The Book of Ruth
From the AIDS epidemic to Covid, with an earthquake in between, Project Open Hand has never stopped feeding people with love
This bio of POH founder Ruth Brinker appears in Open Hearts, a cookbook commemorating the charity’s 35th anniversary. The book includes some great recipes from notable chefs such as Cat Cora, Charles Phan and Traci Des Jardins, and yes, all proceeds benefit this venerable organization! https://www.openhand.org/openhearts
Where does the spirit of giving come from? Is it innate, or a matter of upbringing? Maybe to have an open hand, and an open heart, you have to start with an open mind. Before she moved to San Francisco, South Dakota native Ruth Brinker lived in Los Angeles where she discovered writers like Aldous Huxley and books like Autobiography of a Yogi. “ She told me she had this kind of epiphany when she was young,” says her daughter Lisa Brinker. “That you should always think of the other person first, and that that was the way to be happy.
“She didn’t have any money,” says Lisa. “She was very statuesque and nice looking, but she had didn’t have any lucrative jobs. She did a little bit of modeling in a department store, but she hated that. And later, by way of explaining her beliefs in psychosomatic problems, she said that when she was modeling, her knee was killing her because she hated that job. And as soon as she quit, her knee was fine.”
Ruth moved to San Francisco where she married Jack Brinker in 1957. The couple divorced in 1965, and with her daughters, Lisa and Sara, she moved to North Point Street near Ghirardelli Square, where she opened an antique store. Hippies were coming in looking for tchotchkes and costumes; members of the Committee, SF’s pioneering improv comedy group, and psychedelic poster artists Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly lived next door.
“She was just this mom figure who would sit there and talk and chat,” says Lisa. “She was super open-minded; she took my sister, me and a friend to the Avalon and the Fillmore, just to see the lights and stuff. I got to see Janis Joplin when I was ten years old.
“I guess that was kind of her role, to be like a mom figure and a helper,” says Lisa. “And so with young people getting AIDS, or even pre AIDS, a lot of them had been rejected by their families and even disowned. She was a good listener, and good person to talk to.”
As the city’s homeless population increased in the seventies and eighties, Ruth worked in a soup kitchen and then at Meals-on-Wheels, which had a kitchen in the basement of Trinity St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. She began there as a volunteer but went on to become the meals-for-seniors program’s executive administrator.
In 1985, a friend of hers was diagnosed with AIDS. The nation was just beginning to acknowledge the plague that had been the number one concern in the gay community for years. “Since it was my first experience with this cruel disease, I had a lot to learn,” Ruth said in a speech to the Commonwealth Club. “I was struck by how quickly his condition deteriorated — remember, this was before AZT or any other life-prolonging drug. Very quickly he didn’t have the strength to prepare his own meals, much less shop for and carry home a bag of groceries. If friends had not brought him food, and a group of us did, he would have died of malnutrition. As it was, he skipped more meals that I care to think about because people got their schedules confused or had to postpone their visits.”
While she and a group of friends tried to feed a small group of men afflicted with AIDS, she recognized the enormity of the crisis long before the government did. She gathered a list of 1000 patients and sent them letters to gauge their interest in her idea to provide food for AIDS patients. She only got two replies. “I was really shaken,” she said later. “Then I realized, they didn’t think I was for real. They thought I was some dizzy housewife. So I just had to start so they could see that I was for real!”
From the beginning she knew how to shake the money tree. “Some friends of mine invited me to a dinner party and I said, ‘Well, what should I bring?’” recalls one early donor. “And they said, ‘Bring your checkbook!’ So we all showed up. Ruth was there and she gave her little spiel. We had all known some people who had — they really didn’t know what it was at that time, so we called it ‘the illness.’ So we all made a pledge; I made a pledge to give her $500 a month for the next year. And all my other friends did, too.”
