On the Job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Express Employment Professionals as a leading staffing provider that employs nearly six hundred thousand people annually across more than eight hundred franchise locations in the US, Canada, and South Africa. Our long term goal is at the heart of our company's mission to help as many people as possible find good jobs. By helping as many clients as possible find good people. It takes more than just online searches to land a job. It takes real people who will identify your talents, a person invested in your success. Express Employment Professionals understands what it takes to land a new position at a top employer or start a new career in today's job market. Express Noose Jobs, Get to no Express, Go to expresspros dot com. Welcome to on the Job. This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know, whether it's breathing new life into an age old profession, taking the reins in a family business, forging your own path with a new idea, or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. In the deep hills of Appalachia. Linda McKinney has a very important job. She feeds people in McDowell County, West Virginia. The community has seen its share of hardship and flood shortages in the wake of the coal industry drying up over the last thirty years. In the aftermath, Linda works day in and day out to make sure that the people of McDowell are fed while the community perseveres. Producer Otis Gray brings us the story as a beautiful potato you want to fly? Yeah, it's a chilly, overcast day and I am in McDowell County, West Virginia peeling potatoes with Linda McKinney. L I n da mc k I n n E. Why we're in the warehouse of her food bank called Five Loaves and two Fishes. Linda just got this huge shipment donated to them, which is palettes and palettes of potatoes for a food give out that they have this coming weekend. That's are beautiful. Look at this and it was actually one I'll picked up. Its shaped like a heart, So that tellsion that's meant for me. About all gets donated here? Yes? And do you give it away from free. Yes, this is all free. We don't sell anything here. Linda is a character. She's a short Italian woman with her hair dyed of fiery crimson red, and she runs his food bank with her husband, Bob, in the southernmost part of the state, right in the heart of Appalachia. Bob is still a mind safety and training instructor for the state Mining Department. His income supports the two of them. Linda's full time job is to run the food bank and feed as many people as she possibly can here with whatever donations she receives from nonprofits and religious organizations. So you actually don't know all the time what you're gonna go. No, no, you don't. You know we can't buy food. We don't buy food. We barely keep enough in our budget for overhead, and no one's paid here. No one's paid here. Like many places around here, McDowell has always been a coal town, but in the last few decades more coal has been imported from overseas, devastating economies like this and leaving them with a high unemployment rate, poverty and everything that comes with that. So sometimes people will show up and Linda doesn't have enough that happened last month. We just didn't have the food. The third Saturday of every month, Linda and a group of volunteers do this food give out, and even in the coldest of weather, people in mcdowells show up as early as two am to wait in line for the noonday distribution because, for better or worse, let's first come, first served. You can only feed so many, you know, and we at one time we fed anyone that came. But the food got short. And it scares you when you don't see food, and you say, God, what am I going to feed these people? There's no food here. This Saturday is the next food give out in McDowell, a rural place where for many the choices can be to leave or to starve. Well, today we followed Lenna McKinney as she stands her ground and prepares to feed whoever she can. I'm a storyteller. I never had anybody played with when I was little, so I just made up stories and lies and played by myself and eat mud and grass and dirt, had a good old time by myself. Didn't have any cousins around that I could play with, and I was raised basically by adults. And so you learn. I'm a storyteller. I've always been. I laugh all the time and never shut up. You know I'm in the building. When you hear him, I cackle. I'm sorry, I cackle. Linda's a good talker. She was even a pastor for three years here in the same church she was born in. She loves the story of Five Loaves and Two Fishes, which is the story the food Bank is named after. It's the Bible passage in which Jesus takes five loaves of bread and a couple of small fish and breaks them to feed thousands, despite his disciples not thinking they have enough to give. I can just see him pulling that bread and slinging a fish. That's what I would do. You know. Being Italian, we throw a lot of things, so I just sling it everywhere. But you know, the disciples, which is all in a tissy because there wasn't any food. But he showed him, didn't he He showed him. Linda was raised an only child, and like a lot of immigrants, her Italian father came to West Virginia to work in the coal fields back in the fifties, and they both lived in a house with her grandmother. My dad was a man of the house who went to work every day at the mines, and my Norna and I had aunt a widow. Don't that raised me well? First thing, they taught me to pull me up to a cook stove and taught me how to cook. She was born and raised to be a caretaker of sorts. So when the man who used to run this food bank