There is an old folk saying that goes, “Old John would half-starve were there no woman to prepare his meals; old Nellie would starve if she had no one to share her cooking.” Until the middle of the twentieth century many elderly people, living alone and isolated from families and friends, died prematurely from hunger and malnutrition. The situation changed for the better for some elderly people in January 1954, when a group of volunteers at the Lighthouse, a settlement house in the Kensington area of Philadelphia, started to deliver noontime meals, five days a week, to elderly, isolated shut-ins. They modeled their program after a civil-defense program started by the Women’s Voluntary Services in Great Britain to feed the aged during the blitz. As word about Philadelphia’s so-called meals-on-wheels spread, communities across the country began their own volunteer programs. More than three hundred of them started over the next twenty years.