In September 1985, Ruth founded Project Open Hand, cooking the first meals herself out of the Trinity Church kitchen. She received $2000 from the San Francisco Zen Center, who told her that the Buddha would approve of her work. “I served a dinner entre with five to six ounces of protein, four ounces of some kind of carbohydrate and one or two vegetables lightly cooked,” she later recalled. “The bag lunch, which was delivered at the same time, consisted of a sandwich, two pieces of fresh fruit, a salad and a desert.” Long before it was fashionable, Ruth insisted on fresh fruits and vegetables, and no processed food.
It took her a while to get the publicity she needed. Early reports in the gay press got her lots of phone calls — from other people with AIDS needing her services. “The people we served never dreamed they’d be on any type of dole,” Ruth recalled. “They were executives, architects, computer programmers; they have lived a nice lifestyle. Then they run out of money and wind up in a ten-dollar a night motel. It’s very hard for them to ask for help — sometimes they wait until they’re nearly starving.”
She had demonstrated the need; what she really needed now was more money. Dinner parties with well-heeled attendees could not be their only source of revenue, as lucrative as they might be. As former POH director Tom Nolan says, “If you were a gay man in San Francisco — actually, if you were anybody, but a gay man particularly — and you saw all this suffering going on among your brothers and sisters and you didn’t do anything, you were just a jerk.”
“I think she just had the confidence that if she just presented this idea that was correct, and so simple — you know, when somebody’s sick, you’ve got to bring them food — that’s just kind of like a basic thing that people do,” says Lisa. “Maybe it’s a Midwestern thing. She just figured, ‘Who’s going to say no to that?’” In January 1986, the Golden Gate Business Association gave her another $2000, beginning the organization’s hand-to-mouth stage. Like a lot of the people they were serving, Project Open Hand was suffering from neglect.
One thing Project Open Hand never lacked for was people wanting to help. “The volunteer involvement was higher than any other organization I’ve seen, and I’ve known a number of them,” says Jim Illig, who later served as POH’s director of government relations. The enormity of the AIDS epidemic left so many feeling helpless. One gay man who became a volunteer had formed a group that called themselves Gladiators, because all of its members had survived. “I’ve had so many people pass away that I stopped going to funerals,” he said. “When I was going to two of them a day for over a week, I said, ‘That’s it: The only one I’m going to go to from now on is my own.’”
While much of the city, if not the nation, seemed not to care, “the biggest help in San Francisco came from the lesbian community,” he says. “They really stepped up. Because a lot of people were just afraid; because they didn’t know how it was passed, and that made a lot of people upset.”
Sandra Roth and Mary Vaskas were two of those women who felt they had to do something. “It was all so unknown and scary,” says Roth. “Nobody knew what was going to happen except it seemed like everybody who got it died, really quick.”
“Nobody in the mainstream was doing anything, or even acknowledging there was an issue,” adds Vaskas. “Walking around the Castro, everybody looked so gaunt, and skeletal, especially when they got really sick.”
The two women started volunteering at Project Open Hand, chopping vegetables. The simplicity of the organization’s mission appealed to them. “It was like nourishment in the literal sense of nourishment, with food,” says Roth. “And it was also nourishment in sort of the emotional sense. Unfortunately a lot of people had families who weren’t ready to acknowledge what was going on, and so they were on their own. They had their friends, their chosen family rather than their birth family, but so many of their friends were also sick and couldn’t help.”
Some of the organization’s earliest volunteers had tried something similar to what Ruth was doing. Vickie Guesti was working with three friends in the East Bay, making food for AIDS patients and delivering the meals themselves. “Unfortunately, I had many friends that died of AIDS. That was back in the day,” she says, “so it was one bout of pneumonia, and the next bout someone was done. It was a really bad time.”
After reading about Project Open Hand, the women contacted Ruth and asked if they could combine forces in order to serve the East Bay as well as San Francisco. “Ruth once wanted to feed the world,” says Guesti, who now works as POH’s East Bay client caseworker. “They said that they would hire us as Project Open Hand employees, because they didn’t really want random food going out to their clients.”
