Gifford activist J. Ralph Lundy dead at age 90

GIFFORD — Some called him the “Gifford spokesman,” and remembered how. J. Ralph Lundy helped establish Our Father’s Table Soup Kitchen, helped get the Gifford Community Center built and helped bring clean water to his community.
The 90-year-old Gifford activist died Friday, said his son, Jay Lundy, of St. Lucie County. Funeral Services are pending.

About 13 years ago, John May walked into the soup kitchen needing a place to perform community service hours just as much as he needed a hot meal.
“When you want to start them?” said J. Ralph Lundy, then the soup kitchen’s director.

“Mr. Lundy was the type of person who didn’t ask you what you did to get those hours,” said May, who now helps manage the soup kitchen and is president of Feed the Lambs Enrichment Program, a summer youth program. “He loved people — good and bad. But what he loved most about the bad people is that they could become good.”

Lundy, who won the 2007 Jefferson Award, a national award that recognizes individual public service contributions, spent about 30 years as the president of Gifford Progressive Civic League, where he pushed county officials to install traffic lights to make the areas safer, establish a voting precinct to bolster community pride and bring clean water to Gifford to improve residents’ health.
“The water was rusty and dirty and people were getting sick from it,” said Victor Hart Sr., former president of Indian River County chapter of the NAACP. “So, he got a gallon jug and filled it with water and carried it to the County Commission for them to drink.”

Lundy came to Indian River County in the 1950s as a reporter covering Dodgers baseball legend Jackie Robinson for the Jacksonville Journal, Jay Lundy said. Later, he was the long time production manager at the Press Journal and wrote a column about the community for the paper.

In 1963, Lundy started a community radio show “Gospel Caravan,” currently one of the longest-running gospel music programs in the state, and later created the Indian River Float Committee, where annual teen pageant winners could participate in a parade in Miami, Jay Lundy said.
He also created a program “Give them their flowers,” as a way to honor lesser-known community leaders before they died, said former County Commissioner Alma Lee Loy.

“Ralph was a visionary,” she said. “He was always working on something for the Gifford community and residents of Indian River County.”
County Commissioner Gary Wheeler said, “Mr. Lundy was a man of great respect and integrity. You always knew you were in the presence of a gentleman.”

Lundy, who friends said was never one to sit still for long, help found the soup kitchen in 1988 to provide meals to the most needy.
“Daddy believed that when a good deed was done it was done from the heart,” said daughter Chiquita Lundy of Palm Beach County.