In a hard-knock world, that simple gesture of compassion is enough to bring tears to the eyes of Wayne Irving, a homeless laborer who arrived in Minneapolis by bus from Chicago. "Nobody ever did this for me," he says, sitting over a basin of hot, sudsy water as Copeland, 57, wearing a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves, rubs his calloused feet with antiseptic ointment. "I've never met a lady like her in my life."
That's because there aren't very many women like Copeland. With little more than a card table and a couple of coffeepots, she founded a storefront charity 14 years ago on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Today she is the guiding light of Sharing and Caring Hands, a $3 million nonprofit community center that caters daily to as many as 1,800 of the city's needy, dispensing everything from hot meals and bus tokens to eyeglasses and deodorant. "It's heartwarming to see thousands of people benefit," says Jim Ramstad, a local congressman and sometime volunteer. "Nobody does more to help people in need. Mary Jo is a true saint—Minnesota's Mother Teresa."
Copeland, who draws no salary, says her work springs from a biblical mandate. "I believe in what Jesus said about helping the less fortunate in memory of him," she says. "That's why I wash their feet. We are commanded to be servants of the poor." But there's more to her motivation. An emotional woman who sometimes breaks into tears when talking about her life, Copeland—married for 38 years and the mother of 12 grown children—traces her empathy for the homeless, the working poor and abandoned young mothers to what she describes as her own painful past.
The daughter of a Minneapolis clothing salesman and his wife, a hairdresser, Copeland says that while she was growing up, "my mother didn't clean the house. Everything was filthy. My dad would get up at 3 in the morning and rant and rave. He'd beat my mom.... I'd lie in my bed scared to death." Gertrude Holtby, Copeland's late mother, cautioned in a 1992 newspaper interview that her daughter was prone to exaggeration and was "always a little different, high-strung."
Still, she acknowledged that her daughter's perspective on life was shaded in part by her difficult youth. Copeland's compassion for the dispossessed was also likely shaped by the responsibilities she knew as a caring mother as well as the emotional trials she faced after two miscarriages and a deep depression that led to a struggle with Valium. She says she quit the drug after five years, "cold turkey, on my own. One day I said, 'No more.' "
To Copeland's devoted followers, the details of her past matter far less than her undeniable generosity. "When she was growing up, my mom didn't have love, caring or anyone saying, 'Hey, you can do it. We're praying for you,' " says Copeland's son Mark, 31, her $39,520-a-year general manager and one of the center's seven salaried employees. "And that's what we do here—we offer hope, prayer and whatever practical help people need."
And they need plenty. On a typical morning, Mary Jo rises at her customary 3:45 a.m. A faithful Catholic, she says a rosary while racewalking for exercise around her parish church. Soon she is at the center, comforting the teary mother of two toddlers, who tells her that she is trying to escape an abusive relationship. "I'll help you, honey," says Copeland, planning to find the family a spot in her 56-apartment transitional-housing facility. "We'll put you in a nice, safe place to stay." In the same breath, Copeland suddenly spins to confront a stylishly dressed youth talking on a cell phone. "How dare you bring that into a shelter!" she shouts. "Why aren't you out working? You get out of here right now! Come on, let's go!"
The whip-cracking is part of the Copeland style as she plays field marshal to a corps of 1,000 volunteers while juggling requests from the hundreds of petitioners who line up daily to ask for help with car payments, rent or finding a job. "I've seen people try to put one over on her, but she puts her foot down," says Carrie Dahlquist, a recovering alcoholic. "Sometimes she loses her temper, but I don't blame her. People have to act right."
Copeland is just as strict with the center's purse strings. According to the Charities Review Council of Minnesota, a local watchdog group, an impressive 94 percent of the center's $3 million annual operating budget is channeled directly to the poor. (Copeland has raised an additional $13 million in various building drives, all from private donations.) "Every nickel you give is going to a needy person," says Tom Lowe, 67, chairman of a local lumber company, who has donated more than $600,000 over the past seven years. "Mary Jo sets an example for this kind of work."
For Copeland, who raised her own sizable family in an 828-square-foot bungalow before moving 11 years ago to a modest four-bedroom house in a nearby suburb, frugality—and hardship—are nothing new. As a girl, she says, "I remember living in a corner of my room. My dad worked, but he didn't give us anything. I'd go to the bingo halls at night, when my mother played for food. Sometimes we ate. Sometimes we didn't." For solace, Copeland turned to the church, cutting flowers from neighbors' gardens to place in front of a statue of the Blessed Virgin. "People thought I was a little goofy, being so religious," she says. "But it gave me such comfort. It was all I had."
At least until a mixer during her sophomore year in high school, when she met Dick Copeland, son of a former newspaper executive. "We danced. I sparked with her," he recalls. "After that, we were together, dating, like you did back in the '50s." According to Dick, 58, an executive buyer for a grocery-store chain, his parents didn't approve of his troubled girlfriend: "My mother was sophisticated and controlling. She had her own ideas of what she wanted for me, and Mary Jo wasn't it." For her part, Mary Jo remembers going to the Copeland house for dinner, "but they wouldn't let me eat with them. I'd have to sit in the car."
Despite his parents' opposition, Dick married Mary Jo in 1961, and by 1977 they were the parents of six boys and six girls, now ages 22 to 37. Family life was "incredibly gratifying, but exhausting," recalls Mary Jo. "I didn't have any friends, and the neighbors thought I was crazy for having all those kids. I was dealing with my own childhood issues, plus the physical and emotional stress of all those pregnancies"—not to mention the miscarriages.
For several years beginning in the mid-'70s, she lived in her housecoat, seldom venturing outside. Then in 1981, when their youngest child, daughter Molly, left for preschool, Dick encouraged his wife to expand her universe beyond the family's needs. "She'd spent all those years at home and didn't know what she was going to do," he says. "I told her she had to take all that love into the world."
That year, Copeland volunteered at a local branch of Catholic Charities but soon ran afoul of its bureaucracy. "They wouldn't deviate from their policies," she says. "If people were hungry and the food shelf was closed for the day, I'd run out to my car and get them some food." Four years later, using $2,200 from a public-service award, she signed a three-year, $36,000 lease on a small storefront that has grown to include a $6.5 million shelter and a 27,000-square-foot main building that opened in 1997.
There, on Sundays when she's not tending her garden or doting on her 13 grandchildren, Copeland can be found with her daughter Barbara, 30, a lab technician, cleaning toilets and setting out silk flowers and potpourri. "I grew up with everything so dirty," she says with a conspiratorial wink. "I like everything to be spotless."
Susan Schindehette
Margaret Nelson in Minneapolis
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