Elana Scherr: Meals on Wheels Is Only One Way to Use Your Car for Good

From the March/April 2025 issue of Car and Driver.”Meals on wheels!” Mark Luevano sang into the screen door of a cute bungalow in Culver City, California. “Oh hi, Mark,” an elderly woman said as she gently nudged an equally elderly poodle out of the way to make room for us to set down a fragrant bag of fresh dill and greens on her foyer table. “How are your kids?”The kids were well, and after reporting such, we climbed back into Luevano’s Ford Mustang Mach-E and checked the address for our next stop. Luevano has been volunteering with Culver Palms Meals on Wheels (CPMOW) for several years, and he was happy to let me ride along for his Friday drop-offs. It didn’t take long—we covered his route of about 10 deliveries in just over an hour, even with conversations about kids at one home and about fishing at another. “It’s not just feeding people,” he says. “It’s about checking in on them, making sure they feel cared about.” Frank Calleja|Getty ImagesSome bigger Meals on Wheels programs use official vans for deliveries, but it all started with volunteers loading up their personal vehicles.CPMOW has been feeding its neighbors in West L.A. since 1974. It’s just one of thousands of independent programs under the Meals on Wheels America umbrella providing food to homebound or disabled older people at low or even no cost. Some bigger programs use official vans for deliveries, but it all started with volunteers loading up their personal vehicles. Daryl Twerdahl made her first delivery with the St. Vincent Meals on Wheels program in L.A. in 1989, not that she needed to tell me the date once she described the vehicles used: “the kind of funny-looking, sleek station wagons that were right after the woodies and just before everybody got into SUVs.” Elana Scherr|Car and DriverTwerdahl and her friends would fill their Ford Taurus wagons with casseroles and soups and make sure every senior in the community had been fed and checked in on. “It was so personal, to use your own car,” she said, “but even if you don’t have a station wagon, I would encourage you to go to volunteer.”Elana Scherr|Car and DriverBringing Rescue Dogs to Their New Home I met Twerdahl and Luevano a few days after volunteering for an entirely different sort of motorized mitzvah. I’d spent the previous week helping transport rescue dogs from a crowded shelter in the Midwest to new homes in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a common problem for an animal rescue in one place to have, say, too many retrievers, while in another state, there’s not a Lab to be found for adoption. The solution: bring the dogs where the homes are. As part of Operation Frodo 2024, I joined a caravan of 20 other dog lovers to transport 23 beagles from Iowa to Oregon. More about DogsThis was the third year that the group had moved dogs across the U.S., and we worked with military precision. Well, as much precision as can be expected with two dozen pups doing maypole dances around any human foolish enough to stand still. Shout-out to the night clerk at the pet-friendly Boise Airport La Quinta Inn, who somehow managed to find and catch an escaped cat for one guest while also arranging for maintenance to rescue one of our beagles, who had locked herself in a bathroom. Somehow, no beagles were lost. All learned some leash skills and developed a taste for new-car luxury after riding in one of six vehicles loaned by Ford, Genesis, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Subaru for the mission. But, to paraphrase Twerdahl, you don’t need a fancy SUV to make a difference. The important part was that we helped bring the dogs to loving new families—who hopefully have a contact for a good locksmith. Operation Frodo accepts volunteers and donations, as do local shelters, in case you’re not up for a cross-country trek with a hound singing the song of its people in the back seat.
A Rally with No Set Finish LineIf you like the idea of charitable vehicular acts but want to do it off-road, look into the Gambler 500, a silly organization of hooptie shenanigans with the very serious goal of trail cleanup. It’s a rally with no set finish line, other than a truck bed full of trash and the warm glow of doing right. (The next one is June 27–29.) If you like that idea but work alone, download the Sons of Smokey app, a geocaching guide to dump sites that allows users to mark areas in need of cleanup or hunt down abandoned boats and RVs to haul off for karma points and a better outdoors experience for all of us. Volunteer drivers can improve the world around them in many ways, whether they’re taking veterans to medical appointments or delivering toy donations. The greatest value of a car is the freedom to go wherever you want. Why not make that somewhere you’re needed?Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story “A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2.”  In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story “In Washington, D.C.’s Secret Carpool Cabal, It’s a Daily Slug Fest” was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
 
Source: caranddriver.com