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MERLE HATLEBERG: 1923-2007:

Merle Hatleberg, who fed thousands as founder of the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen in Costa Mesa and was lauded as a champion for the disenfranchised, died about 7 a.m. Thursday of complications connected with congestive heart failure. She was 83.

Hatleberg started the soup kitchen 21 years ago after having to turn away hungry people from a senior meal program she operated. She moved the soup kitchen to its current location on 19th Street in 1997.

“I started this 19 years ago because I saw the need,” Hatleberg told the Daily Pilot on Easter last year. “You have to serve as many as you can.”

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Jean Forbath, who started the nonprofit service organization Share Our Selves, remembered how Hatleberg decided to open the soup kitchen when the two worked together at the former Rea community center.

Hatleberg managed a senior meal program there, and Forbath helped run a clinic for Share Our Selves.

“When she was there she saw all the people waiting to go to our medical clinic, and she got the idea, ‘Why don’t we feed these people?’ ” Forbath said. “She had a heart as big as herself. She was just a wonderfully sympathetic person who was more like a mother than a site manager.”

Feeding people seems to have been Hatleberg’s mission in life. Born June 15, 1923, Hatleberg grew up packing lunches for coal miners at her mother’s boarding house in West Virginia, said Debbee Pezman, one of Hatleberg’s eight children.

Hatleberg was in charge of coordinating the food for Red Cross relief centers in Orange County during emergencies, and in the 1970s she worked a stint in the cantina at Angel Stadium.

“Her focus has always been on helping what she called the working poor,” Pezman said. “She always tried to say that this is the working poor, and we can all be there.”

Working was part of the equation for Hatleberg, too. She visited the soup kitchen nearly every day until she was no longer able to — and when she used a wheelchair, she would stop by at least once a week.

Hatleberg’s work ethic and giving nature inspired those around her, including Betty Hart, who met Hatleberg 15 years ago when she started volunteering at the soup kitchen.

Now Hart works as a tutor for the kitchen’s tutoring program for Pomona Elementary School students.

“What stands out to me about Merle Hatleberg is her generosity toward the unlovable and those that are hurting and in need,” Hart said, fighting back tears.

Soup kitchen volunteer Wendy Schwartz said she considered Hatleberg a role model for her children. The whole family has given time to the soup kitchen for 15 years.

“As a person she definitely was inspiring to me and my family. In this world it’s so much about me, me, me,” Schwartz said. “I think the message is life is not about what you get — it’s about what you give. And that’s how she’ll be remembered.”

But Hatleberg’s experience wasn’t all full stomachs and gratitude. Over the years she had to move her operations because, as Forbath remembers it, some in the community considered charities like the soup kitchen magnets for crime and other problems.

When people criticized the soup kitchen, Hatleberg listened. Neighbors complained that soup kitchen diners were causing trouble after they ate, so she hired a security guard for the parking lot. There were complaints about the way the 19th Street building looked, so she had it painted and landscaped.

“It seemed to me that she was absolutely undaunted by anything — lack of food, lack of money, lack of friends never seemed to stop her from her passionate desire to help people that were less fortunate,” said Bill Turpit, who worked with Hatleberg through the community group Families Costa Mesa.

A memorial service for Merle Hatleberg will be held at 1 p.m. June 8 at the Crossing church, 2115 Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa. Donations may be made to Someone Cares Soup Kitchen. For information, go to www.someonecaressoup kitchen.com.

Hatleberg is survived by eight children, and 27 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She will be buried next to her husband at Westminster Memorial Park.

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