He trapped squirrels with his bare hands–“I’d feed them with one hand and catch them with the other”–and skinned and cooked the carcasses. Last September a jobless Parker took a sleeping bag into the Schiller Woods forest preserve at Cumberland and Irving Park Road. I got a job working for a liquor store in Melrose Park, but they fired me for drinking.” When he died, I worked for an outfit that made ducts for McDonald’s restaurants, and then they laid off everybody. “My brother-in-law and I opened a shop that sold bows in Joliet. For 13 years he was a lithograph operator for a company that printed bottle caps. Parker, who’s 49, is emerging from a blue-collar slide partly of his own making. In winter there’ll be salting and snow shoveling to do. “But there are only a few people to see and talk to in a factory–on 53rd Street the whole world is before you.” Parker picks up trash along 53rd Street between Woodlawn and Hyde Park Boulevard, being careful not to miss the Harper Court parking lot and the horseshoe drive in front of the shopping center. Though it takes him an hour and a half to reach 53rd by CTA from Breakthrough’s offices at 5249 N. “These men are in the public eye, and we encourage them to be courteous and respectful,” says counselor Bob Cornelius.Īt about 9:30, the men, in teams of two, head off with their equipment to the commercial strips and lots where Breakthrough has contracts–including Clark Street in Rogers Park and Andersonville, Argyle Street in Edgewater, a Harris Bank branch in Uptown, the Methodist Home (a nursing home and social center in Edgewater), and East 53rd Street in Hyde Park. The half-hour Bible study isn’t mandatory, says supervisor Eddie Sturgis, “but we encourage individuals to seek the Lord.” Then comes a class in plumbing, carpentry, floor care, and other maintenance tasks beyond street cleaning. The street cleaners’ day begins with an 8:30 AM devotional session at Breakthrough. “It’s a stepping stone to a living wage.” “The money is not really enough to live on, but it’s enough to get a room,” says Sutter.
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The men get paid $6 an hour for part-time labor, plus bus fare. Most were formerly homeless, though some are state “earnfare” workers, on the conveyor belt from welfare to work. Jim Parker and ten other men participate in a Breakthrough program called CleanStreets.
“It’s good for the community to see that.” “People have these preconceptions about the homeless–that they’re largely bums–but we’ve found that they want to work and stand on their own two feet,” says Arloa Sutter, Breakthrough’s executive director.
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