Remembering ‘Papa’ Mike McGarvin: A regular guy who transformed into an everyday hero

“Papa” Mike McGarvin, the founder of Poverello House, died on July 1 a year ago.

Mike and his wife Mary moved to Fresno 45 years ago with hardly a dime to their names. Despite their own struggles, one hot summer morning they bought some peanut butter, jelly and day-old bread, prepared a stack of sandwiches and a jug of ice water and Mike walked the streets of Chinatown, handing out free lunches to anyone who wanted one. Within a few years he found a storefront for his operation, which he named “The Poverello House,” from the Italian word for “little poor man.”

Today’s Poverello serves more than a thousand free meals each day. There are also two “villages” where homeless people live in sheds in a secure setting and a former private home that serves as an overnight facility for single women. There is a resident drug rehabilitation program, first-rate medical and dental clinics, shower and laundry facilities, a free clothing distribution center and even a loosely run library. The facilities attract so many volunteers that, at holiday season, you need to sign up weeks in advance to get a spot.

Mike received numerous awards and honors from religious, community, and social organizations, even from the White House. He was pretty much the symbol of goodness and altruism in this corner of California. In the eyes of many Fresnans, Mike was saintly.

So, briefly, goes the legend of Mike McGarvin.

Social scientists like myself want to understand what creates a “humanitarian type” like Mike. But dig deeper and his story opens more questions than it answers.

Mike’s family life was dysfunctional by any standard. He grew up in a suburban, middle-class neighborhood just outside of Pasadena but, Mike told me, what looked like an Ozzie and Harriet sort of place was, for him, more like “Ozzie and Harriet on a bender.” His parents’ marriage was unstable and violent. His father was an alcoholic and so abusive that his mother was driven to several suicide attempts. Mike, in turn, developed into a precocious, innovative and sometimes vicious delinquent. He described himself as “a powder keg waiting for a lighted match.”

In, his mid-20s Mike moved to San Francisco to get away from the Southern California police. Unfortunately, it was the summer of 1965, the cusp of the infamous summer of love which, in Mike’s case, led to a two-year binge of alcohol and drugs.

One morning he was riding his motorcycle around San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district when he spotted a grimy-looking café called “The Poverello Coffeehouse.” It looked to him like a promising place to score drugs. Inside, a smiling, enthusiastic old guy was serving coffee to down-and-out-looking street people. The man turned out to be Father Simon, a former businessman-turned-minister, who’d created the café as a safe refuge for the local needy.

As Mike was taking this in, one of the patrons began beating up another guy. Mike never liked bullying so he quickly intervened and broke up the fight. Afterward, Father Simon asked Mike if he’d be willing to volunteer a little of his time for security at the café. Mike was concerned this would cut into his “smoking weed and dropping acid” but, he also recalled, “It felt good when I broke up that fight. For the first time in quite a while I felt useful and I kind of liked it.” Mike agreed to give it a try and, has he put it, “Thus began my career as a ‘Bouncer for Jesus.’”

Over the next year, his substance abuse and violent habits receded. Five years later, he and Mary moved to Fresno, where he began handing out the peanut butter sandwiches that led to his own Poverello House.

It is an inspiring story that people love to hear, suggesting that goodness is always just around the corner. But here’s the reality: Neither the magnitude of Mike’s transformation nor the direction it took were at all preordained. The morning Mike dropped by the Poverello Coffeehouse, he was clearly primed for change. What transpired, however, was just one of many possibilities and, in fact, a highly unlikely one.

The catalyst in Mike’s transformation was the fight that erupted that first morning. Mike was quick to admit that a more “social work-y” request, or a sermon from Father Simon about love and compassion, would have made him bolt for the door. But breaking up brawls brought out his best. “I’d finally found a place that needed me, and moreover, needed the particular talents I had developed during my hell-raising years,” Mike later observed.

It was street fighting – and the good fortune to encounter a caring and psychologically astute stranger named Father Simon – that awoke Mike’s passion for giving.

Later in life you’d meet this smiling, gentle, kind man and think, of course, this is just the type of person who would dedicate himself to helping the less fortunate. But, in fact, it doesn’t take much to imagine a scenario where one self-destructive event led to another and Mike ended up a chronic alcoholic or drug addict, in and out of prison, or depressed and on the street.

I don’t say this to undermine Mike’s legend but, rather, because he teaches a larger lesson. The fact is we all contain many selves, for better and for worse, some whom we never imagined. The challenge is to inspire the best of us to rise to the occasion. Perhaps there are a few angels among us for whom it comes naturally but, for most people, the process is as challenging as it was for Mike. It oftentimes requires an advocate who both recognizes something inside us we never imagined existed and is clever enough to find a way to set us on the right path.

Mike became that advocate to more people than he probably ever realized. He accepted people as they were but was always looking for a chink in their armor that might allow him to bring out something better in them.

Mike was no Mother Theresa. In my mind he was something even more admirable: a flawed human who had to rise above himself and, in so doing, became a model of what is possible. He was an everyday hero for our times.

We miss you, Papa Mike.