Salt Lake Tribune
Monday, April 29, 2002

Homeless Share a Kind of Kinship
by Mark Haynes

Chuck was a man who liked to fish.
Every day the homeless man – with his dog, Lucy – fished from the banks of the Jordan River where it winds through Salt Lake City. He camped next to the river living in a small tent with old newspapers for a floor. When he died of cancer, his friends gathered for a memorial service on the riverbank and poured his cremated remains into the water from a vodka bottle. Then they tossed in his fishing pole and hat with the slogan, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” printed on the front.

Chuck is one of 52 street people Utah writer Leslie Reynolds interviewed for her book, Street People: Case Histories of the Homeless, which she discussed Sunday at the Jewish Community Center. The talk was part of the Coffee, Conversation and Controversy public forums sponsored by the Wasatch Front Unitarian Fellowship.

Reynolds, who holds a doctorate in counseling and has a seminary degree, became sympathetic to the plight of street people after experiencing poverty at one point in her life for 18 months. The experience made her wonder how others survive if they do not have a strong support system like she did. To find out, she took her tape recorder to the streets to interview those who live largely unseen on the margins of society.

“I went to hang out with them in their environment,” she told a group of about 30 people, “not bring them to mine.”

The one consistency she found in nearly every story is that the people came from a dysfunctional family that included some form of abuse, be it sexual, physical, verbal or substance abuse.

“The problem is one of dysfunction, not mental illness, “ Reynolds said. She said it would help if counselors became like parents to help the disadvantaged.

Medication also helps the homeless achieve a semblance of stability. She criticized the court rulings that closed the doors of mental health hospitals in the 1980's, saying they forced people into the streets and that many charitable organizations lacked counselors to deal with the
sudden surge of the mentally ill, many of whom became suddenly homeless.

“The court rulings were never rationally discussed,” she said.

Almost everyone she talked to for the book, rather than feeling abandoned by God, had a profound belief in being sustained by a deity or some other higher power. As one person told her, “Something is keeping us alive because the people are not.”

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