was falling ill and asked Linda and her husband to take it over, she eventually accepted. This we call a buggy, you guys call a shopping cart in the warehouse. She pulls out a shopping cart to show me how they load up food for the families every month. First we look at our food and we count, and we're going to be able to figure up how many families were going to be able to food. This looks to me like we will be able to do anywhere from one hundred and thirty five, maybe a hundred, maybe one hundred and fifty families. So what we'll do we'll come down through here and we'll start right here. So in the warehouse there's pallets and boxes neatly packed against the walls and whist everything here comes from a humanitarian organization called Operation Blessing. If it was not for Operation Blessing, we would not have food. Each month they send us a tractor trailer of food, and that came in this Thursday. Still, when there are disasters in other parts of the world, like the recent floods in Puerto Rico, that means that Operation Blessing might send more there and less to McDowell. Right now, there are the pallets of potatoes. There's a lot of canned goods like soups and vegetables and noodles. There's syrup on top of a big pallet of pancake mix. Little Debby's Cakes is actually a really big donor. And next to that there are boxes and boxes of ho hoes. Yeah, we got hoes. And somewhere here I thank someone cracked the case. They say these are delicious. Tell me what these are. I don't know. I don't eat sweets, okay, strawberry shortcake rolls? Yes? Did they taste like a strawberry shortcake? I'm told a lot of sodas get donated here too. McDowell has landed in the spotlight before, kind of as a poster child for a down and out coal town. What it looks like when Applachian communities can only afford things like sugary foods. They were even featured on PBS a decade back for what journalists called Mountain due Mouth, where kids had their teeth rotting away from so much sugar. While a lot of this coverage was very graphic and highly polarized poverty porn, the health issues that come with the poverty here are very real. Life expectancy in McDowell is just sixty four years, the same lifespan is a lot of Third World countries. So Linda goes out of her way to procure the healthiest stuff that she can get. You know, you really need to take the good food you've got. Beans. I mean, I've come to show if you don't know how to cook beans. Some of the younger generation does not know how to cook bean. I'll show you how to cook the beans. I'll bring a pot of beans and item tasting six or seven. Okay, let me bring it over here. The next thing Linda does is she takes me over to the shelf with these clear plastic bags on it. She calls them school break bags. And what we do when we get food in anything that is small child size. We put them in these bags. Anytime there's no school, any children that come here, we'll get a school break bag. For most of the kids around here, the school feeds breakfast when they come in early. They feed school lunch and an after school snack. But on long breaks like Christmas, those three meals aren't there anymore, and the kids go back to homes with pretty empty pantries. I want to try to give a protein. You want to try to give a cereal something they can eat for breakfast. This is all snacks. You've got you some apple sauce, You've got you some juice, so you know, I may even throw some of those strawberry cakes we got I think we've got I'll see some cheese. It's over there, So I mean, I know you like you kind of get what you get in terms of donations. Do you ever worry about it? Does a lot of this stuff have like tons and tons of sugar in it? Well, you know, in my world, some food is better than no food. It's really hard to understand McDowell and the gravity of hunger here unless you've seen it up close. I'm from a rural place too, in Vermont, where a lot of people depend on food stamps and even hunting to get by, but this just it felt so different. There are some fast food places here, but even then there's no jobs, there's no money to buy that food. This is a place in a country of abundance where for a lot of people there is no food available. Period. When did the food get short? Food got short into and when Walmart closed, that was our perishables. So that's why you would see You see the refrigerators, and you see the freezers. They're empty. They've been empty since Walmart left, completely empty. I can turn the light on and show you, Jorge the camp. She walks me to the back of the warehouse to this long row of about ten full sized freezers and fridges. She says, these were full of meats, fruits, eggs, yogurt, produce anything Walmart would give them. Now each one is completely empty. These were full of meat when Walmart was here, full of meat, any kind of meat that Walmart had, We had it. Each family got approximately three, sometime five big packages of meat, and in the fruits and the vegetables, we would put them in these trays and we would put them outside, and the people were allowed to take what fruits and vegetables they needed. You could pretty much fill these up more or less for free every week. Oh they well, yes, and a lot of times if they would redo their meat cases, we would have to open up and give out the meat then because we had too much for the freezers. You had an excess of food. Ninety thousand pounds is what we lost when they left us a year, ninety thousand pounds. We'll get back to the story in a second. First, a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done, sweats over the details. