Cedar Rapids women move back home, because Block By Block does the ‘impossible’

There is no sweeter glimpse of the good that people do at this time of year than the flood recovery now on view on Eighth Street NW.

Out there in the 1200 block, Alyce Ward, Beulah Kasner and Marilyn Dudley are getting ready for what they had never dreamed imaginable. They are going back home.

Each of the three septuagenarian widows had given up hope of returning to her flood-savaged home, and, coincidentally, each had purchased manufactured homes in separate parks on the outskirts of the city.

Dudley, 76, of 1234 Eighth St. NW, says she thought she'd be there until the end.

“It took me a long time,” she says of coming to terms with never being able to go back home. “It was so hard to give up, but after a while, you just give up. I just thought, ‘This is it.' ”

Then Courtney Ball called.

Ball, a United Methodist Church minister, lived in the neighborhood. He and his brother, Clint Twedt-Ball, are co-directors of the grass-roots Matthew 25 Ministry Hub. Matthew 25, he told Dudley, was creating the concept for a new flood-recovery initiative. The idea was to restore much of eight flood-damaged blocks by Christmas.

“Oh, God, wouldn't that be nice,” Dudley remembers thinking. “It's about impossible to believe.”

She believes it now.

So, too, do Ward, 79, of 1237 Eighth St. NW, who lives across the street from Dudley, and Kasner, 78, of 1204 Eighth St. NW, who lives down the block.

In its study of other disaster areas, Matthew 25 had learned that progress can be hard to see when it happens in a patchy fashion. An owner of one house here and one there might have restored their homes, but the work is lost when others haven't been able to do the same.

Initially, Ball says, the thought was modest - restore one entire block.

Jim Ernst, executive director of the non-profit Four Oaks family services agency and its housing subsidiary, the Affordable Housing Network Inc., told Matthew 25 that he thought they “could think bigger than that.”

In July, John Smith, president/CEO of trucking firm CRST Inc., and his wife, Dyan, donated $1 million to the Block By Block idea. At the same time, the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation steered another $700,000 to the initiative from private donations, and the United Methodist Church contributed $200,000. The church and others are providing a stream of volunteers to help.

The program also has secured an additional $1.1 million from the Iowa Finance Authority and plans to compete for part of a $3 million pool of local-option sales tax money set aside by the City Council for direct services to flood victims through programs like Block By Block.

By the end of 2010, the program's goal is to have signed on a total of 20 to 26 blocks and to have completed 75 percent of the construction on 12 to 16 blocks.

“It's hard to think of yourself as a piece of history when you're in it,” the unassuming Ball says from his basement cubicle at Trinity United Methodist Church, 400 Third Ave. SW. “But looking back, people will see this as a pretty significant program.”

Ward sees it as significant now. She raised 10 children on her husband's wages as a painter in their house. So getting back there was a dream she had not wanted to give up on.

“I'm lonesome,” she says of her life away from the neighborhood. “There, I can go in the backyard and neighbors stop by and talk.”

One will be friend Dudley.

Coming back, too, is Kasner, who initially had moved into the Eighth Street house to take care of her mother and then had lived there for 32 years before the flood hit.

“One minute I had my home, and the next minute I had nothing,” says Kasner, who worked for 20 years in the laundry at St. Luke's Hospital.

To a person, Ball says, Dudley, Ward and Kasner figured him and Block By Block as another pie-in-the-sky program.

“ ‘I just don't believe you're going to do it,' ” Ball says was the reaction.

Ward is going back home now with her Boston terrier, Rocky.

“That miracle came along,” she says, “and to get home again … I'm going to be 80, and I want to be there.”