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kyoms.com 30 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 At exactly 10:17 on a cool June morning, a school bus outfitted with colorful pictures of oversized produce turns into a gravel parking lot. It exhales to a stop. Mary Hull looks out the window. Just two minutes late and already about a dozen el- ementary-aged kids — some in shorts, others in loose pajama pants — who live in nearby mobile-home parks bounce in line. All the faces look familiar, each one a regular at the Bus Stop Cafe. Special Delivery By Anne Marshall Illustration by Kendall Regan The Bus Stop Cafe brings food to disadvantaged kids in their neighborhoods. SHIFT For the past three years, Hull has spent much of her summer aboard the Bus Stop Cafe, a mobile food program run by Jefferson County Public Schools. (Hull works as the cafeteria manager at the Academy @ Shawnee during the school year and has worked in school food services for three decades.) At 10:19, the line grows to 17 kids, then quickly to 22. Cars pull into the lot, crunching gravel, and more kids pile into the single-file line. Hull, a feisty, barely five-foot-tall woman with a giant smile, greets each child on the bus. She and the bus driver pass out plastic sealed containers that hold a turkey and cheese sandwich, fruit, yogurt and chocolate milk. "You're welcome, baby," Hull says with a wink as she lifts a meal from a giant silver cooler. JCPS has 127 summer feeding sites, many in schools or churches or community centers. But the Bus Stop Cafe targets sites that are often rural, areas of town where walking to a summer feeding site might be too difficult. The Okolona mobile-home park that Hull's bus visits at 10:15 every weekday morning sits on a busy road with no side- walks. Across an overgrown field, the only visible business is the mammoth UPS hub. The Bus Stop Cafe runs from May 30 to Aug. 4. Two buses and four refrigerated trucks make the same 19 stops Monday through Friday. Hull starts her day at 9:30. She sanitizes purple tables and stools that help give the former school bus the look and feel of a cafeteria. She quickly stocks the cooler with lunches. But those coolers — the size of deep freezers — could never hold the hundreds of lunches Hull serves at her five designated stops, so a refrigerated truck packed with extra meals follows behind. "There's a great need," Hull says quietly. (According to the most recent census data, near- ly one in four children lives in poverty in Jefferson County.) Anyone under 18 can eat at the Bus Stop Cafe, no ques- tions asked. On this morning, a young mother carries a chunky infant while clutch- ing the hand of a pigtailed, wobbly-legged toddler. Hull passes the mother a special brown-bag lunch for the baby Dental Implants | Wisdom Teeth | Dental Extractions Face & Jaw Surgery | Office Based General Anesthesia From left to right: Dr. Nate Walters, Dr. Will Allen, Dr. Chris Noonan, Dr. Geoff Mills, and Dr. Jamie Warren 2800 Cannons Lane | (502) 454-4885 Jewish Outpatient Care Building | 225 Abraham Flexner Way, Suite 302 | (502) 587-7874 Across from the Summit | 9488 Brownsboro Road | (502) 326-0606 Bullitt County | 138 Eastbrooke Court, Suite 100 | (502) 957-1250 Kentuckiana Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery Associates, PSC kyoms.com