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In heaven, Ellen Katchur is probably smiling.

Twenty years ago, her husband Julius "Joe" Katchur initially scoffed at her idea. It wasn't that he didn't care; but, after retiring from the phone company in Queens and moving to Middleburgh, he wanted to enjoy his new life.

Mrs. Katchur, however, was shaken after watching a television program about Indian reservations in western U.S. states where residents felt the bite of winter in poorly-insulated shacks and there was no running water. American Indian adults drank to numb the pain, she learned; teenagers hanged themselves.

"She said, 'You know, we've got to help them,'" Mr. Katchur told The Evangelist.

He couldn't deny her request, so the couple began soliciting churches, businesses and organizations for blankets, toys, toothpaste, food, basketballs, wheelchairs and crutches.

They packed the items in a rented truck and drove thousands of miles to the reservations, starting what became at least a biannual pilgrimage with stops in the Dakotas, Montana and New Mexico. Mr. Katchur's retirement money covered gas purchases.

Despite losing Mrs. Katchur to Alzheimer's disease four years ago, Mr. Katchur still makes the trips, which cost about $1,800 each. He listens to the music of the Daughters of Mercy, Willie Nelson and Luciano Pavarotti as the plains roll by. He stays a few days at each reservation, in hotels and sometimes in his truck.

Once, the truck broke down after another driver ran him off the road. Minnesota Knights of Columbus sheltered him. But setbacks don't deter Mr. Katchur; at 83, the journeys are part of who he is.

"He has to make the trip," said Ricardo Lucchetti, a fellow K of C member in the Albany Diocese. "He has a lot of friends out there."

Those friends include Viola Loafer, parish coordinator at Our Lady of Sorrows in Kyle, S.D., a town with one grocery store and a high unemployment rate. She told The Evangelist that without Mr. Katchur's donations - from electric skillets to comforters - families would simply "go without."

At the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, heat is unaffordable, jobs are scarce and mud hinders transportation on dirt roads. So the Oglala Sioux tribe needs Mr. Katchur's help, said Donna Noel, director of senior services in Bennett County.

Mrs. Noel said Mr. Katchur goes beyond dropping off items: He even takes requests. One year, he brought a pair of boots for an elderly man he had met on a previous trip. Another time, he delivered a requested desk and file cabinets to the senior center.

Likewise, Mr. Katchur asks Kaaren Rizor, director of Ashland Community Health Center in Ashland, Mont., to make wish lists. He brings her syringes and other medical supplies - but also stuffed animals for the children the center serves.

"There was just no end to the kind of things he brought," Mrs. Rizor said. "It was what he lived for all year long; I can tell."

Indeed, the ministry seems to have turned into a career. Every room of Mr. Katchur's house - located close to his parish, Our Lady of the Valley in Middleburgh - spills over with donations and purchases. Piles of puzzles, blankets and crutches nearly touch the ceiling. He shares the bedroom with heaps of toys, from an Elmo doll to a stuffed Winnie the Pooh.

"I tell people I've got a warehouse," Mr. Katchur remarked. "They look at me like, 'This guy is nuts.'"

A few years ago, he purchased a white Dodge Ram truck and a 14-foot trailer hitch that tows six tons. Now he's intent on finding furniture and bed frames for the eastern Navajo Nation in New Mexico. He buys the mattresses.

"It is so forlorn," he said of conditions on reservations. "The parents are aching with hunger." When Mr. Katchur comes, elderly people cry as they thank him.

"There are always tears - in their eyes, in his eyes," said Chris Halter, director of St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School in Thoreau, N.M.

Mr. Halter recalled that Mr. Katchur had delivered baseball gloves, bats and balls for a children's league, as well as kitchen sets for fire victims.

Back home, Mr. Katchur's fellow Knights of Columbus worry about his health. Last week, he tripped and fractured his hand.

But "he just keeps chugging along," Mr. Lucchetti said. "We try to tell him to slow down a little, but he's got a mission."

Because no one has offered to continue his work, Mr. Katchur says, "I gotta' keep going."

It's what Mrs. Katchur would want, he believes: "My Ellen, she started this."

(Read a previous story on Mr. Katchur at www.evangelist.org.)

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