Fernando Castillo was working as a chef in San Francisco when his lover got sick. They closed their restaurant so Castillo could take care of him, and the other men in their building. “I ended up taking care of seven people in the eighties, and cooking for a lot more,” he says. “I cooked a lot of stews and soups — nutritious things that people could eat. Many of them had thrush [a yeast infection in the mouth], so they had trouble eating. I remember having to make chicken and rice with broth, and blend it.
“Somebody give Ruth my phone number,” Castillo recalls, “somebody told her about me taking care of my friends. She called me one day out of the blue and asked me if I needed some food for my friends. I told her that I was a chef, and I was doing the best that I can. She said, ‘Well, I would like to meet you.’ And I said, ‘Maybe one day I will.’ When she started working at the Trinity Church, I was there in the little free time that I had. I was very busy with the guys.
“Then my friends started dying. When the last one died, she said to me, because we became very, very good friends through that, she said, ‘Fernando, why don’t you come and help me?’” By then Ruth was in a position to pay some people, and soon Castillo was Project Open Hand’s executive chef.
By then the organization was swamping Trinity Church. “The kitchen operation was beginning to spill out into the hallway and up the stairs where people were peeling potatoes and carrots,” Ruth recalled. “My outer office became the lunch preparation area; the ladies vesting area became our computer room; the choir room became our bookkeeping department.”
With the help of several grants, Project Open Hand purchased its first real headquarters, a former import/export warehouse on 17th Street in the Mission District. With the help of an early head chef, Christopher Medina, they designed and built a 4000-square foot kitchen to help feed their swelling number of clients. Part of the kitchen’s challenges was cooking to meet the changing needs of those they fed, people who were literally wasting away. “We offer the exact opposite of food that you would eat if you were on a diet,” said Medina. “We use lots of butter, cream, sugar and sauces, and make big portions.”
This was the first kitchen many of today’s older volunteers worked. “We’d show up at 17th Street after work, get our route list and food, and head out,” says Bill Dunn, who along with his wife Christine has been delivering food as a volunteer since the late eighties. “We’ve delivered routes all over the city — Bernal Heights, Inner and Outer Mission, Glen Park, Noe Valley, Ocean Avenue near the Cow Palace, Inner Richmond, Marina, Polk Street, Russian Hill, West Portal, Chinatown, North Beach, Downtown, Western Addition, the Presidio and others I’m sure we’ve forgotten. We delivered to SRO hotels, apartment buildings, and single-family houses. Usually we did two routes on a Friday. Sometimes more if needed.”
While volunteers have been the lifeblood of Project Open Hand since its beginnings, that blood would sometimes run out and the staff would be pressed into service. “Someone would come over the intercom and say, ‘Everyone drop what you’re doing! A couple volunteers didn’t show up, we’ve got to get these meals done,’” recalls Illig. “And I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute! I’m in the middle of writing a grant. Are you kidding me?’ They’d say, ‘No, this is what we do.’ So we’d drop whatever we were doing, grab the meals, get in our car and deliver them, because they’re hot and there were people hungry at the other end. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, this really states the purpose, that when you come to work you can be pulled away and told to deliver a meal.’ I had a regular route and you got to know some of the people you were delivering to, and if they weren’t there, they weren’t on the route that day, you’d wonder: Did they die? Are they in the hospital? We were often the only person they would see.”
“I think the camaraderie of the people really hooked me,” says Lisa Erdos, who began volunteering on 17th Street. “The fact that the organization really did so much, and they cared a lot that the food was really good. My dad got meals from another community food organization when he was living alone later in life, and it was absolutely terrible! Project Open Hand was always good, even from the beginning. Like Fernando would make just incredible tamales and other wonderful food; the flavorings were good and the variety was very impressive. Throughout the years I’ve had quite a few friends who’ve had food from Project Open Hand because of breast cancer or some other disease or a broken hip, and they have always raved about the food.”
By the time he was made executive chef, Castillo had become very close to Ruth. “I called Ruth ‘Mama,’” he says, “and she would say, ‘Oh honey you know we’re cooking more and more and more,’ because back in the nineties, we grew so fast. We went from 500 meals a day to 700 to 1000 in a very, very short time.”
