Maurice Chase, priest and patron saint of L.A.’s skid row, dies at 92

Nearly every Sunday morning, Thanksgiving and Christmas for almost three decades, the man called Father Dollar Bill, Father Dollar or just D.B. — for Dollar Bill — showed up on a Los Angeles skid row sidewalk. He was a white-haired man in a red sweater and a Notre Dame cap, his pockets jammed with crisp, green bills, which he handed out until the money was gone.

Father Maurice Chase didn’t mind what name the destitute men, penniless mothers, people in wheelchairs, drug addicts and ex-cons called him. He didn’t care how they planned to spend the money. Nor was he bothered by the criticism that other skid row service providers sometimes voiced: that he was a self-promoting attention hound whose hit-and-run assistance had little, if any, enduring effects on the desperate people who gathered for his handouts, blessings and hugs.

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“I’m out here to tell people I love them and God loves them,” he told the Los Angeles Times several years ago. “I met Mother Teresa in Mexico City once, and she told me to touch the poor. Do you hear that? Touch the poor.”

Father Chase died Nov. 20, four days before Thanksgiving, at his Los Angeles home. He was 92 and had cancer, said his nephew Robert Boyd.

In an era of multimillion-dollar agencies for the homeless, Father Chase was an anomaly.

“Maury Chase just planted his feet right on the sidewalk, the last place on Earth where the poorest of the poor can live,” said Alice Callaghan, founder of the skid row advocacy center Las Familias del Pueblo. “He didn’t attempt to single out the undeserving poor from the deserving poor; I’m sure he handed money out to thieves. But it wasn’t the dollar that mattered. It was the gift of human love.”

Boyd said he did not know how much money his uncle had distributed since the mid-1980s, when he began soliciting donations from wealthy benefactors such as Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Autry, Merv Griffin and Vin Scully. The amount reached hundreds of thousands of dollars. Each Sunday, Father Chase usually handed out $2,000 to $2,500. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, he doled out as much as $15,000.

He began his direct charity when he was a fundraising assistant to the president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His job was to loosen the purse strings of potential donors to the Catholic university.

Through his friendship with actress Irene Dunne, he hit the Los Angeles party circuit and became known as “the society priest,” a description that was not entirely complimentary. He took press kits about his fundraising to parties and was frequently mentioned in society columns.

To make sure his accomplishments were duly recorded, he sent news clippings and photographs of himself to the obituary editor of the Los Angeles Times to help the newspaper prepare its write-up.

Father Chase came up with his skid row charity after contemplating the instructions of Loyola Marymount’s president, Father Donald P. Merrifield, who hired him in 1985. Merrifield told him: “I’m sending you out among the rich and famous. You better have a balance in your life.”