HOLLYWOOD — The line started forming a little before eight, a full hour ahead of the doors, and Yolanda Brister, 58, watching it lengthen from the church steps with a cup of coffee she never got around to finishing, decided to take that as a compliment.
“People line up early for something they trust,” she said. “Or for something they think will run out. I’m choosing the first one.”
By nine on Saturday the line ran well down Franklin, and by two in the afternoon roughly 1,100 of the 1,200 backpacks her supply drive spent two weeks filling had gone out the basement door — one bag per child present, no form, no registration, no questions. The remainder goes to the six school offices this coming week, her standing practice for families who could not come, and classes resume across the district in the days after that.
Distribution day is the plain end of an elaborate machine. Every bag was filled against a laminated card for its grade at its school, checked by a second person, zipped, and shelved by school. On Saturday a parent states a school and a grade, a volunteer pulls the bag, and the whole transaction is over before the child has decided which strap to carry it by. Efraín Cordero, who has run the line for six years, kept it moving with the settled authority of a man who manages lines for a living.
“A backpack line is easier than a fruit line,” Mr. Cordero said. “Nobody squeezes the backpacks.” His next line he will stand in himself: the county inspection of his Selma Avenue fruit cart, under the city’s new vending rules, is on the 28th. “One line at a time,” he said, and went back to his.
The packing evenings, which a week ago looked like the drive’s soft spot, were not. Ms. Brister hoped for 40 volunteers a night and got 47 on Wednesday and 53 on Thursday — enough that the retired teachers opened a second checking table, and the last bag was zipped before ten on Thursday.
The scissors, the shortage that defined this drive for seventeen years until this newspaper printed the words “blunt-tip scissors” two weeks ago and Hollywood answered with 2,380 pairs, were an afterthought at last. The roughly 1,500 surplus pairs sit boxed behind the choir robes, enough to carry the drive through 2028. The man who double-parked on Franklin and left a case of sixty has still not been identified, though several people in Saturday’s line asked after him.
The surplus earned its shelf space before lunch. A mother mentioned, almost in passing, that her son — entering second grade — is left-handed, and a volunteer went behind the choir robes and came back with a left-handed pair, which the drive now stocks. That is a sentence nobody in this basement could have said in any previous August.
The scientific calculators, the expensive middle-school item that stood about 40 short as of last week, closed out in two stages. Cash donations after this newspaper’s last story covered 28 of them. The final twelve arrived Friday afternoon, when Guadalupe Serrano, who owns a stationery and school-supply shop off Highland, sold the drive her last twelve at cost — the gap shut the day before distribution.
Among Saturday’s early arrivals was a girl Ms. Brister recognized at once. Last August, as an incoming sixth-grader, she was handed a fifth-grade bag and a promise, and Ms. Brister spent that evening driving a calculator to an apartment on Kingsley. This year the girl stated her school and her grade — seventh now — and the right bag came off the shelf on the first pull. She unzipped it on the table and checked.
“Smart,” Ms. Brister said. “I’d have checked too.”
For the record, and for the third consecutive story, at Ms. Brister’s request: donations of pencils remain unnecessary.
By late afternoon the basement was empty in a way it has not been since June — bare shelves, folded tables, the laminated cards squared up and rubber-banded for next year. Ms. Brister sat down on a folding chair for what she said was the first time all day and looked at the empty shelves the way other people look at full ones.
“Seventeen years I worried about scissors,” she said. “Now I’m set until 2028, and I have a whole year to find something new to worry about. Next year already started. It started this morning.”