Nearly five dozen of David Ottey’s friends and associates joined him Monday in the back room at The Swiss tavern in Tacoma. They shared more than a few glasses of beer, along with plenty of laughter and stories.

Ottey, 64, retired Wednesday after 22 years of helping to feed the hungry as executive director of the nonprofit Emergency Food Network of Tacoma/Pierce County.

“Some people say I haven’t worked a day in 22 years,” Ottey quipped.

Wrong, said the business people, pastors, politicians, union leaders and human services advocates who gathered at The Swiss.

“A lot of people go to bed with a full belly because of him,” said Rob Allen of Gig Harbor, a Pierce County economic analyst and bass player with Ottey in the band the Disclaimers. “He’s got a huge heart.”

Ottey is a man with a vision of the world and how it should run, said Tim Puryear, a property manager in Lakewood and a former board member of the food network.

“If we could get the world to listen to him it would be a better place,” Puryear said. “Everything David touches is about the people.”

When Ottey was hired Jan. 13, 1986, the six-year-old food-distribution program for local food banks was based in an abandoned annex at the old Larchmont school on East B Street in Tacoma.

It consisted of one employee, the employee’s pickup truck, a typewriter, a telephone and a 25-year-old forklift.

That first year the agency moved $407,000 worth of food to county food banks.

“This year we will move $14 million to $15 million worth of food,” Ottey said in a recent interview, his voice dropping to a whisper at the thought.

He sat at a small, round oak table in his sparsely furnished office in the network’s 200,000-square-foot warehouse on Puyallup Avenue in Lakewood. Inches away was his battered old desk, a thick sheet of plywood on top making it executive size.

Today the network – which serves 76 food banks – has 10 employees and five trucks, including an 18-wheel tractor-trailer.

“I thought I only needed a job,” he said. “It turned out this job was an incredible gift that was given me. This is a business here, but it’s very much a mission.”

The network is partners with the Grays Harbor-Pacific Counties Distribution Center and King County’s Northwest Harvest, which distributes food throughout Western Washington. The Thurston County Food Bank has a close connection, too.

Over the past two decades the network has evolved from the traditional model of collecting donated food and distributing it to creating food resources, Ottey said.

In addition to its warehouse, the network has an 8-acre farm that grows 160,000 pounds of fresh vegetables a year, a cannery partnership that has turned out more than 1 million cans of food since 1996, and a 300-tree orchard in Roy that last season produced 1,400 pounds of apples in its third year.

The result, Ottey said, is that “no person need go hungry in Pierce County.”

OTTEY HAS EVOLVED, TOO

The unfortunate meeting of a Mercury Marquis and a Volkswagen Beetle brought Ottey to the Emergency Food Network in 1985.

At the time, he was running a school for dropouts in downtown Tacoma with a state-subsidized, for-profit organization.

When the big Mercury hit the tiny Beetle, the impact shoved the VW’s trunk into the fire wall.

“I hit the steering wheel so hard with my jaw that I broke the steering wheel,” Ottey recalled.

His life became doctors and dentists and then unemployment.

Ottey heard about the executive director job at the food network from a friend who came to his Tacoma Hilltop house on Sundays to watch the Seattle Seahawks.

The deadline for applying was 5 p.m. that Sunday. Ottey skipped the second half of the football game and redid his résumé.

He slid it under the door at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, where Associated Ministries, which ran the network, was based.

The Rev. David Alger of Associated Ministries helped interview Ottey, who got the job.

Alger, who himself is retiring next spring after 28 years with Associated Ministries, said Ottey has brought the program light-years from where it started.

“It’s fair to say it’s the best food delivery system in the state,” Alger said. “He was able to generate $12 worth of food for every dollar donated. David has been the energy, and around him he has had the support of a great staff, as he would be the first to remind you.”

Ottey said that when he applied to lead the network he didn’t know what it was. He’d also never been to a food bank.

“Here I am this guy who’s been a teacher; I’ve been in bands; I’d been kind of drifting in my personal and public life,” he said. “All of a sudden I get this thing in my life. It grounds me. And I get to be in the catbird seat, watching like the ripples in a pool, all these things develop around it.”

BUSINESSMAN, EVANGELIST

Ottey said one thing he learned about himself is that he likes being a businessman and “making the deal.”

“It’s being able to see the way to get things done,” he explained. “I have no learned skills. I have innate skills. I don’t take credit for them, but they are clearly there.”

An illustration: A voice mail he got one morning from a woman in upper New York state led to the network picking up nearly 500,000 pounds of frozen potato products stored in Eastern Washington. The goods were shared with Northwest Harvest.

“Within 48 hours we took control of the product and moved it,” Ottey said, chuckling. “These people had been trying for six months to get rid of it.”

He also has a passion for the work.

“What I’m good at is putting me in front of a group of people and let them decide whether they want to give money,” Ottey said. “When I get into this mode my passion is so strong they can’t stand up to me.

“Don’t tell me everybody can’t be fed. That’s absurd. Don’t tell me everyone can’t have shelter over their heads at night. That’s absurd.”

Margy McGroarty, retired president of The Greater Tacoma Community Foundation and network board member, likes Ottey’s fighting spirit.

“He can be prickly when it’s called for because he is a fighter,” she said. “He represents those people who use food banks and those who volunteer at those food banks.”

RETIRE? NOT REALLY

Ottey said he doesn’t know what he will do next but it will be something.

“I’m not going to sit around in my backyard (in Yelm) in my bathrobe, drinking beer at 10 a.m.,” he said.

Besides, he added, his wife, Ellie, who works for the Pierce County Housing Authority, wouldn’t let him.

The 13th annual Ottey Fest, the annual potluck that draws more than 100 friends to his home, will happen. The beer will flow. And the Disclaimers will play, with Ottey on guitar and, with his deep, country-western voice, handling vocals.

He’ll be available to help Liz Dunbar, retired deputy director of the state Department of Social and Health Services, who’s been hired as interim director of the food network while the board searches for Ottey’s replacement.

Making the deal still beckons.

“I’ve got 22 years watching a system develop, and there are ways the system can be better,” Ottey said.

He believes the network’s role is to distribute food but also to be a role model for other regions because there’s nothing like the Emergency Food Network elsewhere in the country.

That’s a message he’d like to keep preaching.

Mike Archbold: 253-597-8692

David Ottey

Age: 64

Residence: Yelm

Wife: Ellie

Children: Seven children, six grandchildren

Education: Pacific University, Forest Grove, Ore., 1962-64; University of Redlands, Redlands, Calif., 1964-67, bachelor of arts degree in English literature; University of Redlands, graduate school, standard elementary and secondary credentials, 1967-68

Work: Executive director, Emergency Food Network of Tacoma/Pierce County, 1986-2008; director, Educational Clinics Inc., Tacoma, 1984-85; teacher/administrator, Fife School District, 1979-84; founder/lead teacher, Prospect School, Tacoma, 1975-79; teacher, Northshore School District, Bothell, 1971-75; teacher, Rialto School District, Rialto, Calif., 1969-1971

Organizations: Past chairman of Washington State Food Coalition Board of Directors; board member of Pierce County American Leadership Forum Board of Directors and vice chairman of Fred Oldfield Western Heritage Art Center board of directors in Puyallup; member of Tacoma Rotary and Lakewood Rotary clubs and Washington State DSHS Economic Services Advisory Committee

Honors: Washington State Coalition for the Homeless named him Director of the Year in 2003; received 2000 Pierce County Community Services Award and Municipal League of Tacoma/Pierce County Distinguished Citizen Award.