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a response. You need a callback. You need a job. Express Employment Professionals can help because we understand what it takes to get a job. It takes more than just online searches to land a job. It takes someone who will identify your talents, a person invested in your success. At Express, we can even complete your application with you over the phone, will prepare you for interviews, and will connect you to the right company. Plus, we'll never charge a fee to find you a job. At Express, we could put you to work with companies of all sizes and industries, from the production floor to the front office. Express Nose Jobs get to no Express. Find your location at expresspros dot com or on the Express Jobs app. And now back to our story. The local Walmart here was the only source of fresh food within driving distance, but no one here had jobs, so Walmart was not generating revenue. And in January twenty sixteen they closed. Today that I heard that Walmart was closing, I didn't believe it. And when they closed, they closed, They shut down and got out of town. After the demise of the mining industry here, Walmart was also the biggest employer. Now the building is just this empty concrete block with weeds growing through the parking lot pavement outside, adding to this feeling you get when you drive through McDowell like you're in a ghost town. At one time we were one hundred thousand. We may hit nineteen thousand right now. When were you one hundred thousand? When the coal mines was booming in the fifties and the sixties, when I was little and my dad got paid every Friday, we would go to every store. There were dress stores, there were hardwarees, There was a Kroger, there were grocery stores and restaurants, home cooks. There's nothing, it's nothing. The entire town ran off of the profits from the coal mines for decades. A lot of people didn't even bother thinking about college here because they knew that they could go into the mines and get jobs that might pay up to ninety thousand dollars a year and support their families. When the mines shut down, those jobs ceased to exist and there wasn't really anything to take its place. Mine runoff and compaction also made most of the soil here infertile and the water bad to drink, so falling back on farming was not an option. Parents have been forced to travel to nearby cities like Charleston to fine work, leaving their kids to be raised by the grandparents, and a lot of these families move in together to save money, sometimes five families in one home, so grandma or grandpa's susis security or pension is supporting those individuals in the house. That's not a good thing. A dollar only goes so far. These are the folks that will show up to Linda's food bank on Saturday, knowing that they might not get what they came for. So hearing this story, you kind of have to wonder why stay? It's just home, and it's like you're gonna sleep on somebody's couch or you're gonna sleep in the floor on a mattress. You you pull your resources and you do what you have to do to feed your family. As positive as Linda is, you can tell that this work doesn't come without at all. I mean, Lord, sometimes you want to go home and curl up and cry. What comes on this? Especially with the children, brace my heart. I mean, they don't have beds to sleep in. They have some of them sleep on the floor, some of them sleep on the couch. Right now, we've got a sleeping bag drive going. Sleeping bags are awesome for children. They can get down in them and snuggle nowhere, no matter where. So we've got we're collecting sleeping bags right now. You know, if I see a need, I try to supply that need. How does it make you feel when you don't have enough? Well, you know, it's it's not my fault. I know that, but I feel like it's my fault. You know, I can go back to my days off my nanna. Never did anyone leave our house without food. My Nanna always made sure that the children were fed. There was never a day. We had a gate and had a big old cow bill on it, and when I'd come through that gate, my Nanna knew I was home because that cow bell, we're boom boom, And soon as I go up on the porch, my plate was on the table. I've ate every day. Every day. I do the best that I can do for my family and the best that I can do here for this county. There's been times that we've been really scared because there's no money in the bank, and then the food. Sometime the food is not what we think we should get, But I always feel that it's not what we want, it's what God knows we need. And my husband and I are people of faith. We totally believe that when God does not want us here anymore, the lights will go off and the food will dry up and we'll go somewhere else, or we'll wake up dead. It's like that picture of that cat you're just hanging on, you know, have you ever seen that cat just hanging onto the branch. It's what you do. You hang on every day, you hang on, You hang on that Saturday, the givebout was about to start. They were almost one hundred fifty families waiting on the lot for food. A group of volunteers showed up to help Linda distribute, and just before noon she gathered all the volunteers around and started off the day with a prayer. All right, let's go to the Lord in prayer, and you've got to promise me you're gonna do everything orderly today. It makes it go a lot sweeter for all of us. Right, Okay, Heavenly Father, we thank you Lord for this group that's come today. Lord, we ask that you just be with us, be among us. Lord, just take over today and let everything be done in a calm and mannerly way. We asked Lord that you spread this food as far as we can spread it, because you know we did