The Passing of a Friend

With a heavy heart and a long look to the past I share this obituary from the Syracuse Post-Standard Newspaper.

By Ken Sturtz | ksturtz@syracuse.com 
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on January 17, 2015 at 10:06 PM, updated January 17, 2015 at 11:09 PM

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- One of the operators of Unity Kitchen, a soup kitchen that has helped the poor in Syracuse for more than four decades, has died.

Ann O'Connor died Saturday afternoon, her husband Peter King said. She was 81.

In 1971, O'Connor started working at Unity Kitchen, which patterned itself on Catholic Worker communities that serve the poor. She was attracted to the kitchen as an anti-Vietnam War activist because its founders - Bob Russell and Father Ted Sizing of St. Lucy's Church - were involved with sit-ins at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

She was recruited because of her organizational skills, King said.

"I couldn't believe the conditions," O'Connor said in an interview several years ago. "They were serving mashed potatoes and coffee."

Although she was confined to a wheelchair at the age of 16 due to severe arthritis, O'Connor dove in to her work. A year later, King began working at the kitchen. The pair met there, quickly became friends and married in 1980.

"We made Unity Kitchen our life's work for all those years," King said. "One of the things Ann insisted on was that a bridge be built between the poor and the non-poor," King said. O'Connor persuaded her middle-class friends to help with the kitchen, which is supported entirely by private contributions. When O'Connor and King would go and speak to people about their work, O'Connor usually did the talking, King said. "She had a way of speaking so you lost sight of the wheelchair she was speaking from," he said. "People realized they were looking at a person with courage and guts."

For years they ran Unity Kitchen, which amounts to an elegant soup kitchen on West Onondaga Street. Two dinners were offered to guests each week at tables set with china and silver by volunteers who served the meal. No one got paid, not even O'Connor or King. They call themselves "hospitallers." "We're seeing the hidden Christ in a dignified way," O'Connor said in an interview years ago. "We love the people who come here. It's not like any other place. It's real and deeply rooted in our faith."

O'Connor was sidelined last year when her health failed. King took time away from the kitchen to care for her.

After more than 40 years, King is working with help from others in an effort to keep Unity Kitchen open. He said his wife would want it that way. "We want to make sure that our limited, but lavish hospitality goes on," he said. "We feel we still have the gift of hospitality to exercise."

January 19, 2015