Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press

As co-director of the House of Bread, Marie Lederer is a central hub of the food bank’s operation.

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The sign reads “Welcome to Bethlehem.” The name of the town, birthplace of Jesus, translates to “house of bread.” All that happens around this sign seems to meet a mission.

Marie Lederer points to a prayer on the wall of the food pantry. It begins, “When I have food, help me remember the hungry ....”

The printout finds a place in the tight quarters, a shrunken version of the space the pantry occupied until last year. Expanding school needs at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, just across the intersection, necessitated the move.

Mrs. Lederer, 25 years as co-coordinator of the House of Bread, objected to the decision, then made the best of it.

“It’s not what we used to have,” she says. “We’re still feeding the needy.”

In an economy where need seems a growing enterprise, the House of Bread continues to thrive despite smaller quarters. Here in the bottom level of a former convent, the prayer gets served and the hungry get remembered.

And the 86-year-old Mrs. Lederer, who talks as if requiring another gear to shift into, shows no sign of easing off her vocation.

“I’ve got too much to do to slow down,” the woman laughs.

Along with 74 other volunteer workers, she lends her time to a long-standing community outreach, and three days a week people leave this place with sacks of groceries and expressions of gratitude.

Donations, monetary and foodstuffs, keep the pantry shelves and oversized freezers in inventory. Those who seek House of Bread help, getting in line by taking a numbered poker chip off a pegboard in front of the reception desk, have their requests filled by workers dutifully choosing from the available offerings.

Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press

The Catholic faith runs paramount through Marie Lederer’s life. Here she is reflected in a portrait of Jesus, which is hanging in the House of Bread.

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With abbreviated volume, the storeroom has familiar labels — from Parkay to Prego, from Sara Lee to Blue Bunny — and carts follow a clockwise course, past canned vegetables and fruits, past salad dressings and pastas.

Mrs. Lederer got recruited to the House of Bread not only for her devotion to the faith — a native, she attended Immaculate Conception as a girl and went to Sacred Heart convent — but also her expertise in the food business. For two decades, she had worked at Swope’s Hy-Klas, a market at 24th and Olive streets.

One reason for the Swope’s job was proximity, about a block from her house. She could walk to work.

“I’ve never driven,” she admits. “I can water ski. I can roller-skate. I just never drove.”

(Her husband of 66 years, Fred, handled the motoring most of their marriage, and they spent years picking up food donations at local stores. With Fred’s eyesight failing, she now gets a ride to the pantry from fellow volunteers.)

She was 61 when called to work at the pantry in 1983, an age many people might consider lightening their work load. And the early years weren’t exactly ideal, with the House of Bread located in the basement of the St. Francis house of priests.

Jack Switzer, the pantry’s other co-coordinator, remembers those days in the rectory basement as “very uncomfortable.”

“Everything had to be hauled up and down the stairs,” he recalls.

It wasn’t a lot better for the priests, who too often found people poking around in their kitchen cabinets. “When we moved out, that was the happiest day of their lives,” Mrs. Lederer says.

In the serious business of feeding the hungry, volunteers bring a lightness to their work. Most have been together for years and share the easy laughter that teamwork breeds.

“You know what they used to tell me at work,” says Mr. Switzer, a former postal employee, “do your laughing on your own time.”

Everybody cracks up.

Mrs. Lederer seems forever cheerful in this enterprise, greeting a client with “How you doin’, hon?” and moving briskly from one chore to the next.

Once she leaves the pantry, she fields phone calls at home, working to negotiate money for people who lack money to pay utility bills. Not all get help, which she laments. At the House of Bread, she has more capacity to assist.

“God provides,” she says to Mary Ann Lawhon.

“God provides,” replies her fellow volunteer.

Mrs. Lederer donated a framed picture to the pantry waiting area, one of St. Martin de Porres. The 17th-century Peruvian is known for his compassion to all living creatures. “He was so good to the poor,” she says of the saint.

In the same fashion, the House of Bread makes good on its mission, one with greater urgency in uncertain economic times. Mrs. Lederer loves the work and all around her.

“I see God in the face of every person who comes in here,” she says.

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.