She was 88, a widow for 40 years and she got Raleigh’s first Meals on Wheels lunch

RALEIGH

Fifty years ago, Juliette Singleton drove across Raleigh with her first carload of roast turkey, sweet potatoes and peas — a lunchtime savior for the home-bound, the arthritic and the 95-year-old craving chit-chat and gravy.

Along with her partner, Singleton made Raleigh’s first-ever delivery for Meals on Wheels, a daily hot lunch aimed at seniors no longer capable of frying chicken, chopping salad or driving to the Piggy Wiggly.

The first stop on her route that day took Singleton just a few blocks from her starting point at Hillyer Christian Church: the home of Ellen Dortch Shore, a widow for nearly 40 years.

At 88, the widow pulled up a chair, tucked into her lunch and smiled at her new friend.

“Normally,” she said, “I just have a glass of sherry, crackers and cheese.”

A ‘very rewarding’ experience

This month marks a half-century for Meals on Wheels, which started out in 1974 serving nine people — a total now topping 1,400 across Wake County. Volunteers now exceed 2,200 people.

“It was very rewarding for me,” said Singleton, who still remembers her first stop after thousands of deliveries. “I had this one lady who was so sweet, she’d been to her granddaughter’s wedding, so we was very insistent that I stay and see the pictures, and whenever I’d leave she’d say, ‘Will you put this letter in the mailbox for me?’”

I should note on this anniversary that I carry a deep fondness for Meals on Wheels, mostly thanks to my Grandma Irene Kern. A plucky Baptist and ardent crossword puzzler, she drove a weekly route around suburban Los Angeles well past the age of 90.

Grandma would often take me along with her when I was a boy of 8 or 9, showing me off to the shut-ins who spent lonely days watching soap operas or playing canasta. I’d hand them their low-sodium entrees and their 2 percent milk, and Grandma would ask about their cataracts or their hypertension.

The last time I her, a few years before she died, Grandma was several decades older than most of her clients — still driving her little Plymouth Champ full of hot trays.

Back in 1974, a lunch from Meals on Wheels cost $1.75, and sponsors picked up what the neediest couldn’t afford. Now, one meal costs $4.75 if a client wants to pay it. If you’re over 60 with a chronic disability, you can get a meal regardless.

But here’s something you learn going door-to-door: Nutrition and poverty come in many forms. When some people answer Meals on Wheels’ knock, it’s the first and last time they’ll open the door all day.

Take Ellen Dortch Shore, their first-ever client.

Singleton confessed some Meals on Wheels volunteers wished The News & Observer had chosen a different photo for the inaugural run in 1974, considering Shore is pictured in front of her silver and her art collection.

She was 88 at the time, but in 1914, she had married Dr. Clarence A. Shore — the first director of the State Laboratory of Hygiene and a worldwide authority on the treatment of hydrophobia.

Dr. Shore’s widow

The N&O described all of Raleigh society fawning on the young couple at their wedding, filling a gift room with silver, glass and china. “A testimonial to the popularity of the couple,” the reporter raved. “A more beautiful display has not been seen here.”

Dr. Shore would build his reputation in the growing field of public health, speaking at international conferences and enjoying a high status in Raleigh. But he would die young of thrombosis in 1933, meriting two columns above the fold on the N&O’s front page and a headline that called him “a notable figure of progress.”

His widow kept very much in the public eye afterward: turning the first shovel that broke ground for Rex Hospital in 1935, traveling to London by steam ship in 1958, lending a 19th-century Chinese bronze tiger for an art exhibit in 1967.

But whenever she got mentioned, she appeared under her husband’s name: Mrs. Clarence A. Shore.

And when she died in 1981 at age 95, her death merited three sentences on page 29.

Imagine a loneliness so large it fills 48 years.

Imagine how nice it would be, as an 88-year-old woman with so much of life taken away, to answer the door and find someone standing there with a tray full of hot food.