HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Growing up in Baltimore, Eric Little remembers watching activist-turned-city council member Beatrice “Bea” Gaddy on the TV news, talking about feeding the city’s poor.
He never imagined that he would one day don orange gloves, a white smock and hair net to debone turkeys that would help serve thousands at Gaddy’s annual Thanksgiving feast.
But that’s exactly what he’s been doing for the past several years, through a partnership between the medium-security Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown and Gaddy’s nonprofit, which aims to preserve the legacy of the woman known as the Mother Teresa of Baltimore.
Gaddy’s dinner is a famed city tradition nearly as old as Little, who is 40. The tiny white-haired woman lived on the streets early in her own life and later vowed to feed everyone she could. She began putting on the Thanksgiving dinner in 1981 in East Baltimore and became one of the city’s most famous activists.
Since the 1990s, dinner organizers have relied on help from prisoners to prepare the turkeys, said Gaddy’s daughter, Cynthia Brooks, who took over running the Bea Gaddy Family Center after her mother’s death in 2001.
One Thanksgiving, they served 50,000, she said.
The prisoners earn just a small fraction of the state minimum wage, but they learn job skills and have a way to pass the time.
Little, who was convicted of second-degree murder, has spent the past 11 years in prison. Thanksgiving for him now mostly consists of watching football with other inmates and eating a holiday-themed dinner in the prison mess hall. This year’s menu is turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, peas and fruit pie, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.
Little said he misses his three daughters and the family dinners that were once a hallmark of their holiday. His labor at the correctional meat plant has become a different way to connect.
“I like doing it, because I’m from Baltimore,” Little said, shortly after deboning a 26-pound bird. “So I know there’s a lot of poverty and a lot of homelessness there.”
Prisoners have met and forged bonds over the years with organizers of the Bea Gaddy dinner. In 2010, when the nonprofit was low on cash donations, members of a Bible fellowship group at the Roxbury Correctional Institution, also in Hagerstown, pooled their wages and sent $117.48.
Other job skills programs at the facility include upholstery, metal and laundry shop.
