Founder of Stores Keeps Faith in Bid to Help Homeless : Philanthropy: Bernard Abrams of Three D Bed & Bath is trying to collect blankets for the homeless with an ad and a discount offer. He’s had little success, but he’s still hopeful.

Bernard Abrams, the 70-year-old chairman and founder of Three D Bed & Bath, decided it was time to do something to help the homeless.

His company paid $4,000 to place a full-page advertisement in an Orange County newspaper last Sunday. The ad, which showed a photograph of an elderly homeless man asleep on a park bench, asked people to gather up their old blankets and bring them to Three D stores so they could be donated to local shelters.

As an added incentive, Abrams offered a 20% discount on purchases of new blankets to anyone who brought in an old one.

The response to the ad has been, well, dismal.

As of Thursday, a grand total of 23 blankets had been donated to Three D stores in Irvine, Tustin and Westminster. Abrams said he hadn’t expected “a miracle,” but he had hoped for a somewhat greater outpouring of generosity.

“A cynical person would say it would have been better to give the money to the charities,” said Three D President Donald Lee Abrams, Bernard Abrams’ 43-year-old son. “But we were hoping to raise consciousness about the homeless and get blankets for them at the same time.”

For three years, the Costa Mesa-based retailer has regularly donated blankets and linens to three homeless shelters in Orange and Los Angeles counties. But Donald Abrams said that after reading so many newspaper articles about the homeless and their plight, he and his father decided to do something more.

They chose to try the blanket-donation program in Orange County because Three D’s two biggest stores are in Irvine and Westminster. Three D operates 27 bed and bath retail stores across the nation, 15 of them in California.

Three D isn’t the only Orange County company to lend a helping hand to the homeless.

Sharon H. Ballidis, director of the endowment campaign for the YWCA Hotel for Women in Santa Ana, said about 25% of the several hundred annual donations made to the homeless women’s shelter are from corporations. Most companies choose to give clothing, food and other in-kind donations instead of cash.

The Anaheim office of L’eggs Products, for example, donated several hundreds of pairs of hosiery to the hotel last Christmas. The donation was especially important to women residents of the shelter who were looking for jobs, Ballidis said.

According to a report from the American Assn. of Fund-Raising Counsels Inc., corporations and foundations contributed roughly 10% of the $104 billion given to charity and other philanthropic causes in the United States in 1988. The rest came from individuals.

In the Three D ad, Bernard Abrams appealed to readers to “do something to make a difference” in the lives of the homeless. “I look at it this way,” the ad read. “If we don’t help keep them warm, then aren’t we the ones who are cold?”

Donald Abrams said the company could only run the homeless ad one time because of the expense. It’s possible, he said, that many people forgot about or never saw the ad.

The firm will wait two weeks before judging the success or failure of its blanket-for-the homeless program, he said.

“This was not an ad that said: ‘Come in today,’ ” he said. “I hope that we’d have more blankets rather than less, but if we can encourage other businesses to also help the homeless,” then the money will have been well spent.

Abrams said the company has printed flyers to pass out to customers in its stores and has set up displays about the campaign to aid the homeless.

“Hopefully, the word of mouth will get it going,” he said.