A Second Helping

Bill Hadesty, a retired accountant, does a lot of the weighing at Holden Beach.

Many beach visitors have been perplexed by the end-of-vacation question: What to do with all the leftover food?
For most, the garbage can is the answer. But that solution disturbed one beach resident so much 10 years ago that he decided to offer an alternative.

"I'm of the generation where it was just a sin to waste food," says Bill Spier, 81, a Holden Beach resident and a member of Brunswick EMC.

So Spier parked himself, his 1990 Nissan pickup, and a food-donation sign where departing vacationers couldn't miss him — in the parking lot of Holden Beach Chapel, less than a block from the Intracoastal Waterway bridge. Now he and friends set up A Second Helping each Saturday in summer, accepting milk, eggs, crackers, bread — all the perishables and nonperishables that nobody wants to haul back to Memphis, or Raleigh, or wherever.

A Second Helping founder Bill Spier accepts a donation at Holden Beach.

"Bring everything," Spier says. "We can put it to good use somewhere or other."

Over the past decade, that's added up to more than 140,000 pounds of food. Perishables go to Sharon United Methodist Church on the mainland, where they're picked up by recipients or delivered to house-bound residents. "They will be gone by this afternoon," predicted Spier one recent Saturday morning.

Nonperishables go to the food pantry at Brunswick Island Baptist Church on the mainland. Deliveries to the churches are made by Don Downs, a retired U.S. Forest Service employee and Brunswick EMC member from Supply.

Downs has worked with Bill Spier from the beginning, when, he says, "I really didn't recognize the need." But now that he's seen how he can help "elderly people, people that have lost their jobs," he says, "it's been more of a blessing for me."

Spreading up the coast

News of Holden's A Second Helping spread up the coast to Emerald Isle and Topsail/Surf City, where residents began their own versions last summer, collecting more than 6,000 pounds of food.

A Second Helping-Emerald Isle, formed by Carteret-Craven Electric member George B. Gardner and other volunteers, collects at four locations for the food pantry of White Oak Ecumenical Outreach Ministries in Swansboro. One site is beside N.C. 58, where "people would just come by and join us," Gardner says. "It turned into a real community effort." A couple of early-morning locations are in coffee shops because, he says, "A lot of people stop by and get coffee when they leave the island."

Lisa Mende directs traffic to the Friends Feeding Friends collection site in Surf City.

T-Shirt brigade

At Topsail/Surf City, the collection sponsored by Emma Anderson Memorial Chapel is Friends Feeding Friends. Volunteers in bright yellow T-shirts spend Saturday mornings near the bridge to the mainland collecting for the food pantry of Faith Harbor United Methodist Church in Surf City.

Though the beach economy may seem to be booming, says co-coordinator Bryant Mende, a Jones-Onslow EMC member, "There are plenty of people down here who have missed the boat." Besides, he says, he remembers childhood beach vacations. "Everybody would fight over NOT taking the food home — 'I don't want this loaf of bread.' "

Something important

Vacationers leaving Holden Beach that recent Saturday seemed universally thankful for Second Helping.

"I know there's such a need, often invisible," said Diane Wykcoff, on her way home to Nashville. As a former school social worker, she referred people to food pantries, she said.

Told that there surely were other ways they could be spending Saturdays at the beach, Bill Spier and friends showed no regrets.

"This is something important," said retired accountant Bill Hardesty.

"I could be baby-sitting right now," joked Larry Blume, a retired police officer. "I'd rather be here."
And for Bill Spier: "I can't think of anything I'd rather do."