As Ruth’s right hand, Castillo got to see her in action when it came to securing donations. He would accompany her to the green market where the city’s restaurants shopped. Ruth would have arisen at 4 am to get the cream of the day’s crop, often for very little to nothing.
“We would go there and Ruth would say, ‘Well, we have maybe $500 to buy vegetables,’ and then she would sneak into another area where there were some zucchinis or onions or whatever and she would say, ‘And why are these there?’ And they would say, ‘Well, you know, they’re gonna go on delivery, maybe be a little cheaper [because they were on the verge of going bad].’
“Ruth was very soft spoken. So she would say, ‘Well, we have very little money but these need to be cooked very, very soon!’ And they would laugh and then say, ‘Okay.’ So, we would get all these freebies. Of course we would spend the $500 that she brought to buy vegetables. But we would have freebies like crazy.”
In charitable work, it’s all about The Ask. Ruth Brinker was a formidable presence at the green market or the corporate meeting room not because she was aggressive. Everyone who knew her emphasizes how soft-spoken she was — sometimes you had to lean in close, just to hear what she was saying — and also how well dressed.
“She was 63 when she started Open Hand,” says her daughter Lisa, “and she had a friend who was kind of a super clothes horse, just buying tons of beautiful clothes. Her weight went up and down, and whenever she went above a size 12 or something, she would just give my mom a ton of beautiful tweeds, cashmere, silk and things. So my mom was always really well dressed. She didn’t have to buy anything; her friend just gave her all this. At her memorial everyone was talking about how she was always really dressed up. So I guess that kind of helps: People listen to you better sometimes when you look very presentable.”
Fundraising in her finery was less fraught than delivering food. “I’ve got to protect myself,” she said in 1989. “I can’t go on regular deliveries anymore. I don’t want to get too fond of these people.” In the early days, clients would sometimes collapse after answering the door for an Open Hand delivery. Just getting out of bed took all the energy they had that day.
“Red was her favorite color,” Nolan recalls. “The color she wore most often. And she made quite the impression when she walked in the room. She was such a great asset to the organization: A little old lady grandmother. She would say so herself: ‘Who can turn down a grandmother trying to feed people?’”
***
On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California. San Francisco’s Marina District was hardest hit, with scores of homes destroyed. Damage to the Bay Bridge suspended traffic in both directions, and though Project Open Hand was beginning to expand its services into the East Bay, no one was able to drive food over. And in SF, the kitchens at both Glide Memorial Church and St. Anthony’s, which reliably fed the neediest, were closed due to earthquake damage.
Miraculously, Project Open Hand’s new kitchen on 17th Street remained intact and the organization rose to the challenge. Jonathan Walker was the executive chef at the time — he’d accepted the job the day of the quake, which struck at 5:04 that afternoon when many in the Bay Area were already gathered at home to watch the SF Giants play the Oakland A’s in the third game of the World Series. Some of what were then the city’s best restaurants (Ernie’s, Square One, Zuni) donated their food to the POH kitchen. They sent 600 entrees and 400 box lunches to the Red Cross shelter at the Moscone Center, 100 entrees to St. Ignatius Church, 20 lunches to the Fort Mason Park Center — all told, Project Open Hand served nearly 50,000 meals to Bay Area residents in the first week after quake. Bill and Christine Dunn used their van to haul entrees to the Marina Middle School. “The van smelled of marinara sauce for weeks,” Bill recalls. Bay Area residents who weren’t aware of the organization before now had a favorable impression.
Vickie Guesti and her foodie friends had already joined forces with Project Open Hand. “We were working in the basement of a church right across from the Athletic Center at UC Berkeley,” Guesti says. “There was a friend of mine who lived in the city who would pick the food up [from 17th Street], and then she’d bring it to Berkeley. We had a lot of volunteers that would meet us” to help distribute the meals in the East Bay.
