She’s Spokane’s Golden Spoon Bert Fletcher Helped Start City’s Meals On Wheels
Before Meals on Wheels, there was hell on wheels, known to her friends as “Bert.”
In the basement kitchen of the Central United Methodist Church in downtown Spokane, Bert Fletcher whipped up meals for shut-ins at the request of local churches 23 years ago. She’d cook, wrap and deliver the meals herself, then race to the store for the following day’s menu. Within a month, she had four friends volunteering full tilt.
Today, the Meals on Wheels program she helped launch delivers 80,000 meals a year in Spokane and draws from 1,500 volunteers.
Back in the Methodist basement meanwhile, Fletcher took over cooking dinner for homeless men and street kids, up to eight at a time. Today, the weekly free meal draws up to 175.
From church bazaars to the downtown teen shelter, Crosswalk; from soup suppers to benefit teas, Fletcher fed Spokane, one helping at a time.
Great-grandchildren, widowhood and illness didn’t slow her. But concrete floors finally have.
At 83, Fletcher can no longer stand long hours on her feet. She still volunteers at the meals, visiting and serving. She just helped raise money for an elevator to bring older people and the disabled to meals in the church basement.
But Fletcher, the golden spoon of downtown Spokane, no longer cooks.
“I miss it,” she says. “I have quite a few guests and my family in, though. I still do a nice roast.”
“I’ve never met anyone like her,” says Pava Young, who worked at Meals on Wheels for many years. “She truly has that sense of giving, that we are our brother’s keeper.”
In the era of Donna Reed-moms, Fletcher was always a working mother, raising three children while cooking at every notable restaurant in Spokane.
She cooked at Nims, the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane hotels, at the Rockaway and the Metropolitan. In all-male kitchens, she was the steak lady, knowing from steam and touch when a steak went from rare to medium rare. If an owner second-guessed her, she picked up her knife and walked out.
“Don’t touch my steaks.”
When her middle daughter, Miriam, died in a car accident, Fletcher and her husband Edwin took her three children, ages 3, 5 and 6, and raised them, too.
At nearly 50, she took up Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Silver Spurs (Western dance club) and roller skating, all while catering from her home.
“She was my mom and grandmom and we kids always came first,” says Brenda Binder, manager of Value Village on Boone. “She wanted to make sure we never felt our loss.”
Fletcher cooked for Meals on Wheels until demand reached 95 meals a day in 1984, surpassing the church kitchen’s capacity. She continued cooking in the church kitchen, and volunteering. Raised a Baptist, she gradually began to attend services in the church above the kitchen, becoming a pillar of the Methodist community.
“I’ve never held office or anything,” she demurs. “I’m a worker.”
“She is a saint, she truly is a saint, she makes ministry doable,” says the Rev. Rich Lang. “She teaches pastors how to be Christian.”
Fletcher learned kindness from strangers. Her mother married five times and left Fletcher in the care of foster parents ranging from German and Swedish families to a woman who could neither speak nor hear. Fletcher never forgot the kindness each showed.
Earlier this year, the church basement filled with friends and relatives to celebrate her retirement from the church kitchen. She did cook Thanksgiving dinner, but she was at the church, giving thanks.
Lang says like all great elders, she is wise enough to know just how many cooks the kitchen now needs.
“It’s hard to give to her,” says her granddaughter, Binder. “Every time I talk to her I say, ‘Grandma, I love you.’ That’s what’s most important to her.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo