Support for Austin Street Center

Every year since 2007, my family has performed a unique personal service for the Austin Street Center homeless shelter.

My wife Nancy is a master hobbyist baker and has an old family recipe for a made-from-scratch pumpkin pie that she bakes for our table at Thanksgiving and Christmas every year. When my daughter Austin entered second grade, Nancy started looking for a mother-daughter service project they could do together for the holiday season. Nancy didn't just want to donate money or perform a token effort. Instead, she wanted to find a project she and Austin could do year after year and make a meaningful effort.

Our church, Central Christian Church of Dallas, has a long relationship with Austin Street Center and in the summer of 2002 our Sunday School class attended a luncheon with "Reverend Bubba," the nickname of the beloved Rev. Beulah Daily who founded and ran Austin Street for almost 30 years. The match was obvious to Nancy. "Let's bake for Austin Street!"

No, not a bake sale. Nancy wanted to bake dessert for the shelter's big holiday meals. In the Fall of 2007, Nancy coordinated the project with Rev. Bubba and it was "game on!" It was Rev. Bubba who first suggested pumpkin pie because it was soft and some of her clients have dential issues that made other type pies more problematic. Even that worked out perfectly because of Nancy's family pumpkin pie recipe.

After Halloween, Nancy and Austin begin to solicit and gather whole raw pumpkins from our neighbors and friends. They bake the raw pumpkins meat and process it into pie filling and freeze the resulting product into multiple 3-gallon containers. Fortunately, enough people decorate their homes with whole pumpkins in the Fall that getting donated pumpkins isn't a problem. As long as pumpkins are uncut (no jack-o-lanterns) and blemish-free, they usually make great filling after their role as the decor has been finished.

Then, three days before Thanksgiving, they begin hand-rolling pie crusts, making and filling pies and baking. Central Christian Church has a nice big commercial kitchen from which we base this project and Nancy has served has multiple terms as Hospitality Chair for Central running this kitchen so she knows her way around it. The kitchen includes a marvelous very-large 60-year-old cast-iron gas-fired pizza oven that is perfect for baking. It is about 6 feet tall, seven feet wide and a massive hunk of iron. Once up to temperature, it doesn't vary much with doors opening and closing with pies going in and out. It is a delight to bake pies in this oven.

Each shelf of the three-door oven can bake six pies at a time; that's 18 pies in a single batch. All 18 in a batch come out uniformly baked edge to edge.

Soon, the whole church is filled with the aroma of freshly baking pumpkin pie. I've done meetings in the church while the bake was happening and it is very distracting; it made us all want to adjourn our meeting for lunch early.

Each pumpkin pie is individually boxed in a 12-inch corrugated pizza box to protect it during transport. The pies are delivered to Austin Street Center at noon on the day before Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.

Every year, pies are delivered the day before the holiday and the pies are used in Austin Street's holiday meal for their clients. The first year, Nancy and Austin baked 80 twelve-inch pies for Thanksgiving and another 100 for Christmas.

Each holiday, the number of pies that are baked varies depending on the anticipated crowd at these meals. Holidays with bad weather, we anticipate bigger crowds and bake more pies. Depending on the number of pies baked, we'll go through 10-20 gallons of pureed pumpkin for each event. 

This coming Thanksgiving will be the fourteenth consecutive year for this project. Thousands of made-from-scratch pies have been made and delivered. Austin has become a master baker too. When he became old enough to join in, our grandson Nicholas (Bobby's son) became part of the team and represents his ROTC unit in service. 

In the early years of this project, Austin recruited her school friends to help and some of the Central Christian Church people pitched in to help. However, after years of experience, this operation has become so efficient that almost all of the work is performed by just these three every year. We have simply configured the time required for this service project into our holiday plans and schedules so it is now an official family tradition.

I am so proud of my family for their dedication to this very worthy effort.