The day after the quake, “volunteers from San Francisco brought the food over on BART [the Bay Area Rapid Transit system that connects SF and the East Bay via a tunnel under the Bay],” recalls Guesti. “A disc jockey in Berkeley got on the radio and said, ‘If you have a large car or pickup, meet at the West Oakland BART station.’ So all these people from San Francisco came over wearing Project Open Hand T-shirts. We met them on our end and loaded up vehicles; there were a lot of people because everybody was at a loss and wanting to volunteer. And then those vehicles went to the [homeless] shelters, because Open Hand was one of the few kitchens in San Francisco that could accommodate the shelters.”
At the time, Project Open Hand still delivered meals to HIV-AIDS patients exclusively, but the rapid expansion to feed even more people at a time of crisis was noteworthy: They could be doing more, and soon they would. But first there was some corporate drama.
By 1991, Project Open Hand was big enough to warrant a board of directors, twelve professional people, some of whom may have thought Ruth had outlived her usefulness. The then-CEO and board chair led a revolt of sorts that got Ruth locked out of the business she started, due to what she would later chalk up to, perhaps too kindly, “Founder’s Syndrome.”
“Ruth was a grassroots kind of gal who would literally go to the gay bars at night and do fundraisers,” says Illig. “She would throw all the money in a cigar box. Everybody was talking about the cigar box in her trunk: She would just leave it there, you know, and then when there was a need to go buy food, deliver more meals or whatever, she just used [the money in the cigar box] to go out and buy it. So there was no accounting. And then she started expanding and bringing in some corporate-type board people. They were appalled! There was never any accusation of her stealing or doing anything but spending it on her mission, which was to feed people with love. Whatever she raised, she’d spend. So they came in and put some restraints on her; she did not like that.”
Illig arrived after her departure, but the effects of the rift were still being felt. “When I got there, I had a mailbox, and I discovered the mail had already been opened. I went, ‘What the hell is this?’ and I was told, ‘We open all the mail now because Ruth was getting checks and putting them in her bottom drawer, and not cashing them, driving accounting crazy and forgetting about them.’ The board pressured Ruth to step aside, step back and be a figurehead only. She really hated that; her heart was into this.”
Not one to let the grass grow under her feet, Ruth started a new venture called Fresh Start Farms. The goal was to rescue neglected urban sites, like a vacant lot at the corner of Ellis and Divisadero, and turn them into gardens run by formerly homeless people living in subsidized housing, and a handful of Russian refugees. The produce, herbs and edible flowers produced behind their chain link fences would be sold to some of the city’s finer restaurants, including Jeremiah Tower’s Stars and Aqua.
Here, too, Ruth was visionary: She foresaw urban gardens popping up all over the Bay Area, feeding the foodies while helping the less fortunate. “She’d had that idea for a while,” says daughter Lisa. “She had met so many people, chefs and restaurant people [while working at Project Open Hand]. She wanted to grow the salad greens and sell them to the restaurants. But that only lasted a couple years or so. She didn’t have the energy or the focus to really do that.”
Meanwhile back at POH, donations had taken a hit due to Ruth’s departure. Despite her occasional appearances at events, the rumor mill persisted: Someone had pushed out the founder of one of the city’s most beloved charities. “I have walked in the Pride Parade with many, many contingents,” said civil rights attorney Bill Ambrunn, “including with popular elected officials and celebrities. But it was never like the experience walking with Ruth as part of the POH contingent. All along the parade route, you could hear people crying out, ‘We love you Ruth. Thank you Ruth.’ People clapped and cheered enthusiastically for the tiny little lady waving from the car. They knew her and knew her story and loved her. Even if they didn’t actually know her, many of them knew people she helped care for.”
Even Mother Teresa, on a visit to San Francisco, said something about Ruth’s good works. “I said, ‘Oh my God, look what Mother Teresa said about you,’” Castillo recalled. Her response was classically understated: “That was very nice of her to say that.”
So many saw it as a savvy move when Project Open Hand hired Tom Nolan to be its executive director in 1994. Nolan had already achieved fame as one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US, as a member of San Mateo County’s Board of Supervisors.
“I was a supervisor in San Mateo County from 1984 to 1992, and in 1985 joined the AIDS Task Force, which had to do with the testing in the early days and all those things,” says Nolan. “Some of us came up to visit various AIDS organizations in the city, like the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Shanti Project and Project Open Hand. So I met Ruth at that point for the very first time. I was very impressed with her; she was a soft-spoken, charismatic person. I’d seen her off-and-on a few times before actually working here. She was always enormously supportive when I got there. She’d been the founder, and the project’s first director.”
By the time he arrived, Fresh Start Farms was dying on the vine, and Ruth, then in her seventies, was getting too old to start another organization. But Nolan was determined to bring her back into the fold. “I recognized right away that she was a marvelous asset,” says Nolan. “And I was at the point in my life where I wasn’t jealous of any attention she might be getting… She was perfect and so we brought her over many, many times. We’d introduce her to clients and staff; she’d walk into our lunchroom and people would stand up and clap for her…. They really appreciated what she had done and how she’d done it.”
It was under Nolan that Project Open Hand radically expanded its mission, always seeking Ruth’s buy-in as he did. “Anytime we would do anything big, any kind of change in the organization or anything that might be controversial, I always went and talked to her about it,” he says. “I knew that it was important to do. So she was involved when we bought the building [at 730 Polk Street] and started serving more than just people with AIDS: seniors, breast-cancer survivors, eventually anyone who was critically ill with anything. But I saw her and sought her opinion, and also her blessing.”
The decision was partly a financial one. “We bought a building over on Polk Street, where they are now, and we paid $2.5 million for the building, and needed another $2.5 million to renovate the kitchen and all that. And I recognized right away that we needed to have our finances balanced. We needed somebody to help build the building; the cost was much too great for us.” The Salvation Army, which had been providing lunches for senior centers around the city, lost its contract because it wouldn’t go along with San Francisco’s partner benefits program. Originally Project Open Hand was going to share the duty of providing food to 22 congregate senior meal sites with Meals-on-Wheels.
“But interestingly enough,” says Nolan, “one of the very few things about the city where they’re not flexible at all are deadlines for applications for things. Meals-on-Wheels was 13 minutes late getting their bid in and accepted. So we got them all. All of a sudden we had to prepare for a different kind of population, and part of our motivation initially, quite frankly, was keeping the building afloat, and keeping the organization financially secure.”
Expanding their service to seniors was not in and of itself controversial. (Ironically, Ruth had tried to enlist Meals-on-Wheels to help feed AIDS patients early on, but their bylaws prohibited them from serving people under 60.) “We had the capacity and we needed the money,” says Nolan now. “But it became very clear very soon that the senior population we were serving had a very important place in our hearts… What was really controversial was two years later, when we decided to expand beyond [feeding people with] AIDS in 1996. People actually were beginning to live longer and healthier. When I got there, in ’94, essentially it was if you got AIDS you got sick and died… To put our finances on a stronger foothold, we landed a big contract with the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade.”
Some of Open Hand’s benefactors balked as its mission shifted. The US government’s historical neglect of the AIDS crisis had left many people sensitive to further insults. Not for nothing was the best book about the AIDS crisis entitled And the Band Played On. (Its author, former SF Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts, was a member of the Gladiators, the informal group of AIDS survivors — until he died of the disease himself in 1994.)
“The base of support for Open Hand has always been wealthier older people,” says Illig. “There would be days where we would get a giant bequest, and the development director had a bell outside of her office she’d ring to celebrate when we got $50,000 or whatever. A lot of people were dying and wealthy people like Robin Williams helped us push over the capital campaign [to buy Polk Street] at the end. He matched everything anonymously, the last million or so.”
Kim Madsen, director of nutrition services at Project Open Hand, points out that the organization’s mission morphed in part because “our clientele really changed quite a bit. It started out as gay white guys and then it became an epidemic where one month it was people using IV drugs, so then that just shifted the demographics of who we were serving, and then all the different health issues that come along with different ethnic groups. We found that we had a lot of people that were on dialysis,” says Madsen, “so we had to create a special menu for that. So just over time as the needs grew, and our clients changed, we have adapted our menus to meet those needs so that their health conditions would be improved or managed.”
