Free meal honors a generous, departed spirit

RALEIGH -- When people talk about LeRoy Jernigan, they recall how he always sang loudest in church, how he made the best Jesus in the Christmas play and how he always tried to get a laugh by quacking like the Aflac insurance duck.

He was a big, boisterous father of two, just 40 years old when a co-worker found him dead in the Circus Family Restaurant - shot in the back of the head while cleaning the exhaust system, a random victim of a killer now locked up for life.

After five years, the Thanksgiving dinner started in Jernigan's memory has grown into one of the largest in Raleigh - 1,000 plates this year if the city can supply enough empty stomachs.

Circus owner Glenn Mitchell plans to cook more than two dozen 20-pound turkeys, inviting the city to a free dinner, complete with sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and green beans.

Meals that don't get eaten inside Circus, he'll deliver to hospital waiting rooms, bus stations and the homes of lonely shut-ins.

"I wanted to turn something bad into something good," Mitchell said, recalling the day he heard of Jernigan's death. "This guy would do anything for anybody. He had homeless people living in his attic, and he didn't have much money himself."

Success of the Circus dinner can be measured in the variety of its diners.

Many who take turkey at 1600 Wake Forest Road are homeless, or one notch removed from homeless, bunking a few nights a week in one of the cheap hotels along Capital Boulevard.

But last year, the Circus handed a hot plate to a Marine waiting alone in the Greyhound station, riding back to Camp Lejeune.

"He said it was the only meal he'd eaten all day," said Adrian Dixon, pastor of Northside Community Church in Knightdale, whose members both staff and help fund the dinner.

Another time, a man drove up in a Mercedes, parked and walked up to the door looking bewildered. All he wanted was a hot dog - a 99-cent special on Thursdays.

But as he sat down with the scruffier diners, he let everyone know that his wife had recently died and that he was spending his first Thanksgiving alone, without her.

He ended up staying at the Circus for several hours.

Holiday greeting

It's not a fancy place. Mondays are BLT days, 99 cents apiece. The Circus offers drive-thru service. It sits across the street from This Just In Consignments and Econo Auto Painting.

But on Thanksgiving, volunteers greet you at the door and show you to your seat. Waiters, some of them just 10 years old, bring your plate.

At its peak, the dinner sees 40 or 50 volunteers in the kitchen, serving trays and delivering plates to the needy nearby. The South Raleigh Civitan Club came by to peel 300 pounds of sweet potatoes.

Dixon is proud that much of his congregation has made serving Thanksgiving dinner their holiday tradition.

It's pleasant to think of Jernigan mingling with the Thanksgiving crowd, maybe handing out each plate with a jovial "Aflac!"

He was a contract worker, hired to clean that exhaust system twice a year. The odds of him being there on the night a serial killer found him in the kitchen and shot him at close range are terribly long.

Still, Mitchell likes to think Jernigan would be happy with the turnout, seeing strangers sit together, glad for each other's company.