Dream Leader Ywca Recognizes Sandra Willis For Hours Of Care At The Women’s And Children’s Free Restaurant

The pasta boils on red-hot burners as Sandra Willis wipes her forehead and directs the all-volunteer crew at the Women’s and Children’s Free Restaurant.

Here Willis, the woman who dreams of casseroles at night, feeds Spokane’s poorest women and children. They come to the basement dining room at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church on North Monroe for her spaghetti and her shepherd’s pie.

With her soft British accent, her determined working-class roots and her large heart, Willis serves food for the body while warding off emptiness of the spirit.

On Thursday, the YWCA will honor her with its outstanding achievement award for community service. It will recognize the thousands of volunteer hours she’s donated during the last six years as the free restaurant’s own “pilot light.”

In nominating Willis, Kathy Simmons wrote that with this award, the YWCA could make an important statement about leadership.

“You do not have to be a business woman serving on many boards; you do not have to be a civic or a political leader; you do not have to be university educated; you do not have to know the right people,” wrote Simmons, president of the restaurant board. “The traits you must possess to be a leader are those that Sandra Willis has in abundance - dedication to community service, dependability, heart, courage, humility and perseverance.”

On this recent evening, Willis tactfully directs her crew of six women and two children as they dish up red fruit gelatin, pour pitchers of apple juice and fill baskets with garlic rolls. She’s recovering from an appendectomy, but she’s rarely still.

A woman in a large Big Brothers Big Sisters benefit T-shirt, Willis wears her gray hair short and curly. She’s 46. Her dark brown eyes stare straight ahead and her upper lip curls as she concentrates.

At the moment, Willis is concentrating on serving dinner promptly at 5:15. She scrounges up serving spoons and coaches her helpers to dish the spaghetti and meat sauce into big bowls. For dessert, they’ll serve SnackWell’s brownies.

Then Willis pushes open the kitchen door to the dining room and joins a table of elderly women from a nearby seniors apartment complex.

“How are you all doing?” she asks the 30 women and children lined at the tables. She tucks a napkin under her chin and dishes up spaghetti and corn.

Edna Dewey, a chipper 87-year-old in a fuchsia blouse and pearl earrings, sits at Willis’ elbow. Dewey says, “You know that bread from last week? I took it home and I toasted the last of it yesterday, and, oh, boy, was it good.”

Willis smiles at Dewey.

It was eight years ago when Willis walked into this church dining room with her own two small children. Her husband was out of work and the family was receiving food stamps.

“It was a nice setting,” Willis remembers. “The people were very friendly. It’s not a place you’re afraid to come to.”

Willis began volunteering to cook the potatoes each evening. “If you help, you feel like you’re not just taking something for nothing,” she says.

The food, mostly donations from the Spokane Food Bank, was uninspired, usually potatoes and canned pork gravy. “I thought maybe we could add some vegetables or something,” she says.

When the main cook resigned over six years ago, Willis stepped in. She discovered her gift: “creating something out of nothing.”

Willis now works at least 15 hours a week, planning meals, shopping at the food bank, directing kitchen crews. Her signature: well-balanced menus that stretch a $4,500 annual budget and thousands of pounds of donated food into tasty, traditional meals.

She dreams at night of new recipes as sacks of surplus Wendy’s hamburger patties and 40-pound boxes of commodity chicken march into her sleep.

Willis never knows how many women will show up for her evening meals. There are her regulars, the seniors whom she photographs for her albums, and the battered women with sad faces and bewildered children.

It’s 30 or 40 at the beginning of the month, 60 or 70 toward the end. Last Christmas she served 120.

“Sometimes it’s like feeding the 5,000,” she says, laughing.

Among the diners tonight are Juanita Dodd and her two little boys with spaghetti sauce on their chins, Scott, 4, and Brian, 9. They’ve eaten Willis’ cooking for years.

“I like her food,” Dodd says with a wide smile. “She’s a good cook.”

Willis grew up in Worthing, a town in the county of Sussex, 60 miles south of London. At age 12, she learned to bake steak and kidney pies.

She had trouble learning in school. It wouldn’t be until adulthood in America that she would realize that she suffered from dyslexia.

At school the teachers told her she was slow and stupid.

But at home, her mother, a former Army cook who whipped up huge meals for British and American officers during World War II, and her father, a train engineer and a blacksmith, had a different message.

“My parents told me I could do anything,” she remembers. “They said, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.”’

Standing in front of the jars of powered garlic and allspice in the restaurant’s steamy kitchen, she says, “This is one dream right here: having my own restaurant. I just didn’t know how I was going to do it.”

On Thursday, a number of Spokane’s most talented and energetic women will gather to honor Willis and the YWCA’s other leadership award winners.

Willis will feel embarrassed by the attention and rather shy. She knows the life she’s carved out in the battered church kitchen brings its own satisfactions.

“I get blessings in ways I never knew I could,” she says. “Things come that I hadn’t even thought to ask for in my prayers.”

But there’s no shyness tonight. Tonight, she’s living out her dream. Back in the kitchen after dinner, Willis is in charge.

Soroptomist volunteers sweep the floor. A Gonzaga student mops. Willis deals with the leftovers, tossing out old rolls, giving away the pasta sauce.

The brownies are no problem. They vanished immediately. Willis jams one empty Snack Wells carton inside another.

“What they don’t eat, they take home,” she says fondly.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: The Women’s and Children’s Free Restaurant, located at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 1620 N. Monroe, serves dinner for low-income women and children on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 5:15 p.m. For more information, call 327-9539.