Paul Hepfer, Project Open Hand’s current CEO, says the move to widen its services in the nineties is no longer controversial. “I think now people realize that it was such a great model, to have medically appropriate food for people with what is now a chronic condition,” he says. “HIV is a chronic condition that people can live with their whole life. And if it makes them healthier, why wouldn’t we provide that resource for people with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, end-stage renal disease?”
***
Project Open Hand was born in the midst of one pandemic and is now surviving another. Paul Hepfer had not been in charge long before disaster struck. “When the city issued the shelter in place warning [March 16, 2020], I had a conference call with the director of the State Department of Aging and other meal providers from around the state,” he recalls. “And she was talking about, you know, preparing the National Guard to come in to help us to deliver and we were like, ‘Oh my God, if what happened in New York happens here, what are we going to do?’”
There was even talk of suspending operations but that didn’t get far. Hepfer called the board “and they all agreed: You can’t slow down food production when people need it the most, and when people are the sickest.” They got some relief from the government’s Payroll Protection Program (PPP), and had to change their way of preparing meals: Vegetables are now bought pre-cut, reducing the need for as many volunteers, who now spend their time preparing frozen meals.
“We rented a freezer trailer that’ll hold up to 20,000 frozen meals so we can get two to three weeks ahead,” says Hepfer. “In the event that, God forbid, we didn’t have the staff on hand to help, or we had a much higher need.”
“If someone has COVID, then there is no interaction,” says Guesti. Many of Open Hand’s clients come to depend on the human interaction they get with the delivery people, which is frowned on now. “But I think our drivers sometimes sit and chit-chat with people.”
Wendy Cohen, POH’s community nutrition program site director, says it’s been especially tough on the seniors. They had to close the congregate centers until further notice, and the seniors who used to come for more than food (bingo and dancing to the oldies) just pick up their frozen meals. Most of them can’t even see their children or grandchildren. “That’s why this pandemic has been so hard for people,” she says. “For seniors especially, they live alone, and a lot of them aren’t technology savvy.”
“When it was AIDS, we were losing our friends,” says Castillo. “With half my friends, I kissed my friends, I told them how much I loved them. And with this disease, we can’t even go and hug people. I lost my oldest brother in Mexico City [to Covid], and I couldn’t go. I just had to have the memories of him talking to me a few days before he died. So this is very different.”
Open Hand’s current executive chef, Adrian Barrow, thinks that San Francisco’s history helps. “People here learned their lesson,” he says, “and they’re very smart. They learned their lesson before we even got there because we lived through the AIDS epidemic. The reason we adjusted so easily and readily here [to Covid-19 restrictions] is because we’ve already been through our own pandemic.”
“San Francisco was the largest city in the country with the best Covid response,” says Illig. “We’ve had less than 140 deaths in the whole city of 700,000 people, I think partly because we went through this with HIV. We recognize viruses can kill; in those days it was different and killed particular people. But in the early days of HIV, nobody knew how you could get it.”
Hoa Su is a newer volunteer; he began coming to work in the kitchen on Sundays nine years ago, and though he never met Ruth Brinker, he was motivated by her example. As a person with HIV, he knew the stigma of anything associated with a virus, and has often thought of Ruth’s bravery in the darkest days of AIDS. “Not letting fear get in the way of offering help, I think that is what all of us are willing to do right now given that Covid’s a major concern,” says Su. “That’s why the mission, and her story, really speaks to me. The courage that she had, and the human decency that she had just to help, regardless of what the situation is.”
From the kitchen tables filled with (socially distanced) volunteers to the executive offices upstairs, the message is the same. “I just hired Amor Santiago, who’s the vice-president of development,” says CEO Hepfer, “and I told him, ‘This is a big year for us. It’s our 35th anniversary; we’re going to do lots of events with lots of pomp and circumstance, celebrating all these things.’ And then, you know, no events could happen. The only way that I think I got through it was to step back and say, ‘This is why we’re here anyway.’”
