Picking up mail, food

Monday, May 3, 1999 | 9:42 a.m.

Local letter carriers are again asking Las Vegas residents to leave food in or near their mailboxes next Saturday.

Most nonperishable items will do: macaroni and cheese, canned tuna, peanut butter, baby food.

The food -- an estimated 500,000 pounds, will be collected by letter carriers on their regular routes, hauled to post offices, sorted, separated and loaded onto trucks and distributed among 17 local charities.

What letter carriers in 10 states began nine years ago as an experiment has grown into a national effort and includes 10,000 cities.

It's now an annual project for the National Association of Letter Carriers, and in the past six years the drives have collected 265 million pounds of food nationwide, said Julie Bryant, letter carrier and organizer for the local food drive.

The drive has taken root, she said, "anywhere there's a letter carrier."

For Las Vegas, it has become the valley's largest annual food drive. The second largest is the Boy Scouts' food drive, which in November collected 265,000 items, according to the Salvation Army.

Last year 420,000 pounds were collected in Las Vegas, making it 11th in the nation among cities that participated.

This year local carriers are hoping to make Las Vegas among the top 10.

"The postal workers are all excited," Bryant said. "It's a natural cause for us to get involved in, because we go into the heart of every community."

In the United States, "about 30 million people go hungry every year, and about 20 million never thought they'd need assistance," Bryant said. "We're not just talking about homeless people. We're talking about working families who can't afford groceries."

Because Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army are the main food providers in the valley, the bulk of the food will go to their shelves.

It still isn't enough, Sumner Dodge, Salvation Army spokesman, said. The 50,000 pounds that the Salvation Army received last year lasted less than a week. This year Salvation Army officials are hoping for enough food to last through the summer.

"Every month we see between 3,000 and 4,000 families looking for emergency food boxes," Dodge said. "We give them as much food as we have available."

The food boxes include cans of meat, vegetables, soup, fruit, condensed milk, breakfast food and baby food. Because it's for emergency use only, a limit is set to how many times a year each family can collect food.

The food drive is held the first Saturday in May because that's when food supplies begin to run dry. In addition, many schools get out in May, leaving children who are in the free lunch program without that one meal a day, Bryant said.

"People just don't realize how much food we go through. We go through mountains of food. We're helping twice as many families as we were at the beginning of the decade."

Nearly 10 years ago, the food collected from holiday donations would last the Salvation Army an entire year, Dodge said. A few years ago the shelves began emptying by spring.

On July 8, the shelves at the Salvation Army ran dry. A appeal to the community brought in 220,000 items by October.

"By May we get to a point where we worry how we're going to get through the summer," Dodge said. Which is why letter carriers volunteer to put in 6 a.m.-8 p.m. shifts one Saturday a year to work along side hundreds of other volunteers.

Within the next week 100 million postcards donated by the U.S. Postal Service will ask residents to leave food by their mailboxes on May 8. Local Lucky Stores will donate grocery bags to be used for the drive.

"We're making it easy for the community to help," Bryant said.

Some donations also will go to Aid for AIDS of Nevada, Boulder City Welfare Council and Giving Life Ministries.