go over in our numbers this morning. We asked that you be with us, that you give us peace Lord today. Lord, it's in your heavenly holy night that we pray this morning. Amy. By the end of the day, the food bank served one hundred forty seven families, almost five hundred people, and they even had enough food to spare for the next give out. Everything's good and we thank off the Women's London. Everybody doing for a county on mac coal. May God please you and every one of them. May Heaven smiled upon me. Since I first started covering Linda's story, she's seen plenty of hardship, but she's also had a lot of wins. There you go, Darlin, all right, let's keep you straight. In twenty eighteen, Anthony Bourdain traveled to West Virginia for an episode of his show Parts Unknown. They contacted Linda, who made him a family dinner in her home and shared stories about the wonderful, tough people of McDowell. It was one of the last shows he recorded before he passed away. All right name Shapa. In the same year, television personality Mike Rowe organized the entire McDowell community to surprise Linda on his show Returning the Favor. It's a show that features extraordinary people that make a difference in the community. He organized a massive donation of food and fixed the food Bank's roof, which was in long need of repair. He liked her so much that they saved Linda for the season finale. Haughty Scottie, how'd you laugh? Laugh, Scotty, that's too haughty Scotty in the Holler. Even with all the press that the Food Bank has gotten, Linda still wakes up every day and works tirelessly to secure donations and to feed the people of McDowell. She's just one of many people here who are using their circumstances and their hunger to make real changes, to choose to stay, to find creative ways to thrive when many others would throw in the towel. Okay, you don't need this. As long as ever since I've known her, Linda keeps telling me that Italians don't get sick, they just wake up dead. And she says that's probably the only thing that will stop her from doing what she does. But anyone who knows or might tell you that that might not be enough to stop Linda McKinney Rocko. To see pictures of the Food Bank and of Linda, and to donate to their cause, you can go find them on Facebook under five Loaves and two Fishes food Bank, Inc. We'll have a link on our website expresspros dot com slash podcast that's also where you can see her videos with Anthony Bourdain and Mike Rowe as well for on the job I'm Otus Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at expresspros dot com. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and dread Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble at The Loft in Bronxville, New York. Find us on iHeartRadio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work, Audiation

On the Job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Express Employment Professionals as a leading staffing provider that employs nearly six hundred thousand people annually across more than eight hundred franchise locations in the US, Canada, and South Africa. Our long term goal is at the heart of our company's mission to help as many people as possible find good jobs. By helping as many clients as possible find good people. It takes more than just online searches to land a job. It takes real people who will identify your talents, a person invested in your success. Express Employment Professionals understands what it takes to land a new position at a top employer or start a new career in today's job market. Express Noose Jobs, Get to no Express, Go to expresspros dot com. Welcome to on the Job. This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know, whether it's breathing new life into an age old profession, taking the reins in a family business, forging your own path with a new idea, or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. In the deep hills of Appalachia. Linda McKinney has a very important job. She feeds people in McDowell County, West Virginia. The community has seen its share of hardship and flood shortages in the wake of the coal industry drying up over the last thirty years. In the aftermath, Linda works day in and day out to make sure that the people of McDowell are fed while the community perseveres. Producer Otis Gray brings us the story as a beautiful potato you want to fly? Yeah, it's a chilly, overcast day and I am in McDowell County, West Virginia peeling potatoes with Linda McKinney. L I n da mc k I n n E. Why we're in the warehouse of her food bank called Five Loaves and two Fishes. Linda just got this huge shipment donated to them, which is palettes and palettes of potatoes for a food give out that they have this coming weekend. That's are beautiful. Look at this and it was actually one I'll picked up. Its shaped like a heart, So that tellsion that's meant for me. About all gets donated here? Yes? And do you give it away from free. Yes, this is all free. We don't sell anything here. Linda is a character. She's a short Italian woman with her hair dyed of fiery crimson red, and she runs his food bank with her husband, Bob, in the southernmost part of the state, right in the heart of Appalachia. Bob is still a mind safety and training instructor for the state Mining Department. His income supports the two of them. Linda's full time job is to run the food bank and feed as many people as she possibly can here with whatever donations she receives from nonprofits and religious organizations. So you actually don't know all the time what you're gonna go. No, no, you don't. You know we can't buy food. We don't buy food. We barely keep enough in our