MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - David Barranco was three years old when his father died. His mother wound up in Montgomery with four young boys and no money.
“She dug in,” he said. “She taught us to work hard, to pray hard, to take care of each other and to take care of others. We’ve tried to live by what Mom taught us way back when.”
Today, the words “Serve With Love” decorate a table beside Barranco as he smiles and swaps stories inside the entrance to Chappy’s, the neighborhood deli he started with his brothers 30 years ago. It’s the usual big crowd, and everyone he sees is a first name. One diner walks in to a laugh and a hand on the back. The next gets a question about a family member.
Ask Barranco about his work to help the community and the smile twists into a pained expression. He complains that he should do more. “Nothing I do is big,” he said. “It’s all little. Little, little, little.”
But those around him describe a man who has built a mountain of support from a thousand pebbles, elevating the area’s arts scene, helping hundreds find careers, providing care for premature babies and making sure local cancer patients get medicine and transportation.
Nonprofit leaders say Barranco, the Montgomery Advertiser’s Community Hero for February, is often the first to respond when a call goes out for help, despite the fact that he now runs five restaurants.
“He has to be busy,” Jo Ann Johnson said. “But he’s never busy.”
NEW WORKERS FIND A FUTURE
Johnson is the Montgomery site director for Hope Inspired Ministries, a nonprofit program that trains adults and helps them land a job. Some come from prison or rehab. Some just never learned the kinds of skills it takes to get work.
For years, Montgomery Police officer John Bowman would tell inmates at the city jail about HIM, and then he watched as it changed people. “Instead of getting incarcerated again, they would be working side-by-side with everybody else in the city of Montgomery,” he said. Bowman was so impressed that he signed on as the executive director of the program after he left MPD.
About 145 people entered the program in 2019, and almost every graduate left with a job and a chance at a new future.
There’s a picture on the wall of Barranco talking to one of them at a graduation ceremony. Employees say it could have been a whole wall of pictures. Barranco has attended almost all of the graduations, and Chappy’s is one of the program’s biggest providers of internships and jobs.
Many of them move on to other jobs eventually. During breakfast service last week, Barranco high-fived a server who just earned a degree as a registered nurse.
Others find a long-term home at Chappy’s, working alongside Barranco family members, special-needs employees and lifelong servers. “We’re a big family,” said Lee Agnes Little, who has worked at Chappy’s since the 1980s. More than 300 people now work at locations in Montgomery, Prattville and Auburn.
“We’ve always just tried to hire nice people, no matter what, looking at their smiles and looking at what they can offer,” Barranco said. “… Those that might need a little hand or a little way up, what we little bit we can do, we try to do that, too.”
Manager Diane Oetting changed her life a decade ago when she checked herself into rehab in Birmingham. After getting sober she wound up at Chappy’s, where her parents used to eat breakfast every Saturday morning. She remembered Barranco stopping to talk to her family during those meals but said she never knew about his quiet philanthropy.
Oetting now works in the restaurant’s catering department, and one of her first jobs was to deliver meals to a nonprofit. She asked Barranco if he wanted a receipt for tax purposes, and he looked confused. That wasn’t the point, he told her.
Through the years, she’s learned more about how they operate – whether it’s boxing meals for the homebound, volunteering as a staff to work late on a charity project, or checking kids’ report cards. Barranco was even beside her father when he died. “This is a good place,” Oetting said.
That’s why so many employees have stayed there for decades. “It’s unusual, especially in food service,” she said. “… After nine years, I still wake up every morning looking forward to coming to work.”
HELPING PREMATURE BABIES, CANCER PATIENTS
In Alabama, 12.5% of all babies are born premature, according to the March of Dimes. That’s the third-worst rate in the nation. Montgomery’s rate is even worse at 12.8%.
In 2006, Montgomery radio legend Larry Stevens was serving on the board of directors for the March of Dimes here and was looking for someone in the community to help them fill the healthcare gaps. He immediately thought of Barranco.
“I just had noticed over the years as I had known David that he was willing to help people,” Stevens said. “It was just knowing him.”
They launched an annual breakfast fundraiser, called Breakfast for Babies. Chappy’s donated the food, and workers volunteered their time. It raised $8,000.
Over the next few years, the pebbles grew. The total doubled, then doubled again. Former workers came back to Chappy’s to help out, and people from the community signed on to volunteer. Last year, it raised $62,000 to fund care for premature babies.
Breakfast for Babies at Chappy’s has raised $420,000 in all since 2006.
A few years into the fundraiser, one of Barranco’s grandchildren was born premature. She was treated at the neonatal intensive care unit at Baptist Medical Center East – using one of the beds that was funded by the March of Dimes.
“We didn’t do it for that. We did it to help others,” Barranco said. “But it came back.”
Barranco does a lot of counting his blessings. He even counts cancer among them.
In 2004, his wife talked him into going to the doctor to check out a painful lump in his chest. He was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer.
“That was God’s blessing that I needed at the time, to get my attention as to the priorities and what really is important in life,” he said.
After fighting through chemotherapy, he started working to raise money for the Cancer Wellness Foundation, which provides transportation, access to medication and grants for treatment for patients who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
“Several years ago, we were barely meeting needs,” Board President Jennifer Conner said. “Last year we did almost $11 million in transportation and grants for medication. So, we have evolved over the last five or six years. It’s been phenomenal. We’re able to help a lot more patients now within the counties.”
Meanwhile, Barranco met with newly diagnosed patients to share his experience and encourage them.
Carol Gunter, who has worked with both the March of Dimes and the Cancer Wellness Foundation, said it’s just one of many ways he’s touched lives here over the years. She said her husband, Bill, got his first job through Barranco, learned about business through him and now owns his own company.
Most of Barranco’s impact is out of sight, by design.
“If he heard me talking, he would be so mad,” Gunter said.
‘‘WHAT LITTLE WE CAN DO’
Don’t tell Alabama Shakespeare Festival Development Director Eve Loeb that Barranco’s contributions have been “little.”
For 25 years, Chappy’s has provided food for prospective donors and other gatherings that have helped the theater grow. “I’ve been in the not-for-profit world my whole adult, professional life, and David has supported anything that I’ve asked him to do,” Loeb said.
They’ve boosted the local arts scene with years of donations and support for Alabama Dance Theatre, Montgomery Ballet, Cloverdale Playhouse, the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra and the Montgomery Chorale. And Barranco’s business has extended a helping hand to the Arthritis Foundation, Renascence Halfway House, the YMCA, Resurrection Catholic Mission and many other groups.
In 2014, Chappy’s won the River Region Ethics in Business and Public Service Award for its work in the community. The restaurant competed with the area’s largest banks, law firms and other businesses for the award because Barranco’s restaurants employed so many people.
It now employs a lot more, and they’re still hiring.
Barranco cringes at the idea of being compared to former Montgomery Advertiser Community Heroes, people he said are doing monumental work here.
What he’s done, he insists, is little.
Little, little, little.
“The good Lord put us here to help out and to give back in the little small ways,” he said. “… What little we can do, we’re supposed to do.”
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