Editor's note: "The Faith in Our Lives" is a series spotlighting Catholics in various walks of life, and how they connect faith with what they do.
Jerry Martin must have the sweetest smelling car in L.A.
The front passenger seat of his brown 1986 Cutlass Supreme is piled two feet high with bread, pies and, on the very top, a big box of pastries. The back seat is also stacked with bags of rolls, muffins and more bread spilling onto the floor. The aroma coming from the open door is as good as any bakery's. Some might even say it's heavenly.
The 87-year-old retiree gets up five days a week at 5 a.m., and drives to Vons, Pavilion and other local supermarkets by 6:30 to pick up donated rolls of bread, pies and pastries. Then he delivers his goodies to Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood and Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Los Angeles, to other local charities with food pantries and shelters, and right to the homes of poor families he knows.
But along the way, if he spots a homeless person pushing a grocery cart, he stops the dented Olds to offer them a handout, too.
"Whatever they need, I'm very happy to help --- no discrimination to anybody," Martin says in a semi-gruff voice tinged with his native New York. He's sitting around a table in the patio behind Immaculate Heart of Mary, his two-steepled, stucco parish off Santa Monica Boulevard, on a Sunday morning. "It's all pretty fresh stuff. I won't give anything to poor people that I wouldn't eat. There's a lot of families I bring bread to in the name of Jesus. I don't refuse nobody.
"I've always helped people since I was a boy," he explains. "White, black, any color. It doesn't matter, 'cause I love people. And that's my life today. I'm five-generations Catholic. Jesus is embedded in my heart. I dedicate myself to helping others. That's my prerogative."
A mother's lesson
Martin was born in New York State, but grew up in Italy, where his father returned to fish. It was from his Napoli mother, however, that he learned to give. He remembers her cooking spaghetti and meatballs to bring to poorer families above them in their apartment building.
"My mother was something special," he says. "In my heart, she was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. She taught about other people, and I learned through her to do the same thing."
His mother wanted him to be a priest, and Martin went to a seminary for two years, but was kicked out for smoking. He apprenticed as a barber, making more money than his fisherman father. In the mid-1930s, when he was 17, the family returned to Scriba, New York, near Syracuse.
Five years later, the young man came to Los Angeles alone and landed a job bartending at a popular Hollywood waterhole called the Merry-Go-Round. One of his steady customers happened to be John Barrymore, who encouraged Martin, with his rugged looks, to get into the movies. The actor even helped him acquire a prized Screen Actor's Guild card, number 870, on the same day Gene Autry got his card.
Martin worked as an extra in pictures until MGM put him under contract as a dancer. Another contract player, Gene Kelly, helped him hone his acting and dancing skills. And the native New Yorker wound up in most of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland's musicals.
For more than 50 years he survived in the industry, with parts in such cinema classics as "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Gone with the Wind," "Casablanca," "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and "MacArthur." He worked with the likes of Charles Laughton and Humphrey Bogart as well as later with Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, Elvis Presley, Julie Andrews and Gregory Peck --- and even used his early barbering skills to cut their hair for free.
Following his heart
"Hollywood was a wonderful place to be. People were nice," he reports with a melancholy look, before adding: "OK, a lot of actors are a little grumpy because they have to work so hard. They have to learn their lines, get to work early and have long hours. But if you're nice, they're nice to you."
Still, Martin, who sometimes made $5,000 on a single day's shooting, finds his post-movie work, which he's been doing now for a quarter century, more rewarding. A eucharistic minister at Immaculate Heart of Mary, he says Dorothy, his wife of almost 40 years, has supported his food ministry, pushing him to do the right thing.
"When I retired from working, everybody told me: 'If you don't feel like staying home, why don't you help some poor people?'" he recalls. "So I went and applied for a license to collect and distribute food, and the grocery stores started giving me bread and sweets for the homeless.
"Why do I do it? Because I've been educated by my church to help the poor people. I just want to give them something to eat.
"Because my heart tells me to do it." |