King Leads Food Pantry Team

Ask Linda King about her favorite part of running the Stone County Community Food Ministry, and she doesn’t even have to think. It’s the children.

She describes a child seeing the cart filled with food that was brought out to a family and asking, “Mama, is all this food for us?”
“And she said yes,” King says. ”And he was just, ‘Oh, we’re going to eat good tonight.’ You know that just sticks in your mind.”

King herself remembers being hungry as a child, growing up in the bootheel of Missouri.

“When I was growing up, we never had enough food,” King said. She said that when she serves families now, she remembers her own childhood.

As an adult, King and her late husband moved to Mountain View to escape the heat and mosquitoes of the area near Caruthersville, Mo., where she grew up.

They chose the mountains of Arkansas based on a tourist information brochure they picked up on a trip to Blytheville. King worked for Conestoga Wood Products for 15 years. The couple raised two children here. Then, they moved to Pennsylvania so Linda King could work for another company. But after her husband became ill, he wanted to move back to the place they considered “home” — Mountain View. So, they came home.

“When he passed away, that’s when I wanted something to occupy my time and one of my friends from the Catholic Church said, ‘Oh, I volunteer at the food pantry one day a week.’ So that’s how I got started,” King said. At the time, Jim and Sandra Qualls were running the food ministry. King took a five-month break to care for an ill relative. “And then when I got back Jim said that he needed to hand it over, and he thought I would be a capable person to do it.”

In a room filled with food, pantry workers fill grocery carts with items based on a computer screen high on the wall that shows the number of adults and children in each family. Volunteers range from retirees to high school students. Across the hall, in the office, food pantry workers take care of the paperwork, including signing up new recipients. On a recent November day, the office was busy with new families seeking food.

King combines a passion for the work with management and organization skills, making it possible for the pantry to serve as many people as possible, her coworkers say.

“She just makes sure everything runs smoothly. Everything is very intentional, everything is planned and thought out very purposefully,” says Megan Nichols, who volunteers in the office and handles the organization’s social media.

Sarah Gurley, who also works in the office, said she recently attended a training with other food pantry workers. When she heard the concerns volunteers from other food pantries expressed, she realized those concerns had already been addressed here.

She says of King, “Because she’s so organized on top of things and she makes sure that we’re all trained, it makes it easy for us to do our job. And it makes us easy to help people.”

King says in response, “Without all our dedicated volunteers, the food room would not work.”

Read the full story in the Nov. 12, 2025 issue.