AUGUSTA, Maine — As hungry diners surged into the Red Barn restaurant last Friday, getting ready to tuck into plates piled high with fried chicken or clams, owner Laura Benedict moved through the tables with the allure of a rock star and the intentions of a guardian angel.
She greeted her customers, especially the older ones, with a smile, a hug, a kiss, a caress of a lined cheek or a gentle squeeze of a gnarled hand. One woman gave her a shopping bag packed with homemade whoopie pies and other treats. Another, 80-year-old Joyce Caverly of Winthrop, offered up a succinct description of Benedict.
“She’s an angel in disguise,” Caverly said without hesitation.
Welcome to the Red Barn, a restaurant where the food seems almost incidental, no matter how delicious. In the last few years, Benedict, 51, has turned the joint she affectionately calls “a chicken shack” into a charitable powerhouse, raising more than $2 million for good causes such as Honor Flight Maine and graduation festivities for various local high schools. She also has harnessed the power of social media to tell the stories of the community she loves so much, writing with honesty and power about her customers, about the elderly folks and the veterans she reveres and respects, about neighbors who have suffered tragedies and who need a helping hand to get on their feet again.
Benedict is quick to offer that helping hand. But she also shares with her 73,000 Facebook fans an unflinching look at her own struggles and demons. Benedict is a recovering alcoholic who also has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. Her restaurant has come close to bankruptcy several times in the past. And despite these hardships, her smile shines bright and her gratitude at still being here and alive and able to help others is so profound it is almost palpable.
“It’s not about food here. It’s about the emotional connection,” she said. “All I do is hug people when I walk in the doors. This is my church and my life.”
Into the darkness
Benedict was one of 10 children who grew up poor in Augusta, with a hardworking father who owned Augusta Seafood and had his own struggles with alcohol. Her older brother, Bobby, opened the Red Barn in 1977, and Benedict began working there as a child. She purchased the restaurant from her brother when she was 20 years old, and said that the money problems started immediately.
“It was already in a mountain of debt,” she said
Trying to stay one step ahead of the creditors, Benedict lost her house, then her car, and at one point was biking 17 miles to work from a trailer park in Windsor.
“For 35 years, I struggled. I struggled to pay my bills. I was on the verge of bankruptcy five times,” she said. “Once, the only reason I didn’t file was because I didn’t have the $1,100 fee it took.”
Aside from her money struggles, she had stress at home, too. She’d married, but by 2000, her marriage had ended and her mother, to whom she was very close, had died.
That was the year her drinking started to “get very bad,” she said.
But Benedict kept on doing the other thing she knew how to do — work hard at the restaurant — until the Great Recession and the stock market crash occurred, putting the Red Barn’s future in more jeopardy.
On a November day in 2009, Benedict didn’t have the money to pay for her food delivery. So she decided to give food away to customers in exchange for a suggested $5 donation, and word spread fast, bringing enough people to her door to keep it open a little longer. Many of them also started to follow the Red Barn on Facebook, the beginning of the large, engaged online community that exists today.
Benedict started doing weekly donation dinners to raise money for local causes by donation. Benefits began to be an important part of her business model, and by 2013, the restaurant had raised more than $635,000 for charitable causes. It also caught the attention of the Maine attorney general’s office, which sent a letter to Benedict just before Thanksgiving that year, ordering her to cease engaging in solicitation and describing the restaurant as a business posing as a charity. Although the letter turned out to be something of a mixup, with Attorney General Janet Mills coming in person to the restaurant to apologize, it did lead Benedict to start the Red Barn Cares Foundation nonprofit. The letter also led to statewide media attention and raised the restaurant’s profile even more.
So the charitable giving continued apace, but in private, Benedict’s life was spiraling out of control. Even as she shared lots of personal anecdotes on her Facebook page, she did not talk about her continued drinking and somehow did a pretty good job pretending that she was OK.
Until she couldn’t pretend anymore.
In late 2014, she was serving “on every board” that asked her and spending money at charitable auctions like it was water. Yet she was going home alone at night after the events were over to find oblivion in beer.
“I was making everybody believe I was too good to be true,” she said. “Then I went home and all I had was a drinking problem.”
On Dec. 12, 2014, Benedict sat down and wrote a Facebook post that got more real than she had ever gotten before. She opened up and told the thousands of her fans and friends that she had a drinking problem, and she needed help.
“I did it because I wanted to be held accountable,” she said, adding she reread what she had written 100 times before sharing it. “I hit send, and I called my therapist.”
Benedict went into a hospital for nearly a week, beginning the hard work of getting sober and getting well. That was when she finally was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — news that came as another blow.
“I said, what is it?’ And the doctor told me exactly what I’d been suffering from my entire life,” she recalled.
Finding the light
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. People having a manic episode may feel very elated, have lots of energy, feel like their thoughts are going very fast and do risky things like spend a lot of money, among other signs and symptoms. During a depressive episode they may feel very sad, empty or hopeless, have very little energy, feel worried and empty, have trouble concentrating, and think about death or suicide.
At first, Benedict rejected the idea of taking medication to control the disorder.
“I didn’t want to be numb,” she said.
But as she continued on her path toward recovery, she accepted the help that came in various ways, including through medication and also through the kindness of the people who had read what she wrote on Facebook.
“That was the post heard round the world. That post had 100,000 comments. What I hoped people would understand is that because you have an addiction it does not mean you’re not a good person,” she said. “My putting a face to it, being honest and open and vulnerable, it helped me get well.”
She found that her customers did not shun her. Instead, more came, drawn, perhaps, by her inescapable humanity.
“They trust me. They know that I’m coming from a place of hurt and triumph,” she said. “The relatability between me and my customers went through the roof. People came in — they lost their job, or they felt hopeless. They felt that I wasn’t going to be other than what I was.”
One of the customers who had been with her since the beginning and who keeps coming back is Don Tuttle, a 92-year-old World War II veteran from Augusta. He served as a tailgunner on numerous bombing missions over enemy territory in Europe and earned a Purple Heart after being wounded. One day, he came into the restaurant looking for Benedict and holding a mahogany box.
“I’ve got something for you,” he told her.
It was the Purple Heart medal.
“He said, ‘I risked my life for this, and I’d rather see it above ground than below ground,’” Benedict said.
She treasures the heavy medal, wearing it around her neck every day, and it’s joined by her “bling”: other medals and pins she’s been given over the years by her customers.
“People come here because they’re appreciated and needed,” she said. “Everybody wants to be appreciated and needed. And sometimes you can give a voice to people who feel they don’t have one.”
As Benedict moves around the dining room, people are drawn to her as if there is a magnet inside her next to her heart.
“Everybody loves her,” Joyce Caverly said. “We love coming here because the people here make you feel like you’re family.”
Recently, Benedict has had a swirl of attention from inside and outside Maine. Her philanthropy was featured on NBC News with Lester Holt this summer and this fall by a contributor to Forbes.com. She is very excited that next month she’ll be on the cover of Maine Seniors magazine. But she’s not interested in letting all that fame go to her head. She doesn’t want to forget where she was just two years ago, in part because she doesn’t want to ever go back there again. Benedict expects to get her two year sobriety chip on Dec. 12, a day she will no doubt mark by spending time in the restaurant with the customers she loves.
“You have to stay grounded and humble,” she said. “I will fight to the end of my days to make sure my past doesn’t swallow me up.”