Rubin: Secret Santas spread joy — and $100 bills — on annual visit to Metro Detroit

The big man pushing a shopping cart toward the Save A Lot store cried.

The woman at Gregory Park chasing two little kids around the playscape cried, too.

The special ed teacher at Hoover Elementary in Lincoln Park, Christina Forth? She cried the hardest Thursday when one of Santa's self-anointed elves put three crackling-crisp $100 bills in her hand, alerted by the local Goodfellows that she has been spending her own money to buy supplies to make her classroom more welcoming for easily unsettled children.

"I cry ugly," Forth warned, and the man who calls himself Elf 32-B smiled, because this was his happiest day of the year.

"Would another $100 make it stop?" he asked — and what do you know, it did.

Every December starting in 2008, an anonymous husband and wife from parts unknown have slapped on fuzzy red caps and spent a day in Lincoln Park, handing out money. The Secret Santas gladdened slightly more than $13,000 worth of hearts this time around, bringing their total across 16 years to $220,000 of their own cash.

They don't want applause. They don't want credit. Their kids don't even know they're in Michigan, let alone what they're doing here.

They just want to dispense holiday cheer, mostly $100 at a time, in a city where one of them once lived.

Their glad tidings caravan Thursday had Elf 32-B at the wheel of Radio Active, the police department's rumbling white 1982 Plymouth Gran Fury, followed by three black official SUVs and a silver minivan. Elf 32-A, who also goes by Mrs. Claus, rode in one of the cop cars.

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They were rolling single file when Elf 32-B spotted Brian Major near the Save A Lot, jammed on the brakes and threw open his door.

Major has the shoulders of a Kodiak bear and the burden of having just lost his mother. It was the unexpected kindness more than the $100 that had him weeping.

At the playground, it was both. Madison Brown, 23, hiding despair as best she could from her 3- and 2-year-old kids, said she has been looking for work for four months, and her truck driver partner has been cut to part-time.

"Everybody says they're hiring, but nobody answers back," she said. "We just almost lost our house."

A $100 blessing will likely go toward presents for Jevon Jr. and Kaizen, she said, a much better outcome than she expected when Jevon alerted her to the police cars.

"I was kind of scared at first," she conceded. "It's not a common thing to deal with."

Except on Secret Santa day.

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From K.C., not the North Pole

The first rule of Secret Santa is that you don’t talk about Secret Santa. Elf 32-B and Mrs. Claus try to be a blank, festive canvas.

He is, however, a giant of an elf, probably 6-foot-8 to the white tassel on his Santa hat, with an upper body like a Yield sign. He made a fortune in gourmet dental floss, lost it in a Belorussian uranium mine, and made it back in xylophones.

She was dealing baccarat in Las Vegas when he was there letting off steam. She walked out with him in the middle of a shift and never looked back.

Or at least, you’re free to believe that. It could also be that they are average-size people from working-class backgrounds, that they consider themselves comfortable but not wealthy, and they have the sorts of friendly faces that would invite hellos even if they weren't greeting strangers with $100 bills.

They trace their gifting sprees to a gentleman from Kansas City, Missouri, named Larry Stewart. He started handing out cash some four decades ago, and managed to remain unknown until he died in 2007.

Stewart inspired a loose network of maybe 30 people around the country who do the same thing, Mrs. Claus said. One of them was NFL Hall of Famer Dick Butkus, who spent enough time on television that he probably stretched anonymity to its breaking point.

Butkus died in October, and in tribute, Elf 32-B had started his day in Police Chief Scott Lavis’ office stamping Butkus’ name in red on some of the $100 bills. All of them were stamped “Secret Santa,” and they were dispensed with one instruction:

Do something nice for somebody else.

In the spirit of the day

The traditional stops on the goodwill tour include the Salvation Army store, a laundromat and the White Castle on Fort Street, where four employees cashed in but the dining room was uncharacteristically empty.

The Secret Santas also handed $100 to a woman who was waiting for a tow truck because she’d locked her keys in the car, and $1,500 or so to participants at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous — AAA, then AA.

At the meeting they inadvertently interrupted, a gentleman named Angelo immediately pushed his money to the man on his right. “He’s more in need than I am,” Angelo explained.

A woman at the thrift shop also directed her bill toward someone else, for the same reason. In keeping with the spirit of the day, she insisted on doing it anonymously.

In front of the Fort Street Wendy's, Albert Carter said he hadn't seen any sort of windfall in quite a while.

Carter, 64, was carrying a plastic bag with two bologna sandwiches from a church kitchen. They were going to tide him over until his appointment at the V.A. hospital Friday.

"I was just saying to my friend I need bus fare to get to Detroit tomorrow," he said. "It's a miracle."

It's a pleasure, said Deputy Police Chief Patrick Culter, 53.

He and his boss, Lavis, were among the department contingent in the elves' entourage.

"Usually, we deal with people at their worst," Culter said. "It's nice to see them when they don't need us."

Patrol officers on the day shift had all been assigned $100 before they left the station, with instructions from Lavis to pass the bill to someone deserving they encountered on their shift. That will resonate.

So does giving, the Secret Santas said.

Elf 32-B said he'll probably buy Mrs. Claus a golf outfit for Christmas. She might get him a shirt.

It's their day in Lincoln Park that feels like a present, he said, and they savor it all year long — random acts of kindness, drowning out the random acts of violence that make so much noise.

Rod Gawne, 59, was standing at a bus stop when the parade of vehicles pulled to the curb. He wore a long tan jacket and carried his possessions in a sack.

Elf 32-B gave him $200, and the police offered him a ride to the market he was bound for before the interruption made him miss his bus.

"Do you believe in Santa?" the elf asked.

"I do now," he said.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Secret Santas shower Lincoln Park with $13K from their own pockets