Galen Hall

Red, yellow or green.

Picking the right packaged meal is easy enough for Galen Hall,

thanks to these three basic colors.

If he sees a red sticker in his notebook, he picks a no-salt meal.

For green, it’s a diabetic-friendly feast. Yellow gets a regular

meal.

The colors are an easy signifier for Hall as he drops off each

appropriate meal at one of the eight houses on his Mobile Meals

route. Hoag Hospital and Friends in Service to Humanity run the

meals-on-wheels program as a way to ensure infirm senior citizens get

the nutrition they need even if they can’t cook.

The 73-year-old Hall, who has been delivering the meals for about

six years, acts almost like a mail carrier. He plucks the correct

color-coded meal out of the back of his van and steps it up to the

senior’s front doorstep. Talk about service.

Hall loves the work, so much so that he finds time to engage the

usually grateful seniors on the other end of the giving gesture. He

offers a meal, as well as a friendly face.

“I like to chat with them to see how they’re doing,” Hall said.

“Most of them like to talk, and I like to have fun with it.”

As a retiree, Hall says the program, organized by the group that

likes to use its FISH acronym, helps to ensure that seniors eat well.

Hall delivers two meals to his clients: a cold lunch and a hot

dinner. He usually gives them a cold sandwich, piece of fruit and

carton of milk for lunch and a tray of lasagna, sliver of salmon and

beverage for dinner.

It takes Hall about an hour to deliver the meals on his route,

which is one of 12 mapped out by FISH that includes homes in Newport

Beach, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach.

Each day, the group feeds about 100 people, some of whom are

blind. For those clients, the group hands out easy-to-microwave

plastic dishes with the food.

Hall said he signed up for the group after seeing an ad in the

newspaper. He was looking for a way to donate his time.

After retiring from the Air Force in 1970 as a warehouse worker,

Hall went to work for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. He

retired from that job, also in a warehouse, in 1986.

Hall, who lives in Corona del Mar, hands out meals along Placentia

Avenue in Costa Mesa.

* Story by Paul Clinton;

photo by Don Leach