By late morning on the last Thursday of each month, a hundred or more people usually are lined up in front of a single-story industrial building at 6224 S. Wabash Ave. Most are strangers to one another, and the majority are older or elderly, many balanced delicately on canes and walkers.
It is a scene reminiscent of the Great Depression soup kitchen lines, men and women seemingly down on their luck, waiting patiently to go inside.
When a garage door at the north end opens promptly at noon, they do find food. But it is not for them, it is for their pets.
In an illustration of the growing conviction that animals can be a tonic for many human ills, the Animal Welfare League has created a logical outgrowth of other social services: a pet-food pantry. For the people who come, getting food for their pets is almost as important as securing their own food.
“Dog or cat?” league workers ask each person who has shown up with a picture identification.
“Dog,” answers 76-year-old Tyree Payne, tall, slender and with a full head of steely gray hair. He is given two plain brown paper bags totaling 30 pounds of dry dog food. Cat owners get the same in cat food.
Payne’s younger brother had picked him up at his apartment in a desolate South Prairie Avenue neighborhood, driving him to this even more desolate stretch of urban disintegration.
Yet for the people who come, the place is a bright spot in their often-constricted worlds.
Indeed, nobody may benefit more from pets than senior citizens, experts say.
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The Delta Society, a Renton, Wash.-based organization that promotes the pet ownership for humans of all ages, cites numerous studies showing that, for example, elderly pet owners make fewer visits to doctors than elderly without pets.
They also show a higher rate of survival from heart attacks than seniors without pets, and they cope better when a spouse dies.
“The whole reasoning behind the pet food pantry was that we wanted to make it easier for elderly people on fixed incomes to keep pets,” said Diane Spyrka, director of the Animal Welfare League’s Wabash Avenue shelter. “Certainly we don’t want to see elderly people skimp on their own well-being in order to feed their pets.”
The league, which also has a facility in suburban Chicago Ridge, for 63 years has rescued abandoned and abused animals from city and suburban streets.
It has long fed the animals in its shelters on the generosity of supermarket chains, pet food manufacturers and distributors that send it damaged (thus unsaleable) bags of pet food.
So much food piled up in league storerooms, in fact, that the organization came up with the idea for the pet-food pantry, mainly targeting needy inner-city seniors.
At the first giveaway, on July 26, 1990, only four people showed up. Through mostly word-of-mouth advertising those numbers skyrocketed. Now, depending on the weather, more than 600 people will show up for the monthly giveaway from noon until 3 p.m., taking away, on average, a total of more than 12,000 pounds of cat and dog food.
“We know what we give isn’t enough to feed most pets for a whole month,” Spyrka said, “but certainly it helps.”
Payne, a retired metalworker whose health has been frail since a stroke five years ago, started going to the pet food pantry early last summer when a friend told him about it.
“If I don’t get this (free) food, I got to go to the Jewel to buy it,” said Payne, who lives by himself in a three-flat next to elevated tracks. “My dog is 140 pounds, so the food the league gives me only lasts a week or 10 days, but it sure helps.
“I only got Social Security to live on,” he added, “and it costs me more than $12 a month to feed him.”
He makes no apologies about what he values most about his 4-year-old rottweiler, Killer. Sleek and muscular, Killer is a genial puppy around Payne. But when a stranger crosses the threshold of the apartment, the dog is a snarling menace.
“I bought (Killer) to take care of me,” said Payne. “I have a lot of thieves around here. If I don’t have that dog, I can’t live here. Everybody in the neighborhood knows I have him.”
Still, having a pet around has offered Payne much more than security.
“You need a dog when you’re old and alone,” he said. He has a grown daughter and son who stop by regularly to look in on him, as does his brother and a couple of good friends. But when they’re not there, he just has four walls and the dog to keep him company.
“That dog understands the English language,” Payne said, grinning with affection. “It’s almost unbelievable. He knows exactly who’s coming to the door, if I tell him. At night, he lets me know when he wants to be petted. Sometimes at 3 or 4 in the morning he’ll get to wanting to hear me talk, and he’ll knock my covers off.”
Payne perfectly fits the pattern of elderly people who benefit from pets studied by John New, professor at the University of Tennessee’s school of veterinary medicine in Knoxville.
“Often elderly people live alone in isolated circumstances,” said New, “and loneliness has medical consequences. Pets . . . offer unconditional love.”
“Whether they are big or small dogs, cats or even birds,” New said, “they are an extra pair of eyes and ears in the house. If something is wrong, like an intruder or a fire, often it is the animal that senses it first and is able to alert the owner.
He added: “People living by themselves often suffer from malnutrition, not because of poverty, but because they don’t like to cook just for themselves and sometimes forget to eat. Animals don’t forget, and by reminding their owners that i t’s breakfast, lunch or supper time, they help keep the owners in an active, daily routine.”
The cost of materials and labor of rebagging the food by the Welfare League is paid for out of a $3,360 grant made by the Chicago Community Trust Foundation, Spyrka said.
“We really like what the Animal Welfare League is doing with this project and its continued presence in this blighted neighborhood,” said Sara Solotaroff, a program officer at Chicago Community Trust.
Patricia Williams, 68, has photo albums of all the dogs she has had over the last few decades, and she emotionally recounts the highlights of each of their lives: Boy, Sheba, Big Boy, Liz, Francis, Taurus, King, Lady, Princess, Shep, Duke Number One.
They were all big guard dog breeds, as are the two that now live with her and her husband, Howard, 54: Duke (after John Wayne) Number Two, part German shepherd, part rottweiler, and Nelson (after Nelson Mandela), part husky.
“I’ve always had big dogs,” she said, because of the sense of security they provide in their crime-ridden neighborhood, a cul-de-sac where their street, 56th Place, runs into a railway embankment.
“They growl real low when somebody’s sneaking around, and when they’re really barking loud, there’s somebody around whose up to no good. The neighbors say they feel better when the dogs are out in the yard.”
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The Williamses have high chain-link fences around their property with signs showing the silhouette of two dogs and the message: “We can make it to the fence in 3 seconds. Can you?”
Despite their ferocity with strangers, Duke and Nelson are pushovers with the family. Until recently, Williams’ blind 75-year-old sister-in-law, suffering from dementia and terminal cancer, lived in the small ranch house with her and her husband.
“She couldn’t do much that she enjoyed, but she did like to sit out on the front steps in the summer, and one of the dogs was always at her side,” Williams said.
“Nobody would bother her while she was out there, and when she wanted to come inside, the dogs would let her hold on to their collars and walk her slowly right to her bedroom door. They aren’t trained, they just understand and know what to do.”