budget for overhead, and no one's paid here. No one's paid here. Like many places around here, McDowell has always been a coal town, but in the last few decades more coal has been imported from overseas, devastating economies like this and leaving them with a high unemployment rate, poverty and everything that comes with that. So sometimes people will show up and Linda doesn't have enough that happened last month. We just didn't have the food. The third Saturday of every month, Linda and a group of volunteers do this food give out, and even in the coldest of weather, people in mcdowells show up as early as two am to wait in line for the noonday distribution because, for better or worse, let's first come, first served. You can only feed so many, you know, and we at one time we fed anyone that came. But the food got short. And it scares you when you don't see food, and you say, God, what am I going to feed these people? There's no food here. This Saturday is the next food give out in McDowell, a rural place where for many the choices can be to leave or to starve. Well, today we followed Lenna McKinney as she stands her ground and prepares to feed whoever she can. I'm a storyteller. I never had anybody played with when I was little, so I just made up stories and lies and played by myself and eat mud and grass and dirt, had a good old time by myself. Didn't have any cousins around that I could play with, and I was raised basically by adults. And so you learn. I'm a storyteller. I've always been. I laugh all the time and never shut up. You know I'm in the building. When you hear him, I cackle. I'm sorry, I cackle. Linda's a good talker. She was even a pastor for three years here in the same church she was born in. She loves the story of Five Loaves and Two Fishes, which is the story the food Bank is named after. It's the Bible passage in which Jesus takes five loaves of bread and a couple of small fish and breaks them to feed thousands, despite his disciples not thinking they have enough to give. I can just see him pulling that bread and slinging a fish. That's what I would do. You know. Being Italian, we throw a lot of things, so I just sling it everywhere. But you know, the disciples, which is all in a tissy because there wasn't any food. But he showed him, didn't he He showed him. Linda was raised an only child, and like a lot of immigrants, her Italian father came to West Virginia to work in the coal fields back in the fifties, and they both lived in a house with her grandmother. My dad was a man of the house who went to work every day at the mines, and my Norna and I had aunt a widow. Don't that raised me well? First thing, they taught me to pull me up to a cook stove and taught me how to cook. She was born and raised to be a caretaker of sorts. So when the man who used to run this food bank was falling ill and asked Linda and her husband to take it over, she eventually accepted. This we call a buggy, you guys call a shopping cart in the warehouse. She pulls out a shopping cart to show me how they load up food for the families every month. First we look at our food and we count, and we're going to be able to figure up how many families were going to be able to food. This looks to me like we will be able to do anywhere from one hundred and thirty five, maybe a hundred, maybe one hundred and fifty families. So what we'll do we'll come down through here and we'll start right here. So in the warehouse there's pallets and boxes neatly packed against the walls and whist everything here comes from a humanitarian organization called Operation Blessing. If it was not for Operation Blessing, we would not have food. Each month they send us a tractor trailer of food, and that came in this Thursday. Still, when there are disasters in other parts of the world, like the recent floods in Puerto Rico, that means that Operation Blessing might send more there and less to McDowell. Right now, there are the pallets of potatoes. There's a lot of canned goods like soups and vegetables and noodles. There's syrup on top of a big pallet of pancake mix. Little Debby's Cakes is actually a really big donor. And next to that there are boxes and boxes of ho hoes. Yeah, we got hoes. And somewhere here I thank someone cracked the case. They say these are delicious. Tell me what these are. I don't know. I don't eat sweets, okay, strawberry shortcake rolls? Yes? Did they taste like a strawberry shortcake? I'm told a lot of sodas get donated here too. McDowell has landed in the spotlight before, kind of as a poster child for a down and out coal town. What it looks like when Applachian communities can only afford things like sugary foods. They were even featured on PBS a decade back for what journalists called Mountain due Mouth, where kids had their teeth rotting away from so much sugar. While a lot of this coverage was very graphic and highly polarized poverty porn, the health issues that come with the poverty here are very real. Life expectancy in McDowell is just sixty four years, the same lifespan is a lot of Third World countries. So Linda goes out of her way to procure the healthiest stuff that she can get. You know, you really need to take the good food you've got. Beans. I mean, I've come to show if you don't know how to cook beans. Some of the younger generation does not know how to cook bean. I'll show you how to cook the beans. I'll bring a pot of beans and item tasting six or seven. Okay, let me bring it over here. The next thing Linda does is she takes me over to the shelf with these clear plastic bags on it. She calls them school break bags. And what we do when we get food in anything that is small