Lessons from a school year living in poverty still resonate in Cedar Rapids man's life

'The most important evaluation of a society is not based upon how well the rich, powerful and privileged are doing, for they always do well. But it will be based upon how intelligently, how compassionately and how justly the society deals with the poor, the marginalized, the powerless and the outcasts.'

— Thomas Sears,

Cedar Rapids

Today, as families and friends gather over bountiful feasts, Eastern Iowa churches, community rooms and cafeterias will open their doors so volunteers can serve thousands of Thanksgiving dinners to people in need of a good, hot meal and to those who seek to stave off loneliness on a holiday.

According to Iowa State University's Iowa Community Indicators Program, 20,662 Linn County residents and 21,737 Johnson County residents are living in poverty. One-third of the students in Linn and Johnson counties qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. (www.icip.iastate.edu)

IMMERSION EXPERIENCE

Thomas Sears, 80, remembers 'with thankfulness' the months he and his theology classmate cast aside their middle-class comforts to immerse themselves in the people and poverty of Boston's South End. It was 1958 — the end of the line for the people they met and the end of the line for the once-prosperous area that had fallen into decay.

'My experience in the South End changed my life and contributed to who I am,' he wrote in a paper he shared with the Cedar Rapids Literary Club in late October.

' ... When I walk in another's shoes, my judgment usually turns to compassion. I learned also that the poor and marginalized share with me a common humanity. ...

'Thirdly, the conventional wisdom regarding poverty, and especially the rhetoric of politicians, does not ring true with my experience. The carefully woven myth about poverty appears to me to blame the victim, to justify our non-involvement and to maintain the advantage of those with privilege.'

 Sitting in his Cedar Rapids living room, more than 1,200 miles and nearly 60 years removed from that immersion experience, Sears says those lessons followed him through 11 years of ministering in United Methodist churches in Iowa and 27 years of teaching history at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids. They resonated through raising two daughters with his wife, Margaret, and continue to resonate today.

Judgement, he says, is 'such a human characteristic, but my judgment was usually wrong.' As a minister, he sought to 'meet people where they are' and to 'respect everybody.'

'I always tried to treat and deal and give professional services to the poor exactly as I did to the rich and powerful — conduct the same service for a county burial as for the richest person,' he says.

At Kirkwood, he taught social and intellectual history and applied those same principles of dealing with people as they really live.

Because domestic violence and abuse were so prevalent during his time in Boston's South End, he grew keenly aware of how to spot students affected by that — especially from the way they responded to class conversations on those topics. He let them know he was available if they needed someone to listen.

'Many came in to talk,' he says. 'Others, when they were going out, said, 'Thanks for the discussion.' It helps to know they're not alone.'

MINISTRY OF PRESENCE

A classroom discussion on urban policy was the springboard to his immersion experience while working on his master's in theology at Boston University. Friend and classmate John McLeister suggested they learn firsthand about poverty by living in a slum during their final year, from September 1958 to June 1959. Sears was about 23 years old.

'I hesitated to give up the comfort, convenience, security and fellowship of the dorm.'

Sears soon agreed to the project. Both young men hoped to create a ministry of presence — not to be missionaries, but to be there as a Christian influence and, most importantly, 'to be one of them, talking as friends and neighbors,' he says.

'We weren't out to change the world.'

But they did change their corner of the world — changing themselves in the process.

LIVING CONDITIONS

'John and I moved into a culture and physical surroundings totally unfamiliar to our middle-class lives.'

The population density was more than 60,000 people per square mile in what had once been an upscale neighborhood of four-story, single-family dwellings, Sears says, adding that about half the residents were people of color and half were various white ethnicities.

The two young men looked for a 'flop house,' and settled on 11 Dwight St., paying more for their meager sleeping room than they would have paid for their dorm. Nearly 20 people lived at that address, in apartments and sleeping rooms carved out of a once-stately home.

'Our building was typical in representing the old, the sick, the disabled, the working poor and those with few labor skills.'

As many as 16 people shared the building's third-floor bathroom. The century-old toilet was perpetually plugged, and the hallway near the trash barrels reeked of urine. The landlord said he couldn't afford to hire a plumber or buy a repair kit, so the two students bought a kit for less than $5. Sears and the building caretaker fixed the toilet.

'The residents with a working toilet took pride in keeping it unplugged. The urine smell in the hall dissipated in a few weeks. The problem was caused not by the renters, but by the greed of the landlord.'

While his roommate elected to scrub the building's bathtub before bathing every Saturday night, Sears went to the nearby public shower used by most of the neighborhood. That facility wasn't much better, so he bathed at the theology dorm on campus the rest of the year.

'We weren't trapped there. We knew that we could get out any time that we wanted to.'

The two roommates 'cheated' by driving over to Roxbury to buy groceries at a national chain store, where the prices were lower, and cooked in their kitchenette.

'(That's) one of the problems of the poor,' Sears says. 'Their food and all of their expenses, for what they'd get, were a lot more than for the middle class.'

CRIME

'We had to very rapidly develop new coping skills. ... In addition to coping with living in a tenement house, we had to take a crash course in street smarts.'

Sears quickly developed a 'sixth sense' to spot and avoid troublemakers.

