From The Oregonian – November 28, 1987

There are fewer drunks lying on the street and the litter is picked up, everyone agrees, but beyond those points, there’s little consensus on how well Mayor Bud Clark‘s 12-point plan for the homeless is working.

Portland mayor Bud Clark in 1991

Nearly two years after the plan was unveiled, social service providers in Old Town point to the progress that’s been made: public restrooms have been opened in the Estate and Beaver hotels, there’s a cleanup center in the Beaver Hotel where street people can shower and get fresh clothes, and most all the dumpsters have been removed from the streets, with the rest scheduled to be gone by Dec. 31.

A van from the Hooper Detox Center, run by Central City Concern, operates 16 hours a day, picking up people who are passed out on the street. Fortified wine sales have been banned. And Burnside Projects, which operates out of the Beaver Hotel, has opened a day shelter so people can get off the streets.

Police patrols have increased, too.

“Each and every thing by itself helps,” said Donald E. Clark, director of Central City Concern.

The social service agencies want to be “good neighbors” in the Burnside area, said Jean DeMaster, director of Burnside Projects.

And “there has been an improvement,” said Roger Shiels, an Old Town consultant who negotiated with Clark to create a truce between Burnside merchants and the social service providers clustered there.

“But there are still obviously a lot of problems,” he said.

While “the sanitation issues are better . . . the panhandling is worse and there’s more mentally afflicted people wandering the area,” said John Parsons, vice president of Pacific Square Corp. development company in Old Town.

“I was real encouraged when the drunk patrols came in . . . but where we used to have a lot of drunks around, now we have a lot of mentally afflicted,” Parsons said.

Parsons, like Shiels, would like to see the social service providers such as Central City Concern and Burnside Projects booted out of Old Town, the Skid Row area of town that has become increasingly gentrified in the past decade or so as boutiques and specialty restaurants have moved in.

“The facilities (for the homeless) are stationary, the population is mobile. The people will follow the facilities,” said Parsons, who suggested moving the agencies that serve the homeless to the Albina area in North and Northeast Portland.

Carl Murrill, who owns the tanning studio in Paradise Hair Design at 211 N.W. Couch St., said he was planning to move his business even though he believes the area “does look cleaner.”

“It’s hard to get people to work down here — they can’t get their clients to come to this part of town,” Murrill said of his pending move.

No matter how much cleanup takes place, though, there will continue to be a rift between businesses and social service providers in the area, said Creag Hayes, owner of the Ciclo Sport Shop.

“I would like to be positive about the 12-point plan but (it’s) institutionalizing the issue,” Hayes said. “They’re maintaining permanent institutional programs in the downtown retail core and . . . so long as that’s the policy, we’re going to have these problems.”

The pending move into the area of Burnside Community Council, now located on the east end of the Burnside Bridge, has business people in Old Town “holding their breath,” Shiels said.

The council, which operates Baloney Joe’s shelter, has announced the purchase of a building at the corner of Northwest Eighth Avenue and Flanders Street.

“Everyone’s hoping they’ll reconsider,” he added.

As for the mayor’s 12-point plan, Shiels said, “I can’t think of any other way to address the problem. It’s not an easy thing . . . I don’t have any better ideas.”

From The Oregonian – November 27, 1987

John Armstrong lighted another cigarette and held it in the air in front of him.

“This is the one addiction I refuse to deal with,” Armstrong said with a smile as he sat in his tiny living room in the Rich Hotel.

Don Clark in 2009

The room also serves as an oasis of quiet in his often hectic day. At 35, Armstrong is a graduate of college and the streets. He is a recovering alcoholic and a former methamphetamine addict.

He also manages the Rich Hotel in Old Town, a 42-room hotel on 205 N.W. Couch St., and the 156-room Estate Hotel next door for Central City Concern.

“Even though I don’t have much at this point, it’s better than the street,” he said.

His is a success story in a book not exactly full of happy endings.

Officials at social service agencies that deal with the diverse homeless population say it’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of programs that try to help people leave the streets. Also, the lack of jobs and the fragile nature of sobriety in a world lubricated by alcohol limit the chances of those who do try to change their lives.