Barrow came to his position via an unusual path: Before he was Open Hand’s executive chef, he was one of its clients. Born in Barbados and raised in Brooklyn, Barrow had a career at some of New York’s better restaurants (Union Square Café, Blue Water Grill) before coming west to work at the Michelin-starred Aqua.
“You know how chefs are,” says Barrow. “We work hard, but we don’t really take care of ourselves. So there came a time I started feeling tired and my doctor was like, ‘You need to take care of yourself,’ and it crossed my mind that maybe I need to retire. I saw a position listed at Open Hand [where he had already come as a client] for special diet chef, and I said, You know what? Let me just walk in my resume. Like a New Yorker, you know.”
He moved from there to his current position and it’s hard to think that Ruth wouldn’t have approved. In her later years, when she lived with her daughter Lisa and her husband in Noe Valley, Ruth began to go the POH center there for meals and conversation.
“The woman that started Project Open Hand then turned around and needed the organization she started,” says Cohen, who worked at the Noe Valley center then. “I first met her when I first started with Project Open Hand. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, but I’d seen a TV a special on three people, heroes of San Francisco, and Ruth Brinker was one of them. I just wanted to meet the person that changed my life.”
Cohen cut Ruth’s hair a few times, and almost lost her when she took off before her son-in-law could pick her up. “She was pretty fast in that walker,” Cohen recalls. Like most of the people whose lives were touched by Ruth and her mission, Cohen is not reluctant to discuss the ethical aspect. “I think all of us have a moral obligation to help people. And if someone crossed my path that had a problem, I’ve just always been compelled to do what I could to help them.”
Tom Nolan went to a Catholic seminary and then attended Duke University Divinity School. “I didn’t get ordained,” he says, “but I saw the organization quite frankly as a kind of parish and myself as kind as kind of a pastor. I viewed it as my job to know as many of the clients as possible. I spent a lot of time in the food area of the building, and knew most of the volunteers, and a lot of the street people who were there at that time. But it was a spiritual thing. Actually, Open Hand brought me out of my own depression. By the time I got there, I had already dozens of people very close to me die of AIDS. And there was no end in sight.
“I used to tell people that no matter what happened there — we had 130 employees and 2000 clients and things would go wrong, there’d be problems — but at the end of every day, we all knew we were contributing something very important and good. And you can’t say that about your everyday work. But we could, no matter how bad it was. We fed some people who were critically ill.”
Nolan was among the last people to see Ruth alive. “She was in a care facility here in the city,” he recalls. “I’d gotten to see her a number of times, but I got a call that morning that she was probably dying that afternoon.” Some of Ruth’s family was there, as well as Fernando Castillo, faithful to the end. “She wasn’t really aware that we were there,” says Nolan, “but we sat by her bedside and talked to her. She had a copy of a book about Issan Dorsey beside her.”
“He was a Zen priest who had also been a drag queen,” says Lisa. “There’s a book about him called Street Zen; he started a hospice called Maitri that still exists. She really liked him, and she just got a kick out of the fact that he was a Zen priest and a drag queen. She always like to tell this story of how when she first started Open Hand, Issan came and sought her out and said that what she was doing was very Buddhist. She liked that. Of course, it could also be very Jewish, very Christian, very humanitarian, whatever. But she seemed to like that.”
Some of Ruth’s ashes were scattered at Green Gulch, the SF Zen Center’s farm and monastery in Marin County; the rest were scattered at the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. Nolan arranged for her funeral service at City Hall. Mayor Ed Lee was in attendance, and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus sang. Wendy Cohen slipped in as well, and recognized some of her old clients from the Noe Valley center.
“I sat by Ruth’s daughter and son-in-law,” she recalls. “I just wanted her to know I was there. It was beautiful; she would have loved it. Nice buffet! And I noticed a couple of seniors that were there, and they were taking the food. They were putting it in their pockets.”
For Ruth Brinker, the giving never stopped.
