Rescue Mission recruiting for annual feast

The United Gospel Rescue Mission in Poplar Bluff is expecting at least 2,000 guests for Thanksgiving dinner.

Desserts, cash and volunteer labor are needed, said the Rev. Greg Kirk, the mission’s executive director.

“Last year, the mission served more than 2,000 meals. I don’t know how many we’re going to do this year,” Kirk said.

“I absolutely am going to need pies, cookies, brownies and desserts,” he said. “That’s always my biggest fear every year is we’re not going to have enough. The Poplar Bluff residents are the original heart attack kids and wait to the last minute. Two hours before the meal, they bring everything. I’d really rather have everything a couple of days before the meal.”

If you are not in the mood for cooking, “you can bring us money,” Kirk said. “You can go to Walmart and buy a cake, pie or cookies. You can pay your friend to make cookies. Whatever you gotta do, we’ll take whatever we can get.”

Along with the desserts, volunteers are needed. Helpers always are needed from 9 a.m. - to noon Monday-Wednesday, Nov. 22-24.

“We’ll be there if you’ve got a group of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, whatever kind of scouts, service group, your church, your sorority, whatever, you want to help, you can,” Kirk said.

Thanksgiving “we need tons of workers, because we’ll have all those meals to deliver. In fact, of the 2,000 meals we do, I’d say 80% were delivery. So we need drivers, we need them at 10:30 in the morning” Thanksgiving day, Kirk explained.

Anyone may come after 7 a.m. because, “we’ll get ramped up on cooking, cutting the pies, the cakes,” Kirk said. “We’ll be bagging the rolls. There’s a process how we do everything.”

About 10 a.m., “we’ll actually start making trays going out to houses and send them out,” he said.

A family can deliver a meal or meals. If they’d like, they may keep on going until we’re done, or they can deliver one meal and go home, or stay for the whole day.

If someone wants a meal or meals delivered to them, call the mission 573-785-4683 by Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

“All you need to do is call,” Kirk said. “We don’t check your income or anything. Tell us how many people are in your family, how many trays you need and a phone number and address, in case the driver gets lost they can call you. Every now and then we really need a phone number.”

“A great thing is our firemen really, really come in to help us and actually our police, the sheriff do too,” he said. “Where our firemen come in handy, we’ve got all those cards. We don’t know where all the houses and the roads are in the city. What we do is the first thing in the morning, I take the complete deck of cards to the fire station. They divvy everything up in order. We get that so we can send one family and they’re not driving all over town, everything’s by each other. Our fire department has done that all the years I’ve been here.”

Kirk said, “If I ever need delivery help, all I have to do is call Chief Whiteley, or call Sheriff Dobbs and they send people. It’s really great how the community comes forward and helps with this meal.

“There’s no way I can feed 2,000 people. We have some people who have come for so many years. They already know where they’re working. We know where they’re working. One lady comes every year and works the food line. She’s laminated signs showing where food goes on the plate. To get everything in there. You have to do it the right way. One guy volunteers every year to cut the turkeys and the hams.”

Kirk described the day “more like a party than anything else. We really have a good time laughing and joking. Generally, the volunteers and us sit down and we’ll eat our meal together.

“When we do the meal, we don’t have our clients go through a line. We have them seated and we bring the food to them. We try to treat it like a restaurant. We have tablecloths on the tables. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a good time of the year.”