Helping the hungry to give thanks, and not only on Turkey Day

As we express gratitude at the table for blessings, here's a memory of one broken man who swept the groaning board with an idea.

PHOENIX — With Thanksgiving heading toward us, a time officially to be grateful, let’s recall a man who put food on tables all year long around the world after having an idea that was hiding out in plain sight and was as simple as saying: if you want to play ball, lace your shoes. Simple, but previously overlooked.

His name was John van Hengel, never as famed with the public as a major entertainment or sports star and increasingly forgotten as the years pass. But that’s what happens to everyone. Quick: Who was the most famous and powerful man in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1730?

Van Hengel believed in the Biblical admonition to do good works here below and lay up everlasting treasure in heaven, where he presumably headed upon leaving this Earth at age 82 in 2005.

As a young newspaper writer, I first met van Hengel in the early 1970s just south of downtown Phoenix, at St. Mary’s Food Bank. He was athletically trim and tanned and had some lifeguard work under his belt— back in the days before skin cancer was so much a concern.

He was presiding over a modest former bakery building on the west side of the street, at 816 S. Central Ave., that had a large refrigerator for temperature-sensitive goods but only evaporative cooling for the majority of the space, so it wasn’t weathertight like a structure with refrigerative air conditioning.

With evaporative cooling, hot air is forced through wet cooling pads that are moistened continuously, then the air is blown through the building. It’s a somewhat humid feeling way to cool down, and largely was succeeded here in the desert by refrigerative cooling.

Van Hengel hosed down the concrete floor as we talked, so it wasn’t as if there were rugs to damage in the desert heat and mechanically induced humidity. The former bakery was 5,000 square feet, and van Hengel didn’t shy from the gritty work. He said that if he started taking government funding, he’d want to hire someone else to do his job.

Shelves lined the walls of the large open space under one roof, stacked with cans and boxes that soon would be picked up by local charities for their needs.