Every Sunday afternoon, the 16 foot white panel truck with “VETERANS HELPING VETERANS” painted on the side, rolls up Chicago’s grandest boulevard, Michigan Avenue, and comes to a stop just outside a building where some of the world’s greatest music gets played.

Everyone from The Chicago Symphony to Keith Jarrett and Joan Baez has played inside the acoustically perfect, pristine white walls of that concert hall.

Just a bit north of the concert hall and the white truck is another building jammed full of art by the likes of Picasso, Renoir and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Outside. On the street. Stamping their feet and hugging themselves to keep warm when the wild winter wind careens down the boulevard, a line of homeless folks, many of them veterans, waits their turn for a sandwich, a cup of hot coffee and if they are lucky perhaps a coat or a pair of pants.

This has been happening, most every Sunday, for twenty-one years.

It’s the work of ex-Marine Jim Proffitt. National Chairman for the homeless of “Viet Now,” a veterans advocacy group. He’s also the guy who drives the truck.

The group calls what it does each week “The Chicago Homeless Sandwich Run.” Last year they made 56,100 sandwiches. And they served 8oo people a week.

The number of human beings in Chicago who spent at least part of last year homeless has been estimated at 90,000. And just in case that number flies by the way big numbers do, here’s some perspective: that 90,000 is almost 20% worse than the previous year.

Almost 20% worse.

Here’s another set of numbers to burn into your brain forever: Ten to twenty-five percent of all adult homeless men are veterans. They used to wear uniforms. Now they sleep on the streets.

The sliver of good news here is that $3.5 billion dollars spent by the Obama Administration on housing, health and support programs has just very recently reduced the total number of homeless veterans.

But the numbers for everyone else are still going up.

So Mr. Proffitt, shown here below with his son Jimmy, do the work that goes on before anyone bites into a sandwich or takes a sip of coffee. The fundraising, the volunteer coordination, making the sandwiches, brewing the coffee and loading up the truck.

And by the end of the day, at their last stop, when the truck is almost empty and the sky bathes the city in a kind of holy sunset light, they’ve fed about 800 people.

People like the man who lives here.

This is a man's home. On Lower Wacker Drive. An eternally dark road that runs below the streets of the city.

The sandwiches were gone by the time they got to this man. So they found him the breakfast you see here. Because, as the man who lives here, a 60-year-old veteran said about Jim Proffitt’s group, “They always show up. You can count on them.”

The complete reporting on the group comes from Don Terry in the gold standard of Chicago journalism, "The Chicago News Cooperative." Look them up and you'll find more of the photographs by John Konstantaras, who took the pictures you see here. The kind of pictures that each tell a million stories all on their own.

In the beginning, twenty-one years ago, there was just Jim Proffitt and his wife Virginia. They started this  "Sandwich Run" together. Now there is an organization. One you can count on. One that always shows up.

And as you look at this last Konstantaras/CNC photo. As you see the steam rising off that cup of good hot coffee, you wonder:

“What if that steam was a picture of hope?”