Page 8
University Daily Kansan, November 4, 1981
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From page one
"In the late 1970s, our development director, agreed,
that we would or three of them, we've had more people coming to
us than ever before," she said.
Barbara Antrim the mission's development director. agreed
"We have so many people out there now that we're giving out numbers in the lobby. We have people so squashed in the hall that they can't even sit," she said.
Antrim said that the mission, located a few blocks east of the City Market, was one of the 10 largest in the United States and slept between 75 to 100 men a night. Its facilities also include an Ozark farm for transient families and a building for transient women.
"There are more people moving around," she said. "We have seen more women and children transients. Before the Women's Liberation movement, a lot of women just endured."
Now, she said, they were hopping freights.
"We're getting younger faces, people we've never seen. I can take you upstairs and show you guys 19 and 20 years old. Twenty-five years ago, the average age used to be 55. The average age is more like 35 now."
THE CITY UNION MISSION is a non-denominational Christian mission that is funded through donations. This year, Antrim said, the mission operated on a budget of $600,000.
It will need $1,000,000 next year.
Before then, however, the Kansas City mission must get through the winter, when the city's itinerants appear silently from alleys, doorways, hobo jungles and parking garages to find warmth and food.
"On a cold night we slept more than a hundred men in this building," Antrim said. "The need is greater."
Upstairs, Roy Cissna, director of the Christian Life Program, looked out of his office window at a lot where, a few minutes before, five huddled men, clad in thin clothing, torn jackets and tattered layers of overcoats shuffled slowly away to find a drink or, more rarely, a job.
"You have the snowbirds that come in when the snow starts to fly, then they get religion," he said.
Downtown, Sgt. Jim Treace of the Kansas City Police Department used a pair of binoculars to look out of his own window, and pointed to a gandy—police jargon for transient—rummaging through empty bottles in a field several blocks away.
"Theirs is perhaps one of the hardest roads of survival you can think of." he said.
Treece recalled the years he spent driving a paddy wagon from cheap flop houses to deserted tenements to crowded railroad tracks. He remembered finding gandy's who had been dead for three days hidden behind boarded doors who, because of a careless, drunken slip, had been crushed to death under the wheels of a freight.
"We've all encountered them when they were nearly freezing to death, victims of their peers, victims of a beating by some kids."
Felton Booker, building superintendent and former hobo, sits outside his office at the mission. The number of transients is growing everyday, he says.
THEIR LIFE, HE SAID, would not get any easier.
Now, he said, the police couldn't throw the drunks in jail to help them survive the winter nights, and had to rely on the missions to take them in, even if the missions were too full to take any more.
"I still know some officers that will bring them in rather than let the elements get them. What they manage to book them on, I don't know."
"Being drunk in public is no longer against the law, at least not in this city anyway," he said. "That really hasn't done them a favor."
Treese said that it was hard for the department to keep track of an increase in the transient population because of a decrease in official dealings with it. However, he said, he did notice an increase in violence among the city's homeless.
"Some are more violent because they're getting into a younger group," he said.
He recounted several homicides.
"All it takes is a better pair of shoes that the guy you're sharing the bottle with," he said, "or maybe your coat's a little warmer."
Unless a homicide or some other crime was committed, he said, there was little the department could do.
SGT. MIKE REEVES of the Lawrence Police Department agreed with Treece.
Although Lawrence is smaller than Kansas City, the same rules apply.
"Unless they commit any type of crime, we're not going to get too involved." Reeves said.
"We've had a few people staying under the Kaw River bridge and when the weather is nice, that's about as good a place as any."
Reeves said that he did not have any records of how many transients Lawrence had each year, and did not classify them as a problem.
"Most of the transients we have here are local," he said. "At least they have someplace to go."
If they were from out of town, Reeves said, the department would refer them to organizations such as the Salvation Army.
CAPT. ROBERT THOMSON, director of the Lawrence chapter of the Salvation Army, 946 New Hampshire St., said that he dealt with 20 transient cases a month during the summer, but only eight to 10 cases a month during the winter.
"Lawrence, I sometimes get the feeling, is not one of their regular stops," he said. "It's on the beaten path, but not one of the major stopping points. I don't know why."
Thomson said that some transients would get to Lawrence by hopping a freight, but that the great majority either hitchhiked or drove into town.
"The greatest amount of transients) would be native Americans coming up to see someone in Haskell or going back to the reservation or tribal center," he said.
"One night (stop-overs), that's basically all they're looking for," he said.
He said he also helped families traveling by car who were following the harvest.
"Maybe the water pump goes out," he said, "and they have to spend money they had allocated for something else."
Thomson said that the total number of cases had stayed pretty constant over the past few years, but added that reports from Salvation Army centers in Salina, Junction City, Kansas City, Topeka and other cities had shown a large increase.
UNLIKE LAWRENCE, those cities were major stopping points for transients, he said, perhaps because each was more or less a day's freight ride from the other.
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SMOKING
Just inside the front doors of the mission, a transient takes an early morning nap after a night of drifting the streets of the city.
However, Thomson said Lawrence was beginning to experience a serious shortage of transient housing, and said that although the Lawrence itinerant population was small, it was of concern.
"They're there," he said, "it's just not as noticeable."
Yet, by all indications, they will become more noticeable, perhaps as soon as the first snowfall.
As the temperature drops and snow blankets the ground, the sidewalks of the inner city, the plastic tents along the rivers and the drafty corners of empty buildings become freezing deathtrap for the transients. And according to Booker, they are forced to migrate to the missions in a process he remembered from his hobo days as "joining in."
Booker said the City Union Mission was already experiencing the first signs of the process.
"They can't sleep in empty houses no more, they can't get a bottle of wine and walk the streets with it. They got to get in," he said.
"They're starting to drift in now because everything is shutting down. There's no place for them to live, no place for them to hide."
The people who are joining in are different now, but their problems, Booker said, are the same as they were during the Depression—no jobs, cut-offs in utilities, a recession and rising living costs.
Booker walked down the stairs and entered the main offices, walked across a hall that, in a few hours, would be packed with families searching for clothing or shelter or both.
"It's beginning to grow everyday," he said, "and it's getting worse."
Photos by Earl Richardson
A hobo walks to a freight train traveling along the bank of the Missouri River, a few blocs from the City Market in Kansas City, Mo. The woody, secluded area is lined with plastic tents and newspapers, which form extensive hobo jungles where transients live in groups.
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