'The highest murder rate in New England was in the South End, but it was confined to domestic violence, friends drinking too much in bars, organized crime assassinations, and bodies dropped off in the South End to avoid prosecution. Street crime was petty crimes such as pickpockets or prostitution. One was safe simply by avoiding the troublemakers.'

'I was not afraid for my safety,' he says. 'The streets were controlled by organized crime, not the gangs of today.'

He parked his car on the street, unlocked, with the glove box open so would-be thieves could see nothing to gain by rifling through it.

He says he had more to fear from the police, who protected organized crime instead of the area's residents.

He experienced that disparity first hand, when trying to figure out where he and a half-dozen junior high boys could play basketball after a high fence went up around the school playground. A 'paddy wagon' pulled up, six policemen jumped out, and the boys vanished.

As Sears was trying to explain their quandary, he was hit over the back of the head with a billy club, and came to in the drunk tank. He was charged with attempting to incite a riot, interfering with official acts and resisting arrest.

He was released after promising to appear in court — but that court date never came and the arrest was not recorded. A lawyer with whom he spoke figured the charges went away when the cops found out he was a Boston University student.

SIXTH SENSE

That 'sixth sense' Sears developed in Boston served him in his ministry years later when he took a group of rural Iowa teens to the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago, for a work camp in the city's impoverished west end. During a walking tour of the area that first day, Sears said the kids experienced 'a cultural shock,' but he felt perfectly comfortable.

'Something happened today that I've never seen happen in the Roosevelt School area,' the tour leader said afterward.

'Whenever a white man is walking the streets, everybody knows it's trouble. They don't make eye contact. They move over to the other side of the sidewalk and avoid any white man. Today, a white man walked down the streets ...

and people smiled, they greeted you — some even stopped to talk and said, 'Have a good day.' How do you explain it, Tom?'

'I said to him, 'Well, I lived in a similar section in Boston when I was in school.''

'Well, that explains it. You belong.'

FRIENDSHIPS

'The difficulty of the living conditions are pale compared with the friendships we made.'

Of all the stories — from the sick old man 'waiting for death to free him from this life' to the homeless man who slept in the bathtub — Maria's is perhaps the most compelling from the melting pot that was 11 Dwight St.

MARIA

'Maria was the Dwight Street prostitute. I must be perfectly clear that my relationship with Maria was always based on my profession and not hers.'

Sears and McLeister met Maria when her 4-year-old son fell out of a window. The men took Maria and both sons to the hospital, then became 'the unofficial' big brothers to the boys.

Maria's tale is heart-wrenching.

Raped by her father for the first time at age 12, her uncle joined in two years later. When she became pregnant with her uncle's child at 16, her family 'called her a slut who had dishonored the family.' She was kicked out of her home and her school.

She lied about her age to become a maid at a cheap hotel but lost the job shortly before the child was born. She couldn't find another job and couldn't pay the rent.

'Terrified of being on the street with a baby, the night before she was to be evicted, she sold her body for the first time. Considering the circumstances of her life, we found her to be a good mother to the boys.'

Growing up in the urban blight could not have been more removed from Sears' youth in Cedar Rapids. The children in the big city slums played in the streets.

'We didn't do all that much with Maria's kids, but a little bit,' Sears says. 'We'd take them to get some ice cream, or usually did something in the South End — took them to different places.

'I'll never forget the youngest one, when we took them to the Commons ... (We) got off the subway at Park Street, and here is this big, open, treed area, and this 4-year-old was absolutely terrified. He'd never seen anything like that. The trees scared him to death,' Sears says.

'So with the limited experiences that the kids had — the whole situation, including the education, the economic, the social situations — it took a very unusual person to be able to break out of that, and usually only with help from somebody.'

On the day Sears moved out of 11 Dwight St., he found out the depth of the impact he and McLeister had on Maria and her boys. What seemed like so little to Sears meant the world to her. And left a forever imprint on his life.

'I was packing to return to Iowa. I was struggling to get a heavy box of books in the back seat of my Volkswagen. I backed out and stood up. Maria was standing next to me. She thanked me for what we had done for her boys.

''But especially,' she said, 'I want to thank you for what you have done for me. You are the first men in my life that has not just wanted to get their hands on my body. But you treated me with respect as if I were a good woman. I will never forget that.'

'She gave me a hug, said, 'Thanks,' kissed me and, with tears in her eyes, hurried away.

'With a prayer for her in my heart, I watched a friend walk down the street.'

EPILOGUE

Sears, who now serves on several advisory boards at Boston University, has returned to the South End over the years, beginning in the late '60s.

'The first time I was back, it was a ghost town,' he says. 'All of the buildings were abandoned when they were no longer fit for habitation. ...

'That was a traumatic experience, because as we went through the streets, I thought of the people that we had known and wondered what happened to them.

'In 1983, the Boston City Council declared the South End a historical area.'

That brought renovations, restorations and revitalization.

'It's a very, very different area now, with expensive restaurants and an art colony there,' he says. 'It has been restored as one of the good areas of Boston.'

But for Sears, it will always be a ghost town, full of memories of days and lives that have come and gone, melting into the shadows.