'Something Good'

Catholic Charities' new food pantry sponsored by Mets' Rusty Staub

By MARY ANN POUST

Cardinal Egan joined baseball legend Rusty Staub at a Catholic Charities community center in Harlem, where he dedicated a new emergency food pantry funded by Staub's foundation, chatted with senior citizens in an arts and crafts room, and - taking advantage of the sunny summer day - enjoyed an ice cream cone with young day campers in the center's playground.

The Rusty Staub Food Pantry at the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Community Center is the first of five pantries that Catholic Charities will open in New York's five boroughs with the support of the Rusty Staub Foundation.

"I never see Rusty Staub at anything that is not wonderful," the cardinal said at the June 30 dedication, thanking the retired right-fielder whose foundation is the benefactor of many Catholic and other charitable endeavors in the city.

"Every time something good needs to be done, we can count on a great redhead who played for the Mets and who has done so much to make New York a happier and nobler place in which to live and work," the cardinal said, interrupting himself to ask for cheers for the Mets.

Turning to Staub, he said, "Rusty, you have added something that is urgently needed, something that will help our people who are most in need."

With shelves full of neatly stacked canned foods as a backdrop, the cardinal also praised the work of the Kennedy Center, a Catholic Youth Organization facility at 34 W. 134th St. which next year will celebrate 50 years serving the Harlem community.

Staub, known almost as much for his distinctive orange-red hair as he is for toughing out the 1973 playoffs and World Series with a hurt shoulder, thanked the supporters of his foundation in his remarks, saying, "This is a wonderful thing for me. Having played here was enormous. To be able to give back is very special, and I'm just honored to do it."

He told CNY in an interview later that he approached Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, executive director of archdiocesan Catholic Charities, because the foundation wanted to sponsor a project that offered direct assistance to the needy.

"We asked if there is a way we can help," he said. When the food pantry idea was suggested, Staub said he told Msgr. Sullivan, "Tell us what you need and we can do this."

A pilot pantry was started in Harlem a year ago and gave out 62,000 meals, Staub said. The new center, in a brightly painted, renovated ground-floor room at the Kennedy Center, began operating in May and served more than 300 families in its first month. The program expects to provide some 100,000 meals annually at the Harlem site.

It is open on Wednesday mornings, 10 a.m. to noon, and run by staff members of Catholic Charities' Office of the Homeless and Hungry and senior citizen volunteers from the Kennedy Center's senior program. Registered families who come monthly are given a bag of nutritious food sufficient to prepare nine meals per family member.

The Staub foundation provided an initial grant to Catholic Charities of $100,000 to establish that and four other pantries. The next phase of the plan calls for Catholic Charities to open similar pantries in Brooklyn and Queens, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Diocese.

Staub said the foundation was considering a mobile unit to serve the Bronx and Staten Island. "That way we can move the food to where it's needed," he said.

Others who attended or participated in the dedication included John Phelan, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange who is the board chairman of Catholic Charities; Msgr. Sullivan; Msgr. Wallace Harris, vicar of Harlem and pastor of St. Charles Borromeo parish; Joseph Panepinto, director of CYO, and Rep. Charles Rangel, who grew up in Harlem and has long represented the community in Congress.

The new food pantry will join a Catholic Charities network of more than 80 parish and community-based emergency food programs throughout the archdiocese. The network facilitates the distribution of more than 4 million meals to more than 80,000 individuals per year.