When Dick Mastbrook set up the first Loaves & Fishes Centers office in a storage room underneath the basement stairs at Grace Episcopal Church in 1971, he had no idea that the agency would one day serve more than 1.4 million meals annually. The agency had begun with volunteer labor and donated food early in 1970 and then Dick, along with Roger Olson from Metropolitan Family Services, wrote a start-up grant for $40,000. When the funding came through in the spring of 1971, Dick was hired as the first executive director.

Loaves & Fishes Centers was named after a white paper written by Jack Osofsky, executive secretary of the National Council of Aging, called "Operation Loaves and Fishes". The premise behind the paper was that churches and synagogues would open their doors to neighborhood seniors in need of adequate meals and volunteers would deliver meals to those who could not get to the churches. And that's exactly what happened, starting with the first site at the Lincoln Street Methodist Church.

"When we started, food was cooked on site at every center," Dick said. "We had one employee who went to local grocers and produce markets to get donations. Our menus were developed based on what we managed to come up with that day, supplemented with purchased food to ensure a nutritionally balanced meal. When we got to six centers, we realized we needed to centralize production. It was just too hard to scavenge for that much food every day, control the quality of the meals and meat the Health Department requirements."

Dick tells the story of a tall gentleman who walked into his tiny office one day and announced that he wanted to do something to help the burgeoning agency. "I had a proposal in my typewriter for a $40,000 grant so we could open a central kitchen," he said, "He asked to see a copy of the grant and then said he wanted to go home and discuss it with his wife. I was hoping he would contribute $1,000. The next day he returned with a check for the entire $40,000!" The gentleman as Fred Macdonald and his wife was Maybelle Clark Macdonald. That first gift was the beginning of a funding relationship that continued until the death of Mrs. Macdonald in 2009.

With funding from the Macdonalds, Dick and his team opened the first Central Kitchen on NE 42nd and Sandy Boulevard in 1975. With help from a local catering agency, Dick and Loaves & Fishes Centers founders Jean Wade and Cay Krieger scavenged equipment from food service "junk yards" to outfit the kitchen.

It wasn't long until they outgrew that space and the agency moved into the refurbished Safeway on SE 52nd and Woodstock in 1979, again with help from the Macdonalds. That remained the home of Loaves & Fishes Centers until 2003 when the building of the new Resource Center and Central Kitchen was completed.

"In those early days, we really struggled with how diversified in services we wanted to be when opening centers," Dick said. "Instead of running multi-service senior centers, we stayed focused and concentrated on nutrition and getting food to as many seniors as possible. I wanted Loaves & Fishes Centers to be a byword in every household. I'm so pleased that the mission and vision of the agency has remained constant throughout the years."