RECENT ARTICLE IN ANCHORAGE PRESS

Posted: Thursday, April 24th at 9:30am
 

By Susy Buchanan of the Anchorage Press
 

Elgin Jones is running late for his traditional weekend breakfast at the Captain Cook Hotel. But when he finally does arrive it’s in grand style, a bellman whisks him to his table in a wheelchair like a porter carrying a litter. Jones transfers to his seat and greets the restaurant’s staff by name as he orders his usual bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and bananas and directs the waiter to add two Splenda’s and some cream to his coffee. He holds forth jovially in his deep, singsong voice. 

 

Jones is legally blind and hobbled by diabetes. At 74, the burdens of gravity and time have weighed him down, slowing movements, complicating ordinary tasks. Old age is something Jones seems to view as an annoyance, not a barrier.

 

Each weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. Jones ambles slowly across the street from his apartment to the Fairview Rec Center. For the past 18 years it has been the same routine, with Jones supervising the meal service at Kids’ Kitchen, which serves roughly 60 children whose parents can’t — or won’t — feed them dinner.

On a recent Thursday night it was canned ravioli in tomato sauce with some fresh ground beef mixed in, carrot sticks, a roll and a Capri Sun. As the clock nears 4:30 p.m., the double doors begin to open ever so silently as kids peek in and try to slip by Jones’ blindness for a seat at the tables. They inevitably fail. “I know you’re hungry honey but you have to wait until 4:30,” he calls out to a little girl in pigtails and pink tennis shoes that light up as she runs back outside to wait.

 

“It breaks my heart to make a hungry child wait,” Jones says.

 

Jones is careful to point out that he does not serve adults, and that his kids aren’t homeless; there are other services available for those people. Support for Kids’ Kitchen comes from fundraisers (like an upcoming silent auction on April 26), but mostly from donations of canned food, help from churches and youth groups and one savior Jones signals out individually, the Lucky Wishbone, which has been sending over 200 pieces of fried chicken each week for the past 18 years. “That’s a multi-million dollar investment over the years, and one I am so grateful for.”

 

Jones’s work at Kids’ Kitchen has landed him in People magazine, earned a proclamation from the Anchorage Assembly, and won important political friends with names like Cuddy and Hickel that he tosses into his stories like seasoning. But it’s the kids who bring him the most joy and heartache, he says. He can tell stories of getting a bear hug from a young Samoan man Jones had fed as a child, just as he will express worry about some of the more hardened kids he’s feeding now. They have a toughness in their voices that is way more complicated to ease than hunger, he says.

 

“One day Jennifer, who is eight, comes up to me and says, ‘Grandpa. Elgin?’ ‘Yes pumpkin pie.’ ‘Why doesn’t my mommy want me?’ You know how you get all choked up inside? I said, ‘Baby, as fine as you are and as sweet as you are your mommy just needs to rest for a while.’ What else can I say?” he says. “You can’t make someone love their child. All you can do is provide a means for kids to get an education and eat better food.”

 

A Detroit native and former gospel DJ, Jones began making waves when he moved to Anchorage in 1992 and started a short-lived alt-weekly called the Anchorage Gazette, geared toward the city’s African-American population. The Kids’ Kitchen idea came to him as the result of a divinely-inspired dream in August 1996, and mirrored a program he had started during a decade-long stint in Tucson called “Feed the Hungry.”

 

The restless Jones has been back to Tucson four times in the past year as he readies to roll out another Kids’ Kitchen in that city later this summer. He’s not moving, he says, just trying to extend his reach. “They don’t have any programs for hungry children in Tuscon at all,” he says, adding that the need there is much greater.

 

Jones surveys the Fairview kids with his ears, listening for familiar voices, thanking a young man who rushes over to pick up his cane, chatting with a 5-year old girl as she sucks eagerly on her juice pouch.

 

What these children need is more than donations and hot meals, he says. What they need is time from adults who care about them and their futures.

 

“We need male mentors to talk to our boys. If we don’t get them these boys are all doomed. In the society in which we live I can survive. I have a mind, I can talk, I can manage, but without that I’d be in bad way.”

 

Jones vows to keep on caring for his kids until he reaches 100 if his failing body will let him. “Here I am, legally blind and running an agency that feeds 1,000 meals a month. I’m going to use my mind. I’m not gonna sit down, go into a nursing home and stare at the walls. If I go, I’m going out with a bang,” he adds with a smile. “That’s Elgin Jones.”