It's 8:15 a.m. at the St. Vincent de Paul dining facility on a gritty, pothole-laced Third Street in Eureka.

Forty or so homeless people cluster. Some congregate beside a battered Ford truck of ancient vintage. There's plenty of profanity and the smell of marijuana.

A bright blue catering truck with "Betty's Blue Angel" on the cab doors pulls into the driveway next to the dining hall.

Joints and cigarettes are snuffed. An orderly line forms.

A diminutive woman in glasses and a yellow sweat shirt, white T-shirt, black gym slacks and tennis shoes opens the truck's side panel, puts a box of bananas on a nearby bench and begins pouring coffee from a brown, 5-gallon dispenser.

"How are you doing, Betty?" one of the homeless asks as he receives a cup of coffee.

"Good. You want a muffin? Banana?"

Alone, she doles out coffee, muffins and bananas. A careworn woman with palsy steadies her cup with two hands. A tall African American man asks for seconds. Seconds of what, Betty asks.

"Everything. I'm starving." A young man with a cloud of frizzed hair takes his breakfast and says: "Betty, you're an angel."

This is Betty Chinn's 11th and final stop of the morning. She has been delivering breakfast to nearly 400 homeless people since 5 a.m. Some live in bushes, in Army surplus tents, under trestles and bridges.

In the evening, she will travel the same 24-mile circuit to serve dinner, returning home after 10 p.m. and waking at 2 a.m. to begin brewing coffee for her morning run.

"It has a lot to do with when I was a little kid. I was very alert at night," she says obliquely of why her childhood in China allows her to cope with so little sleep.

She has been mother to this shifting family of the homeless for 23 years. She can count on two hands the days she hasn't made her rounds. It's how she expresses gratitude.

There is no monthly or annual budget. No government support. Mostly, its just Chinn, aided by the generosity she inspires in others.

"I do what I can. People help me a lot." A local church lets her use its kitchen. Previously, she prepared meals in her own.

Four years ago, when the local health department said she couldn't deliver food from her family van, she shared her plight with some friends. Soon after, the $40,000 catering truck appeared. She still doesn't know who her benefactors are.

One day, a $3,000 check arrived from someone in Germany.

Chinn's work led a man to make his first charitable contribution. With tears in his eyes, he gave her the use of a vacant house to store the mountains of rice, beans, diapers, presents, socks and clothing – 24 kitchen trash bags of clothes daily – that she dispenses. Her home had been the previous storage area.

Apartment owners let her use some units so she can offer showers.

"Nobody can turn Betty Chinn down," said Dr. John Omey, her dentist, who supports her financially and is doing free dental work for Jesse, a foreboding homeless man under Chinn's care.

Jesse wept when he sat down in Omey's chair – other dentists had turned him away for 15 years.

"I can vouch for her saintliness, her selflessness," Omey said. "She's a modern day Mother Teresa."

Chinn apologizes for being a few minutes late to the dining facility. Two of the 17 children she cares for didn't want to attend school. It took time to convince them otherwise.

The line has gotten its coffee and disperses to eat breakfast.

Chinn grew up in the south of China. Her family – a dentist father, a physician mother – were persecuted during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which, ostensibly, sought to stamp out lingering "bourgeois" elements in Chinese culture.

Red Guards killed Chinn's brother. She was put into the street, homeless and alone, at age 7. For four years she was tormented, eating out of the town dump, forced to wear a sign around her neck strung with chicken wire that said "Child of the Devil." Traumatized, she became mute.

She walked 1,600 miles to freedom in Hong Kong. A relative in San Francisco brought her to California, where she married Leung Chinn, a physics professor at Humboldt State University. Now retired, Leung assists his wife.