Ilse Marks died in 2007 from injuries suffered while collecting food donations. More than eleven years later, the food pantry she founded is still putting Thanksgiving dinner on the table.
STOUGHTON — The week leading up to Thanksgiving is the busiest time of year for the Ilse Marks Food Pantry.
And for the volunteers helping families put an otherwise expensive holiday dinner on the table, it’s also a bittersweet time of year.
As they run the facility at full tilt, they continue to carry out the vision of their pantry’s founder and namesake, who died in 2007 of injuries sustained in a car crash that occurred while picking up donations for the food pantry.
On a Tuesday morning more than 11 years later, 84 turkeys passed through the pantry into the hands of Stoughton and Sharon families.
“There’s no RSVPing,” said Suzanne Blacker, a former teacher who took over for Marks. “We never know who’s going to show up.”
The pantry is run out of a century-old schoolhouse behind the First United Methodist Church. Local farms donated potatoes, onions, squash, carrots, apples and other produce in time for the holiaday.
The Thanksgiving specials round out a year-round selection of non-perishable items donated by schools, Rotary clubs, Girl Scout groups and other civic organizations.
“We’re actually a shop pantry, meaning we don’t pack bags for people,” Blacker said. “They come in and pick out what they like because we want them to take what they’re actually going to use and eat.”
Despite serving primarily suburban communities, she daid the pantry has a large clientele.
“They look like you and me,” Blacker told The Enterprise. “It’s people who are down on their luck, out of work or on disability. We have elderly folks who are on fixed income. Anything you can imagine.”
Visitors to the pantry must show identification proving residence in Sharon or Stoughton, and are asked to provide some proof of need, like a certificate showing fuel or unemployment assistance from the government.
But for homeless residents, or someone subsisting just above the welfare line, Blacker said she and the other volunteers aren’t “sticklers.”
“We always say, ‘We’re not giving away filet mignon or lobster,’ ” Blacker said. “We know that 99 percent of the people need to come to us, if not more.”
Of the 84 turkeys in the pantry’s possession this year, 25 were delivered by volunteers from the local Knights of Columbus council to the homes of clients who had asked for help in advance in advance.
The rest were given out on a first-come, first-served basis to a crowd that descended on the pantry before business hours on Tuesday morning.
Many visitors to the pantry asked not to be identified as they collected what they hope is only a temporary form of assistance: a frozen turkey, a can or two of pumpkin pie filling, a box of stuffing mix.
The organization has participated in this holiday ritual since the early 1990s, when it was known as the Stoughton Food Pantry and operated out of the town’s historic train station.
But stalled negotiations over the town’s acquisition of the station from the MBTA left the food pantry without heat for a winter, and the organization moved to 116 Seaver St.
During the transition, the Stoughton Food Pantry lost its founder and longtime director and got a new name.
“She probably would not be happy that we named the pantry for her,” said Blacker, who began volunteering with the organization in 1994. But more than a decade after Marks’ death, her vision for getting Thanksgiving dinner on the table across the region is alive and well.
Staff writer Ben Berke can be reached at bberke@enterprisenews.com. Follow him on Twitter @Enterprise_Ben.
