State-Journal.com - Frankfort Face: Linda Brown's joyful journey

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Photo By Kelly MackeyLinda Brown

Photo By Kelly MackeyLinda Brown, executive director of the ACCESS Soup Kitchen and Men’s Shelter, talks with Terry Foymire before lunch. Linda describes Terry as one of their many success stories. Once homeless, Terry has lived in an apartment for more than a year.

Photo By Kelly MackeyLinda talks with James Parrison about getting an apartment. “So many people think we are just a soup kitchen, that we just serve lunch, but we are so much more than that,” Linda says.

Following your heart can take you down strange, unimaginable paths, says Linda Brown, executive director of the ACCESS Soup Kitchen and Men’s Shelter on Second Street.

But the journey has been joyful for Linda, 63.

In mid-life she fell in love with a Roman Catholic priest and married him.

A few years ago she requested a burr haircut and liked it so much she can’t imagine anything else.

Linda thrives on helping others and has always found jobs doing that.

“I grew up in Bellepoint, but I don’t act like a Frankfort girl, do I?” says Linda, laughing, in her tidy office at the shelter. “It was the best of the best neighborhoods, a fun place to grow up.

“Neighbors were truly neighbors, and we’d have ice cream suppers.”

Her father, Chester Snelling, owned Snelling’s Bar on Broadway, and her mother, Hazel, “was the vacation Bible school queen at Bellepoint Baptist,” says Linda.

“She was the saint of all saints, and I was one of the worst kids in church, laughing and carrying on all the time. We were just awful.”

But it was church and vacation Bible school and mission trips and nursing home visits – plus home life – that planted the seeds for the work she enjoys today.

Linda says her dad wasn’t much of a church-goer, and it was surprising long after her youth to hear Dr. Amanda Lange suggest that her father was a missionary.

“I don’t think so,” Linda responded.

“And (Lange) said, ‘Linda, your dad fed more people in this town than you would ever believe.’

“At Christmas he was very generous to buy kids things. He’d make sure every kid in the neighborhood would have stuff.

“And when we were kids, the phone rang quite a bit in the middle of the night and dad would say, ‘OK, I’ll be there in a minute.’ He’d go get somebody out of jail, people who had been in his bar, and take them home.”

While Linda may have been rambunctious at church, “We were brought up with manners,” she says. “I’m so thankful for my upbringing. My dad served every kind of person so we didn’t grow up with prejudices.

“That’s why I love working here at the shelter. We have every kind of person imaginable to walk through these doors. I don’t care who comes in here, whether they’re red, black or whatever, or whatever denomination. It doesn’t matter whether you have an education or not.

“Everybody has something good in their life to share with somebody else, whether you’re on the street or in a nice office up at the Capitol.”

Besides her part-time job at the shelter, Linda is also Christian education and youth director at the downtown Church of the Ascension.

She’s gone from Baptist to Catholic to Episcopalian, and feels a connection to all churches.

A Frankfort High School graduate, Linda went to Kentucky State University and was interested in social work. She transferred to Spalding University in Louisville and changed her major to religious studies. Then she earned a bachelor’s in organizational management from Midway College.

Before going to work for the Episcopal church 12 years ago, she was youth minister and Christian education director at Good Shepherd Catholic Church for more than a decade.

While at Good Shepherd Linda met Dr. Bill Brown, a Catholic priest working for the Lexington diocese.

“We fell in love and decided to get married,” Linda says.

Since Catholic priests can’t marry, they knew they would have to leave their jobs.

Bill Brown is now a vice president at Midway College, in charge of the school for career development, and associate rector at Church of the Ascension.

“He’s the sweetest man in the whole world,” says Linda. “We’ve been married 14 years. It seems like yesterday. We had a big church wedding with long dresses and tuxes.

“Wallace Kent married us at Crestwood Baptist.”

Linda says Good Shepherd parish “was very gracious.”