child size. We put them in these bags. Anytime there's no school, any children that come here, we'll get a school break bag. For most of the kids around here, the school feeds breakfast when they come in early. They feed school lunch and an after school snack. But on long breaks like Christmas, those three meals aren't there anymore, and the kids go back to homes with pretty empty pantries. I want to try to give a protein. You want to try to give a cereal something they can eat for breakfast. This is all snacks. You've got you some apple sauce, You've got you some juice, so you know, I may even throw some of those strawberry cakes we got I think we've got I'll see some cheese. It's over there, So I mean, I know you like you kind of get what you get in terms of donations. Do you ever worry about it? Does a lot of this stuff have like tons and tons of sugar in it? Well, you know, in my world, some food is better than no food. It's really hard to understand McDowell and the gravity of hunger here unless you've seen it up close. I'm from a rural place too, in Vermont, where a lot of people depend on food stamps and even hunting to get by, but this just it felt so different. There are some fast food places here, but even then there's no jobs, there's no money to buy that food. This is a place in a country of abundance where for a lot of people there is no food available. Period. When did the food get short? Food got short into and when Walmart closed, that was our perishables. So that's why you would see You see the refrigerators, and you see the freezers. They're empty. They've been empty since Walmart left, completely empty. I can turn the light on and show you, Jorge the camp. She walks me to the back of the warehouse to this long row of about ten full sized freezers and fridges. She says, these were full of meats, fruits, eggs, yogurt, produce anything Walmart would give them. Now each one is completely empty. These were full of meat when Walmart was here, full of meat, any kind of meat that Walmart had, We had it. Each family got approximately three, sometime five big packages of meat, and in the fruits and the vegetables, we would put them in these trays and we would put them outside, and the people were allowed to take what fruits and vegetables they needed. You could pretty much fill these up more or less for free every week. Oh they well, yes, and a lot of times if they would redo their meat cases, we would have to open up and give out the meat then because we had too much for the freezers. You had an excess of food. Ninety thousand pounds is what we lost when they left us a year, ninety thousand pounds. We'll get back to the story in a second. First, a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done, sweats over the details. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a response. You need a callback. You need a job. Express Employment Professionals can help because we understand what it takes to get a job. It takes more than just online searches to land a job. It takes someone who will identify your talents, a person invested in your success. At Express, we can even complete your application with you over the phone, will prepare you for interviews, and will connect you to the right company. Plus, we'll never charge a fee to find you a job. At Express, we could put you to work with companies of all sizes and industries, from the production floor to the front office. Express Nose Jobs get to no Express. Find your location at expresspros dot com or on the Express Jobs app. And now back to our story. The local Walmart here was the only source of fresh food within driving distance, but no one here had jobs, so Walmart was not generating revenue. And in January twenty sixteen they closed. Today that I heard that Walmart was closing, I didn't believe it. And when they closed, they closed, They shut down and got out of town. After the demise of the mining industry here, Walmart was also the biggest employer. Now the building is just this empty concrete block with weeds growing through the parking lot pavement outside, adding to this feeling you get when you drive through McDowell like you're in a ghost town. At one time we were one hundred thousand. We may hit nineteen thousand right now. When were you one hundred thousand? When the coal mines was booming in the fifties and the sixties, when I was little and my dad got paid every Friday, we would go to every store. There were dress stores, there were hardwarees, There was a Kroger, there were grocery stores and restaurants, home cooks. There's nothing, it's nothing. The entire town ran off of the profits from the coal mines for decades. A lot of people didn't even bother thinking about college here because they knew that they could go into the mines and get jobs that might pay up to ninety thousand dollars a year and support their families. When the mines shut down, those jobs ceased to exist and there wasn't really anything to take its place. Mine runoff and compaction also made most of the soil here infertile and the water bad to drink, so falling back on farming was not an option. Parents have been forced to travel to nearby cities like Charleston to fine work, leaving their kids to be raised by the grandparents, and a lot of these families move in together to save money, sometimes five families in one home, so grandma or grandpa's susis security or pension is supporting those individuals in the house. That's not a good thing. A dollar only goes so far. These are the folks that will show up to Linda's food bank on Saturday, knowing that they might not get what they came for. So hearing this story, you kind