger in America, said Julie Fairchild, a spokeswoman for Operation Blessing. Farms and canneries donate the food that otherwise would rot or be thrown out because it is undersized or mislabeled, she said.

About 400,000 pounds of food will be distributed in Southern California, she said. In all, the Hunger Strike Force Convoy will give away 3.4 million pounds of food nationally, she said.