So was Linda’s husband when she decided on a whim she wanted to move from a large home which had just been renovated in Bellepoint, to a suite in the Capital Plaza Hotel.

She got the idea one day when she saw a neighbor, John Hammond, walking through the neighborhood carrying clothes.

Linda stopped her car and asked John where he was going. He said he had moved into the Capital Plaza Hotel and was heading there. She gave him a ride and helped him carry his belongings to his apartment.

She loved it and told Bill that night, “We need to move.” He seemed mystified. But when she explained and they went to tour an apartment, he said, “Well, OK, we’ll move.”

“We started downsizing and had to get rid of 87 boxes of books,” Linda says. “We have the best place in the world to live, on the ninth floor overlooking the river.

“We have two bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and a living room/dining room combination.”

She says when she walks through the hotel lobby and staff members say, “‘Hello Mrs. Brown,’ I feel like Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman,’ even if I have blue jeans on.

“The staff is wonderful. You think about something and they’re there.”

Bill Brown also was gracious when his wife told him several years ago she wanted to get her hair buzzed and bleached white.

“He just said, ‘Well, OK.’

“God love him. He’s just the best.”

So Linda headed to Broadway Barber & Styling Shop and put in her request to Carletta Cantrell, “and Carletta said, ‘Are you sure?’”

She was, and she’s never regretted it.

“I loved it,” Linda says. “It’s who I am. It’s so easy to take care of. Why would you be afraid to make your life simple?

“I like to be able to be me. And here at the shelter I want people to be who they are. I don’t care what they do, where they’ve been. Just tell me the truth.”

At the Episcopal church, Linda says she’s taken youth groups on mission trips to inner city Chicago, “and if I had good sense, I’d never do that,” says Linda, smiling.

“I’ve taken kids from some of the more exclusive neighborhoods here and it’s a real eye opener for them. A church building where we went was nice and had a million dollars of artwork in it, but it was all locked in because it was such a bad neighborhood.”

They saw police with bulletproof vests and guns and a grocery store with bars on the windows and door.

“We did Bible school and fed them and did art and music with them,” she says. “Our kids had been pretty sheltered and they went in and were never afraid. People in the neighborhood treated us like gold.”

On another mission trip, Linda’s kids went into an area “where taxis wouldn’t go,” she says. “It was a big drug area, and one kid jumped out of a tree and stabbed a nun with a fork.

“A young mother came over and told us she had to be a prostitute to make money for her children. She said she was doing the best she could do.

“That was more than I wanted our kids to hear because they were young, but this is what makes things real. I love big cities because you have so many different kinds of people.”

In her hometown, Linda organized the Thanksgiving morning Walk of Awareness, which has and become a major fundraiser for the soup kitchen and men’s shelter.

Registration for the 14^th annual 2.5-mile walk begins at 7:30 a.m. Thursday at the Church of the Ascension, 311 Washington St. and ends at the shelter.

“Thanksgiving morning is quiet and usually a little nippy,” Linda says. “It’s nice to connect with your little group and talk and walk.

“There’s something sacred about the Capitol on Thanksgiving morning. It’s good to be in a country that’s free. You end up at the shelter and the participants have breakfast prepared by men who are street people. Thanksgiving morning we are all one.”

Linda says sometimes when she tells people she works at the soup kitchen, “they think I just do soup.”

She says church groups come in and cook every day, “and they’re wonderful.

“They’ll see a man needing a coat or something else and they’ll help him. If somebody needs a job, clothes, shoes, food, medicine, transportation to the hospital or doctor, or money to get their child a toy for Christmas, it’s a great joy to help them.

“We’re blessed to have all these social service agencies in town that can back up everybody else. We try to find people what they need.

“We’re here to be little angels, I guess, to make life a little easier for someone who’s having a difficult time.”

“Frankfort Faces” is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city’s most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be found by clicking the TV icon attached to the story online at state-journal.com.