10,000 Chickens & A Simple Rule

Ten Thousand Chickens and a Simple Rule

by S. R. Morris

            What does a Catholic church in Phoenix, Arizona have in common with a man born in Waupun, Wisconsin and 10,000 chickens? The answer is John Van Hengel, the founder of the world’s first food bank, renown as St. Mary’s Food Bank.

            Although he was a native of Wisconsin, John moved to Arizona many years ago on the advice of his doctor following a serious injury. He worked at a local mission dining room and helped gather fruit for the mission. Later he talked to a friendly priest about his idea of starting a “clearing house” where missions and other agencies could collect donated food from a central location.

John said all he needed was a warehouse and some seed money to get the project started. The money came in the form of a loan from St. Mary’s Church, so he later named the operation after the church. The location was an old abandoned bakery located south of downtown Phoenix.

            I was only about 14 years old when I first met John. He was a friend of my parents and I became interested in his project when I heard he wanted to collect food to help feed the poor and hungry. Over the years of my acquaintance with John (from 1967 until his death in 2005), he was a frequent dinner guest at our home and I often worked with him at the food bank.

            John was known to quote a portion of John 12:8 many times, adding his own question at the end, “The poor will always be with us, . . . but why the hungry?” The other thing John was known to say was that if people would donate any food to the food, he would find a way to distribute it, so it wouldn’t go to waste.

By now you must be asking where the 10,000 chickens come into the picture? The unusual happenings at the food bank always intrigued me and I loved to hear John tell us a story or two. Like the time he got a $10,000 donation from a mysterious old man driving a car that looked like it belonged in a demolition derby. Or the time he received a donation of 1 million marshmallow bunnies that didn’t sell at Easter.

John had a simple rule at the food bank. It was that he wouldn’t turn down any food that was offered. There was one time, however, when John regretted�"or almost regretted�"making that one of the rules.

“One day, a guy called me and said, ‘I have a lot of chicken to donate,’” John began. “I thought it was packaged chicken. I asked how much and he said, ‘about 60’ so I sent a guy out there to pick up the chicken. But when he got there, he found out they were live chickens.”

The temperature in Phoenix often hovers around 110 degrees during the summer and this happened to occur in the middle of one of those heat waves. One of the windows in the truck was also broken so, finding a way to keep 60 chickens in the back of the truck was a real problem.

            “Well, the driver I sent out was a volunteer,” explained John. “After he finally got the chickens in the truck, they started clucking and flying all over the place in the back of the truck. Then the driver headed back to the food bank. Since the back window was broken out, and there was so much chaos behind his head with all those chickens and feathers blowing out everywhere, I can’t blame him for never returning to drive after that day.”

            According to witnesses, the driver backed up to the large doors of the warehouse, jumped out of the truck, and took off down the street. Before the driver arrived, John received a strange call from a lady in a Phoenix suburb. She told him that she had just seen the food bank truck go through her neighborhood and that chickens were flying out of the back of the truck. 

            “I didn’t know until later what was going on,” John said. “When we looked in the back of the truck, there were about 45 or 50 of these live chickens flying around. They made a total mess of it and it took us a whole day to clean the truck. Some of the volunteers were smart enough to know what to do. They gathered the chickens and put them into cages made of chicken wire.”

            But that wasn’t the end of the ordeal. After cleaning up the truck and getting the chickens settled into their cages, John headed home. It has been a very unusual day, and very tiring, too.

            “That evening I received a call back from the chicken man,” John continued. “He asked me, ‘Did you get your chickens?’ and I said ‘yes.’ Then he said, ‘Could you use some more?’ I was really not enthusiastic for more live chickens, but I told him I would call him back in the morning and let him know. When I called him back in the morning, I asked, ‘How many chickens are you offering?’ He said, ‘How about a thousand?’”

            John said his first thought was Wow! What can we possibly do with a thousand chickens? Then he remembered that there were several boys’ homes or ranches situated in the valley. He called one of the men, an acquaintance, that was running one of the homes for delinquent boys.

“I asked him, ‘What would you do if I offered you a thousand chickens�"live chickens?’” John recalled the conversation. “He said, ‘We’d jump at it and I’ll use the boys to help with them.’ So the next day we sent him out with the cages and some chicken wire and they gathered a thousand chickens, took them home, and penned them on their ranch property.”

The man who had donated the chickens had said the reason for getting rid of them was because they were no longer laying eggs. But surprisingly, John found out later that the boys were finding eggs “all over the place” at the ranch. The director of the ranch told John the boys were having a great time learning something new.

But the chicken incident was not over yet.

“A few days later, the man called back again. He said, ‘How would you like it if I made it 5,000 chickens?’” John continued with the story. “Somehow or other we made it work. We got the other four boys’ ranches to copy what the first group had done and we were able to place a thousand chickens at each ranch. The best part is that those 5,000 chickens were placed by the end of two weeks.”

According to John, the chicken connection was still not over. Things continued because within the next six month period he received another call and they were given another 5,000 chickens and placed them too. Necessity had become the mother of invention.

“We made a lot of kids happy and had overcome one of our first real obstacles,” explained John. “These kids had eggs and chickens to eat, and also had to learn things they had never been familiar with, which was catching and cleaning chickens. We had kept the idea in our minds that we must never turn down anything that was offered. We figured if people were kind enough to donate food, we would find a place for it.”

*     *     *

John Van Hengel Passed away October 5, 2005 at the age of 83. Although he didn’t begin the world’s first food bank until he was in his 40s, he left behind a legacy. Not only are there literally hundreds of food banks across the world in scores of countries, the work be began now collects billions of food and distributes it to millions of people.