As the Thanksgiving holiday approached in 2020, Kaylee Williams's 70-year-old neighbor Chuck told her he would be spending the day alone because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So he asked if Kaylee would make him a pie.
“I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, I wonder how many Chucks are out there — people who just can't celebrate with their families,’” Kaylee said. “So I called up a bunch of friends, and I said, ‘What if we baked pies and we gave them to residents of Des Moines, and we created a little sign up page on the internet?’"
Pie requests rolled in quickly, and soon Kaylee found herself overwhelmed by the orders — she was drowning in dessert.
“I'm sitting in my living room, and we've got pies everywhere,” she said. “They were on the record player, on my dining room table, the kitchen was completely filled with pies that people had dropped off to be donated. And I'm sitting on my laptop computer, and I think I was in tears.”
Luckily, she had enlisted the help of her more pragmatic sister, Clair Williams-Vavra. The sisters started marking every pie that came through the door with pie tags, labeling it by flavor, the name of the recipient, their address and phone number.
After all their hard work, they delivered about 40 pies in the Des Moines area that year. When COVID cases winded down and vaccinations made it safe to gather again, they wondered if there would still be an appetite for the free pies. And now, in year six, Eat Free Pie Des Moines has become a tradition for the recipients, as well as the bakers and delivery drivers.
“Families who have made delivering the pies on Thanksgiving Day a tradition show up in their minivans,” Kaylee said. “The kids are in the back. We open up the hatch, we load 20 or 30 pies in there, and they go deliver them.”
The sisters plan the most efficient routes by matching up addresses. They then assign the routes holiday-themed names like ‘Harvest Route’ and ‘Pilgrim Route.’
For anyone considering donating a pie, Kaylee points out that baking an additional pie for a stranger can be a relatively small addition to the Thanksgiving prep list for those who are already in the kitchen.
Clair said the bakers who donate pies are heartened with this unique way to put care for their community, such as one 12-year-old baker who was beaming with pride when he donated pies.
“His smile, and his parents just were so excited about being a part of this, and you could tell it was something that meant a lot to him,” Clair said.
Pie recipients can request a cherry, pumpkin or apple pie — or they can choose a “wild card pie,” and be surprised with anything from pecan to French silk to key lime on Thanksgiving Day. There are no requirements to receive a free pie, besides living in Des Moines.
"We believe that everybody who wants a free pie or just wants to have pie on Thanksgiving Day ought to be able to have a pie on Thanksgiving Day,” Kaylee said. “That's the world I want to live in.”
The sisters enlist the help of local bakeries to help them fill any gaps between the requests for pies and the availability of volunteer bakers to fulfill their goal that every order is filled.
Kaylee said receiving messages from the pie recipients makes all the effort worth it. One of the families who received a pie last year said it was the one-year anniversary of the death of their father.
“And they just said, ‘What a treat to just get this free pie on our doorstep.’ And it's not just any pie, right?” Kaylee said. “It's baked by somebody in Des Moines. It's about community, and it's about somebody who you do not know, a perfect stranger, who cares.”
This year, Eat Free Pie DSM has already received 85 requests for pies, with 18 volunteer bakers registered to make 34 pies. They're taking requests through Nov. 25 and are still accepting volunteer donations.
To hear this conversation, listen to Talk of Iowa, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Samantha McIntosh produced this episode.
