Take my wife - please - Maxwell House honors volunteers - Column

Commonweal, Feb 25, 1994 by Frank McConnell

If you check out the November 22, 1993, issue of People, you may have caught, on the recto page of the centerfold, a rather enigmatic ad for Maxwell House Coffee. It's a photo of fifty people standing on a spiral staircase in a rough S shape, all holding candles and smiling. And the legend reads, "With Real Heroes like These, We Can Light up the Country." The Maxwell House logo, an overturned cup with "Good to the Last Drop," is tucked into the bottom of the page.

Oh, yeah. The woman at the lower crook of the S, the one in the beige jacket, is my wife, Celeste. Let me tell you how she wound up standing there in D.C. on that October Sunday.

About two years ago, she read in the morning paper about a young woman who had come up from Santa Barbara to our town, Lompoc, to have her out-of-wedlock baby at her aunt's home. Next day the kid took her baby to the hospital to be checked. They found traces of cocaine in the mother and the baby, and-- there was no other recourse--called the cops, who arrested the mother and put the two-day infant into foster care. Celeste was appalled: went to the jail, went to the D.A., talked to the hospital people and local doctors, all of whom agreed with her that this was one screwed-up way to handle things and wished there were another option.

Okay. Now being married to Celeste is sort of like being married to Joan of Arc. What she did was, she called a meeting-- advertised in the local paper--of interested citizens. That turned into a task force. That turned into an organization with support from agencies like the estimable Klein Bottle, a Santa Barbara County institution dedicated to helping youth. And that turned into Holly House. Holly House opened last month in Lompoc. It is a fully-funded, city- and federal-supported live-in counseling and care center for addicted mothers and mothers-to-be who want to get clean and learn how to care for their kids. Celeste, having started the whole thing, now plans just to spend many hours a week playing with the Holly House children.

Enter Maxwell House. 1992 was the company's centennial, and to celebrate it, they decided that they would seek out one hundred "real heroes"--Americans who had volunteered to fill a need in their communities and had made a difference for good. The first "Real Heroes" weekend in D.C. was, apparently, so successful, cordial, and inspiriting that the Maxwell House folks decided to continue it, selected fifty heroes for 1993 from-- according to them--five thousand nominations. It is their way, as they say, of paying the country back for the century of support Americans have given their product. So somebody (it was our dear friend Catanna Donovan) nominated Celeste for the award, unbeknownst to us. Maxwell House called, interviewed Celeste, and in mid-October we flew, at their expense, to D.C. for a weekend of--well, I gotta tell you, and you know I'm not especially optimistic in my reading of life--hopefulness.

Coffee, for crying out loud. If you've been reading this column, you know it's not my favorite beverage. And advertising: I've written my share of knee-jerk liberal stuff about the perniciousness of that craft, and in most cases the McConnell knee still, and accurately, jerks.

What's remarkable about Maxwell House, though, is that it really is--dare I say this and keep my leftist secret decoder ring?--capitalism working the way it should, in the best of all possible worlds, work. The Maxwell guys are, of course, going to get a lot of mileage, and a lot of future People ads, out of this. They even got Barbara Bush to present the awards at the Saturday night banquet, and Willard Scott to emcee the country/western dance Sunday night. We're talking high profile here, and we're talking media event--the occasion demands italics-- for the whole damn weekend (video cameras were almost as ubiquitous as tour guides). Some of our more politically-fixated (and nose-out-of-joint?) buddies sneered such when we got back. "Coffee isn't even good for you," snided one pal--a vegetarian who also smokes grass every night.

But look. Maxwell House could just as well have spent their money on something else. Instead, they chose to spend four days honoring folks like Celeste. And like Pam Edwards, who suffers from a rare form of lupus, but who runs an organization committed to helping seriously ill and handicapped children in Redondo Beach, California. And Jay Wilson, who coordinates Thanksgiving dinner for 27,000--the figure is right--every year in the Baltimore area. And Bryan Slye from Reno, born paraplegic, who is a fully-functioning and in-demand paramedic, and is truly funky and smokes as much as I do. And Gary Meistad from Houston, who owns a bar I've got to go to, and who raises money for all sorts of causes by doing Texas-style barbecues, and who insists that no non-Texan even begins to comprehend the meaning of "barbecue." And Keith Begley from Florida, who runs an AIDS solace project, and whose life partner is HIV-positive. And others. And others.