It’s 4:49 on Friday afternoon when Howard School football coach John Starr parks his white 2008 Chevrolet Suburban in front of the home of one of his most impoverished players.
In the back seat of Starr’s SUV are 23 white plastic foam food boxes. Inside each one are two homemade cheeseburgers wrapped in foil, a pack of peanut butter crackers and a small bag of chips.
When the player we’ll refer to as Robert (for privacy reasons) emerges from his house a few seconds later, Starr – who’s wearing a protective mask and rubber gloves in accordance with COVID-19 safety guidelines – rolls down a window and asks, from a safe distance, of course: “How many do you need today?”
Robert replies that he needs four meals: one for himself, one for a brother who attends a different high school and two for his sisters. With that, Starr pulls four food boxes from his backseat and hands them to the young man, who instantly breaks into a wide, sweet smile before saying “Thank you.”
It is a scene that would not only be repeated at least six to eight more times that evening, but has been repeated by Starr almost nightly since the coronavirus pandemic shut down our schools and pretty much everything else in mid-March.