Don Clark, executive director of Central City Concern, which manages both hotels, said more than half of the agency’s 120 employees are recovering alcoholics.

In addition, Clark said 40 percent of the 400 people a year who get into the agency’s alcohol and drug-free housing program find jobs or job training and remain sober for six months. The six-month period of sobriety is a requirement for working for Central City Concern.

“But I don’t know what happens to them after that,” he said.

Jean DeMaster, executive director of Burnside Projects Inc. [now Transition Projects], said the success rate was higher for individuals who are singled out for special help. These are people who have job skills or who are entitled to benefits they are not receiving, such as Social Security or veterans benefits.

“We had a person who was an insurance agent, and also an alcoholic for eight or nine years,” DeMaster said. “He sobered up and tried to re-enter the insurance business, but he could not adjust to the changes. Here was a professional person in his 50s with no (other) job skills.”

The agency eventually found the man a clerical job with an insurance company.

But finding jobs for people is frustrating, she said. At any one time, there may be 70 or 80 people living in alcohol-free housing who can’t find work.

And if they return to the street, it is almost impossible not to drink.

Many of those who come to night shelters are the products of what social workers call “dysfunctional families.” Many lack a high school education. They may not read or write well enough to apply for a job.

Armstrong didn’t come from that mold. He was raised in a middle-class family in Pittsburgh, where, he said, “I never saw a street person, I never saw a mission.”

He got his first taste of drugs in Alaska while working double shifts as a medic in the Army. A co-worker introduced him to methamphetamine, also known as speed.

“It didn’t take long to find out that not only did it keep me awake, but it made me feel pretty good, too,” he said.

After the Army, Armstrong worked as an emergency room technician, and then enrolled in San Bernardino Valley College in California, graduating in 1980 with a degree in general studies with an emphasis on sociology.

His good grades earned him membership in the National Honor Society — “my last significant accomplishment” — but he couldn’t find a job after college.

“Looking back on it, it was probably alcoholism and addiction” that derailed his life at that point, he said. But he really didn’t try too hard, either. It was easier just to hit the road.

He went first to Washington state where he spent a week in jail for stealing a pack of cigarettes and a beer from a grocery store in Olympia. “The judge told me never to come back to Olympia.”

He crossed the country twice over the next year, staying in missions and living on handouts.

“Wherever the ride went, I went,” he said.

Armstrong took speed when he could afford it, but more often he simply drank.

He applied for work, too, in every city he passed through but employers weren’t interested in hiring someone with no permanent address.

Eventually, Armstrong landed in Portland, a city of rivers and bridges and rain, similar in many ways to his native Pittsburgh. “I decided this has got to stop,” he said.

His wandering stopped, but not his drinking or drug taking. Not right away, anyway.

“The hardest thing is you get that belief system in you where you believe you deserve it. You think, this is where I belong, so you kind of give up,” Armstrong said.

Mary Hammons, social work program manager for the Burnside Community Council, which operates the Baloney Joe’s emergency shelter and other services for the homeless, agreed that building self-confidence was one of the hardest things about helping people get off the streets.

“They feel like failures,” Hammons said.

She said a program called New Start, run by Burnside Community Council, has been operating out of a Southeast Portland home since January. It’s an intensive 90-day program aimed at “transitioning” people off the streets.

The program’s first graduate was a hairdresser who is now working in the Northwest neighborhood, Hammons said.

But, she said, follow-up at Baloney Joe’s or other crisis-oriented facilities is rare.

“They need shelter, we give them shelter. They need food, we give them food. They hurt and we put on a Band-Aid. Lots of times we never see them again,” Hammons said.

In the last few months, however, the agency has instituted a case-management system designed to keep track of the people it serves.

After living on the streets of Portland for several months, Armstrong got a job with Burnside Projects, and stayed sober for six or seven months. Gradually, though, he went back to his old habits.

He met Richard Harris, head of the Hooper Detox Center, and learned about the disease of alcoholism.

“I thought, ‘That fits me, but I’m not going to tell anybody,’ “ Armstrong said.

He was assistant manager of the alcohol treatment program at the time, and he eventually became manager, but he still had not dealt with his own problem.

