When Carl Wolden hit the streets of Modesto late in 2004, he was embittered and angry. He had never gotten over the injustice of paying child support to a woman who used much of the money for hard drugs. After making $31 an hour in his job at a major auto parts firm in San Francisco and making decent money in the Alameda shipyards, he found it increasingly difficult to […]
History
Faces of the Homeless: Carl, Part II
Carl sees the light In 1994, Carl Wolden went through a divorce and lost his job almost simultaneously. Once again, his middle brother came to the rescue. Carl’s brother had remarried, moved to Antioch, and found work in the Alameda shipyards. He invited Carl to move in and helped him find work as a pipefitter’s assistant. Things went well until the shipyards shut down. The stress put added tension on […]
Faces of the Homeless: Carl, Part I
Look at Carl Wolden’s weather-worn face and a panorama of American culture comes to mind, most of it arising out of the Deep South and Midwest: The themes of Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor all seem carved into his features. But, despite his looks, Wolden wasn’t born in Oklahoma or the Deep South; he was born in April of 1964 in Yolo County’s General Hospital. Shortly […]
Homeless in Wonderland
Donnie and Johnnie are on the move. Johnnie, the small guy with the big ears, is pulling a little red wagon. It’s laden with an odd assortment of found objects, including a putter. In context—Modesto’s south side near the Gospel Mission—the putter looks nothing like a sportsman’s tool. It looks instead like a weapon, and that’s probably its only potential in the hands of Donnie or Johnnie. Except for the […]
Faces of the Homeless: Scottie
It’s about a mile and a quarter from the Modesto Gospel Mission to La Loma Liquors at the intersection of La Loma and Burney in Modesto. That’s not far as the crow flies, but the distance stretches by magnitudes when Scottie Shovelski tells you that’s where he goes to cash his monthly disability check. When’s Scottie’s on foot, which, during the day, is virtually all the time, people avert their […]
Merry-go-Round of the Homeless
Right after this summer’s breakout of homelessness brought about protests from urban residents, Modesto’s street people were on the move. Pushing and pulling their shopping carts and bike-powered transport systems, they frequented corridors along many of Modesto’s traffic arteries, only to land on a spot where the police would show up and tell them to move on. Modesto officials soon learned that rousting the homeless from parks and other public […]
Are the Homeless Modesto’s Illegal Aliens?
This summer, at the height of the homeless “invasion,” the first impression was of a modern-day diaspora. It was only natural to wonder where all these people came from. A popular explanation says they’d been sent here by Bay Area city officials, who gladly paid for their bus tickets and promised them better services in Modesto. Those who work closely with homeless people say that’s not the case. Instead, as […]
Visions of the Homeless: Part III
And the Darkness Comprehended It Not The only pain greater than their own is the pain they give the ones who love them. Theirs is a long journey into a wilderness of thorns, each one piercing another heart. Their descent into the smoldering tangle of excuses, evasions, and lies, is like a public burning when the victim will not die. At some point they are unrecognizable. Their flesh scorches, their […]
Visions of the Homeless: Part II
What would Jesus do? Get to the Modesto Gospel Mission early enough on a winter morning and you see the overnight “guests” leaving the building. These are the homeless. The rules say they have to be off the property by 7:30, and the rules are strictly enforced. Many of the men who emerge from the building every morning don’t look homeless, maybe because a few actually have jobs, and maybe […]
Visions of the Homeless: Part I
Modesto under siege Summer of 2015 they appeared like an alien fungus, some pale, wan, jaundice-tinged, others large, dark, and gnarly. They plopped down in our parks and along the canals, raising levels of alarm and loathing to dangerous heights. For a long while, their eccentric orbits had been confined to a peripheral loop skirting the edges of downtown Modesto— the Empowerment Center on Olive Avenue to the north west, […]