“He was just a glorious man,’’ said Beverly Taylor, 59, who lived on Skid Row for two decades. “He was just always there.’’
Beginning in the 1980s, Father Chase, a Roman Catholic, gave out untold numbers of bills, around $3,000 each week. Almost all of them were ones, although to some he would offer larger notes, five-dollar bills or occasionally even hundreds, especially on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Then the total he handed out could rise to $15,000.
Over a year, Father Chase would raise and distribute more than $100,000, Boyd said, much of it donated by people in the entertainment world like Bob and Dolores Hope and Bob Newhart, whom he met decades earlier when he worked at ministries and Catholic schools around Southern California.
Some aid workers criticized Father Chase’s brand of charity, complaining that his gifts had little long-term impact on the lives of recipients.
“I think his desire to bring people love was true, and can certainly be modeled by the rest of us,’’ said the Rev. Andy Bales, chief executive of Union Rescue Mission. “But the last thing people on the street need is cash. A lot of people took that money and spent it in an unhealthy way.’’
Father Chase acknowledged that in a neighborhood where drug abuse and untreated mental illness were common, a single dollar would not get someone off the street. But the money, he said, was not the point.
“I’m trying to give them hope, to give them a sense of dignity,’’ he told The New York Times in 2002.
Maurice Gordon Chase was born in Dinuba, Calif. He studied at St. Paul’s College in Washington and was ordained in 1953 by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, an early Catholic television evangelist.
Father Chase spent the early years of his career at ministries around Southern California before serving as a fund-raising assistant to the president of Loyola Marymount University, the Rev. Donald P. Merrifield.
It was Merrifield who suggested to Father Chase that he also work with the poor for his own spiritual health.
Father Chase continued to make his weekly trip to Skid Row until the last months of his life. “I love it,’’ he said. “God has given me the happiest part of my life at the end.’’
On Wednesday, at a Thanksgiving dinner on Skid Row put on by the Los Angeles Mission, word that Father Dollar Bill had died began to spread.
Wendell Harrison, 54, called out to diners, “Dollar Man is dead.’’
