The night-walkers of Uganda

by Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
For years the fat man with a red suit and a large 
white beard has been surprising strangers with 
his generosity. But now Santa has been forced to 
retire and stay at home - but he has revealed his 
true identity first. 
Over the last 26 years, Larry Stewart, a 58-year-
old businessman from Kansas City, has given 
$1.3m to strangers he met in the street. He 
started by giving $5 and $10 bills to people who 
looked unhappy or unlucky. As he became richer 
– he has made millions with a cable television 
and long-distance telephone service – the gifts 
rose to $100 bills. 
But Mr Stewart has always kept his identity 
secret. People began to call him Secret Santa. 
This spring, however, he was diagnosed with 
cancer of the oesophagus. The $16,000 monthly 
cost of the chemotherapy is not covered by his 
health insurance policy, and Mr Stewart is now 
too weak to continue. 
So he has decided to reveal his identity. Mr 
Stewart hopes that he might inspire someone 
else to take over his Santa duties. 
Mr Stewart has a team of little helpers, who in 
recent years have given out $100,000 travelling 
between Chicago and Kansas City. He also has 
four deputy Santas who this year will give out 
$65,000. 
Over the years Stewart has been in news reports 
and appeared - in full costume - on Oprah 
Winfrey’s television show. “You really are Santa,” 
she told him. There is a Secret Santa website 
and even a book, Santa’s Secret: A Story of 
Hope, written by a local journalist. 
Stewart has experience of poverty. In the early 
1970s he was poor and jobless and he had to 
live in his car, a yellow Datsun 510. One day he 
went to a church to ask for help. They told him 
the person who could help wasn’t there and he 
should return the following day. 
“As I turned around, I knew I would never do that 
again,” Mr Stewart told Associated Press. 
By the late 1970s Stewart had a job and some 
money, but he was still unlucky. In 1979 he was 
fired from his job in the week before Christmas. 
But when he saw a shivering, waitress at a drive-
in restaurant, he realised that were others worse 
off than him. 
“It was cold and this waitress didn’t have on a 
very big jacket, and I thought to myself, ‘I think 
I got it bad. She’s out there in this cold making 
nickels and dimes’,” he said. 
He gave her a $20 bill. 
“And then she began to cry. She said, ‘Sir, you 
have no idea what this means to me’.”
Stewart went to the bank, withdrew $200 and 
drove around Kansas looking for people to give it 
to. The Secret Santa story was born.