PORT TOWNSEND — A light jingling sound, like a miniature bell, keeps Shirley Moss company as she darts around town.
The chiming comes from a silver hummingbird, a kind of wind chime suspended from her van’s rear-view mirror.
The bird is a symbol of Moss’ mother, the late Maxine Kinney. She taught her daughter about strength — polio had put Kinney in a wheelchair — and about unconditional love.
“I never had to do anything to make her proud of me,” said Moss, who grew up to be an artist by profession and manager of the Port Townsend Food Bank by passion.
“But I know,” Moss adds, “that she would be proud of me for this.”
“This” is the cellphone Moss carries with her at all times; the 334 miles she drives in a busy month; the 3,800-pound loads she lifts, box by box, into her vehicle each week.
As the food bank’s volunteer manager, Moss, 56, does it all for free — and for hundreds of households across Port Townsend.
Moss grew up in Detroit and learned her livelihood while still in high school. Amanda Drake taught a jewelry-making class and, “I found my niche,” Moss says.
She makes silver and copper chains by hand: necklaces, bracelets, pins, even headdresses in the style of medieval chain-mail makers. Her grandfather, Guy Kinney, also was a chainmaker.
“Other jewelers can do this, but they don’t want to. My gift is patience,” Moss says while showing a reporter some of her pieces on display at the Port Townsend Gallery.
With Valentine’s Day coming, she admits to the hope that her chains will be chosen gifts.
And “it supports my volunteer work,” Moss says of her jewelry. Soon after high school, she and her partner — Greg Root, still her mate 40 years later — went to live on their boat in the Caribbean Sea, where she earned a living selling her jewelry on the island of St. Thomas.
Moss and Root, a Marine who became a civilian helicopter pilot, traveled some more, and Moss sold her jewelry at shows for years. They lived in Ashland, Ore., for a while, and then, 15 years ago, settled in Port Townsend.
Soon after arriving here, at age 41, Moss had to have open heart surgery, to repair a birth defect. She calls the atrial septum defect a “hole in my heart.”
The operation took all of Moss’ strength. For too long afterward, she felt frail and weary, though she looked as young and healthy as ever.
“Suddenly,” she remembers, “I knew what it felt like to be old.”
Around her adopted town, she saw seniors who had trouble getting around, and who had to stretch their meager Social Security checks over rent, heat, prescription medications and groceries. They couldn’t afford much fresh, nutritious food.
Moss recovered from her surgery with a vengeance. As soon as she was well enough to work, she phoned Helen Kullman, then the manager of the Port Townsend Food Bank.
“I like to lift,” was Moss’ pitch for a volunteer job. So Kullman had Moss start by doing pickups.
She loaded her vehicle with donated food from stores downtown, uptown and on the outskirts, and brought it to the hundreds of food bank beneficiaries.
“This is great exercise,” says Moss, who is known for racing from car to two-room food bank with her long blond curtain of hair flying.
“It showed me how nice it was to feel good again.”
Moss has felt good ever since; fittingly, she was a 2010 recipient of the Jefferson County Heart of Service Award.
Kullman managed the food bank till her retirement last year at age 82; Moss became boss in April.
Working with Kullman and the rest of the volunteers — “no one here gets paid a cent” — Moss moved the food bank from a smaller space on Park Street to Mountain View Commons, the former Mountain View Elementary School at 1925 Blaine St.
Showing a reporter the orderly shelves of the pantry, Moss jokes that this place is “the great recycler. All of this would have gone to no good,” she says of the hundreds of pounds of produce, dairy products and breads donated right after their sell-by date passes.
“The stores put the freshest out and donate the rest to us,” Moss adds.
The queen of all sources is the Food Lifeline, the Shoreline nonprofit that distributes goods to some 300 agencies across Western Washington. Thanks to its broad donation base, the Lifeline can sell food to the Port Townsend Food Bank for an extremely low price: 3 cents per pound. That’s why a gift of cash goes so much farther than a donated canned good, Moss says. With a check for $20, she can buy 66 pounds of fresh pears, organic chard, milk, even Starbucks coffee.
Now and then, Moss buys good chocolate from the Lifeline. Or Ritz crackers. These are treats, yes, and they’re part of Moss’ mind set of treating her clients as she would treat her own family.