of have to wonder why stay? It's just home, and it's like you're gonna sleep on somebody's couch or you're gonna sleep in the floor on a mattress. You you pull your resources and you do what you have to do to feed your family. As positive as Linda is, you can tell that this work doesn't come without at all. I mean, Lord, sometimes you want to go home and curl up and cry. What comes on this? Especially with the children, brace my heart. I mean, they don't have beds to sleep in. They have some of them sleep on the floor, some of them sleep on the couch. Right now, we've got a sleeping bag drive going. Sleeping bags are awesome for children. They can get down in them and snuggle nowhere, no matter where. So we've got we're collecting sleeping bags right now. You know, if I see a need, I try to supply that need. How does it make you feel when you don't have enough? Well, you know, it's it's not my fault. I know that, but I feel like it's my fault. You know, I can go back to my days off my nanna. Never did anyone leave our house without food. My Nanna always made sure that the children were fed. There was never a day. We had a gate and had a big old cow bill on it, and when I'd come through that gate, my Nanna knew I was home because that cow bell, we're boom boom, And soon as I go up on the porch, my plate was on the table. I've ate every day. Every day. I do the best that I can do for my family and the best that I can do here for this county. There's been times that we've been really scared because there's no money in the bank, and then the food. Sometime the food is not what we think we should get, But I always feel that it's not what we want, it's what God knows we need. And my husband and I are people of faith. We totally believe that when God does not want us here anymore, the lights will go off and the food will dry up and we'll go somewhere else, or we'll wake up dead. It's like that picture of that cat you're just hanging on, you know, have you ever seen that cat just hanging onto the branch. It's what you do. You hang on every day, you hang on, You hang on that Saturday, the givebout was about to start. They were almost one hundred fifty families waiting on the lot for food. A group of volunteers showed up to help Linda distribute, and just before noon she gathered all the volunteers around and started off the day with a prayer. All right, let's go to the Lord in prayer, and you've got to promise me you're gonna do everything orderly today. It makes it go a lot sweeter for all of us. Right, Okay, Heavenly Father, we thank you Lord for this group that's come today. Lord, we ask that you just be with us, be among us. Lord, just take over today and let everything be done in a calm and mannerly way. We asked Lord that you spread this food as far as we can spread it, because you know we did go over in our numbers this morning. We asked that you be with us, that you give us peace Lord today. Lord, it's in your heavenly holy night that we pray this morning. Amy. By the end of the day, the food bank served one hundred forty seven families, almost five hundred people, and they even had enough food to spare for the next give out. Everything's good and we thank off the Women's London. Everybody doing for a county on mac coal. May God please you and every one of them. May Heaven smiled upon me. Since I first started covering Linda's story, she's seen plenty of hardship, but she's also had a lot of wins. There you go, Darlin, all right, let's keep you straight. In twenty eighteen, Anthony Bourdain traveled to West Virginia for an episode of his show Parts Unknown. They contacted Linda, who made him a family dinner in her home and shared stories about the wonderful, tough people of McDowell. It was one of the last shows he recorded before he passed away. All right name Shapa. In the same year, television personality Mike Rowe organized the entire McDowell community to surprise Linda on his show Returning the Favor. It's a show that features extraordinary people that make a difference in the community. He organized a massive donation of food and fixed the food Bank's roof, which was in long need of repair. He liked her so much that they saved Linda for the season finale. Haughty Scottie, how'd you laugh? Laugh, Scotty, that's too haughty Scotty in the Holler. Even with all the press that the Food Bank has gotten, Linda still wakes up every day and works tirelessly to secure donations and to feed the people of McDowell. She's just one of many people here who are using their circumstances and their hunger to make real changes, to choose to stay, to find creative ways to thrive when many others would throw in the towel. Okay, you don't need this. As long as ever since I've known her, Linda keeps telling me that Italians don't get sick, they just wake up dead. And she says that's probably the only thing that will stop her from doing what she does. But anyone who knows or might tell you that that might not be enough to stop Linda McKinney Rocko. To see pictures of the Food Bank and of Linda, and to donate to their cause, you can go find them on Facebook under five Loaves and two Fishes food Bank, Inc. We'll have a link on our website expresspros dot com slash podcast that's also where you can see her videos with Anthony Bourdain and Mike Rowe as well for on the job I'm Otus Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at expresspros dot com. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and dread Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble at The Loft in Bronxville, New York. Find us on iHeartRadio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work, Audiation