The food bank volunteers are another family group. Moss’ father, Bill Moss of Sequim, volunteered here for years, until his passing in December 2010 at age 82.
This family includes quite a few seniors, such as the tattooed guy, aka David Gee, who’s been working here as long as Moss has.
“Shirley is very dynamic,” said Gee, 78. “She’s a very good boss . . . she recognizes everyone’s feelings.”
Sally McKelvey, 68, happened to meet Moss in the Safeway parking lot four years ago. Her work at the food bank is a high point of the week, she says.
“I get more back than I could ever have thought,” adds McKelvey, who retired after many years at Quimper Community Federal Credit Union.
This volunteer job, she says, is the best job she’s ever had.
“I get up at the crack of dawn; I can’t wait to be there.”
Food bank day, Wednesday, starts around 6 a.m. with volunteers arriving to start setup. During the snowstorms around Jan. 18, one volunteer with a Suburban sport-utility vehicle provided rides for others whose cars couldn’t make it. Moss said 163 clients came on that Wednesday. Apparently, the heavy snow prevented many from getting to the pantry, since 228 families were counted Jan. 11 and 239 on Jan. 4.
The busiest week in food bank history came this past November: 338 families — households of one to 11 people — came for help the day before Thanksgiving.
Clients can come in and sign up for numbers long before the food bank opens; they can then come back to get in line around
10:30 a.m. The pantry is officially open from
11:30 a.m. till 3 p.m., though if someone comes a bit after 3 p.m., “we’ll find them food,” Moss says.
She spends Wednesdays buzzing from QFC and Safeway to Aldrich’s uptown, the Food Co-op on Kearney Street and to the warehouse on Otto Street where the Food Lifeline order comes in.
She stocks and restocks, speeding around the room, driving back to the markets to replenish the shelves at 1 p.m.
Sometimes, Moss sees people around town with signs saying they need help.
Riding around
“I tell them, ‘the food bank is going on right now,’ and sometimes I give them a ride in my van,” she adds.
“I’ve never had a problem.”
One recent Wednesday, she set her pedometer, and it proceeded to count 19,000 steps — more than 8 miles between 6 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. She keeps track of her hours per month too: That number reached 136 by late December.
Sometimes she’s asked how one “qualifies” for the food bank. “Walk through the door” is her answer.
“Sometimes we’re feeding people for years. Sometimes we’re getting them through a rough patch,” Moss says.
There are many elderly clients who, with mounting prescription medication prices, have little left for food. There are also people who suffer from illness, physical and mental, that prevents them from finding work. And then there are parents whose children need something basic like dental care, but who have no insurance.
When Moss became manager, she set up the “Quick Pick” room, where clients can pick up a smaller portion of food within 10 minutes. This is for those who cannot wait in line because they have only a brief break from work, or they suffer from an illness that makes a longer wait impossible.
“We’re here to help people, while respecting their dignity,” she says. “We are really lucky. We have a wonderful location and a generous community, so we can do a good job.”
McKelvie has watched the way Moss brings people together: donors, clients, volunteers. Moss’ only rule for the volunteers who hand out food, and who now and then get special requests, is “follow your heart.”
That, McKelvey says, is what makes this bank work.
“I pick my volunteers based on compassion,” Moss adds.
There are all kinds of givers: those who supply their time and muscle; those who drive around to the donor markets and pay for their own gasoline; local businesses such as Pane D’Amore, the bakery that provided a very big batch of loaves for Thanksgiving. There are anonymous donors, like the one who sent a check for $1,000 in December, and those who contribute $20 each month. There are also the “pet angels,” Moss adds. They come in and give cash for pet food specifically.
But the food bank is not as top-of-mind through these winter weeks as it was before Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“People tend to forget about us during the year,” Moss says.
And she knows there are those who won’t give because some clients are “working the system,” and taking food so they can spend their money on other, non-essential, stuff.
“There are a handful like that. But you don’t not do something because of a handful.”
Moss isn’t given to worrying about whether donations will come in, or whether there will be enough to go around.
“I’m action-oriented,” she says. “Occasionally a client will stop me, look me in the eye and say, ‘You have no idea what this pace means to me.’
“So I never wake up in the morning wondering if what I’m doing with my life is worth it.
“I get to see the heart of the community,” she adds. “And it’s a great community.”