“I was told if I want to keep the job, I’d have to go to treatment,” he said. Armstrong did get treatment, and in April landed the job with Central City Concern.

He had advantages other street people don’t have — a college education, bonafide job skills — and his alcoholism hadn’t progressed to the chronic stages. “I hadn’t destroyed all my brain cells yet,” he said.

And he had an incentive. “I didn’t want to go back to the streets,” he said.

In August, he married a woman who is also a recovering alcoholic. Christie, 34, recently received her General Education Diploma, the equivalent of a high school diploma, and plans to begin winter term classes at Portland Community College, Armstrong said.

Armstrong said he would like to go into some kind of professional policy planning for homeless issues, but he said a doctorate was needed for jobs like that.

In the meantime, he and his wife are thinking about finding a motel management job — “a normal one” — maybe at the coast.

Armstrong appears to be one of the lucky ones. For those who don’t make it, even after going through the available programs, the future is bleak, although not hopeless.

“Most end up back in the night shelter. We work with them to try again,” DeMaster said. “(We tell them to) keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. One of those times it will work — or you will die from kidney failure, or liver failure, or life on the streets.”

From the Oregonian, by columnist Phil Stanford, November 12, 1987

On the lower level of the First Congregational Church, down by the exit, things were coming unglued. Lenny Dee, the local intellectual impressario who had booked the lecture, couldn’t believe what was happening. People were leaving. In droves.

When it was all over Friday night, he would estimate that approximately one-third of the 900 persons who had come to hear R.D. Laing discuss his latest book, “The Lies of Love,” had walked out, demanding their money back.

That was $10 times 300, and who had that kind of money?

Not Dee, who, as co-editor of the eclectic Clinton Street Quarterly, subsists from one issue to the next on a pizza-for-advertising deal he cut with a local pizzaria.

Dee, who has been putting out the Quarterly for the past nine years, got into the visiting lecturer business this January. Since then, he had brought to Portland audiences, hungry for a taste of what’s hot in the world of intellectual media stars, the likes of Paul Krassner, Hunter Thompson and Abbie Hoffman. And now, the world-renowned rebel psychiatrist, R.D. Laing .

The evening had started to fall apart, Dee and others say, when Laing — who is best known for his theory that those society considers mentally ill are actually the sanest of us all, and vice versa — announced that he was putting aside his prepared talk in favor of an extemporaneous “meditation” on his subject.

He then proceeded, in a rambling, not always coherent fashion, to meditate out loud. More often than not, he slurred his words, he couldn’t remember names of authorities he was quoting, and he stumbled over a chair.

About 15 minutes into the lecture, a man in the audience walked to an open microphone — Laing had asked the audience to join in at any time — and said how much he admired Laing for his contributions to our understanding of psychiatry and the human condition in general, but wasn’t he drunk?

Laing said he hadn’t touched a drop. But the rush to the exits was on. And Dee, a slight fellow with a shock of uncombed hair, was left rushing from one person to the next, taking names and addresses, trying to mollify the departing lecturees.

Not that it would have helped much, but if Dee had thought about it, he might have told them that Laing — if indeed he was under the influence — was merely the latest example of what is becoming a tradition for visiting celebrities here.

The summer before last, it was country singer Merle Haggard, who disappeared from the Clark Country Fair under what were at the time mysterious circumstances. He was later located at his home in California, where, according to his manager, he was recovering from an “influenza-type thing.”

According to Dave Pittman, the manager of the fair, what actually happened was sometime between the afternoon and evening shows, Merle got into an argument with his wife — apparently over whether or not to stop at her class reunion in Roseburg on the way back — and started hitting the bottle.

“I know it doesn’t make much sense,” said Pittman. “But after a while, they got into their mobile home and took off. We never did pay him.”

Perhaps the most notable such event, however, occurred in the summer of 1980, when several baseball Hall-of-Famers, including Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, were brought to town for an exhibition with the Portland Beavers.

Mantle and Mathews missed one TV appearance because they insisted on stopping at a bar at 9:45 a.m.

En route to another show, it was reported, Mantle got out of the car at a stoplight and approached a lady in another car.

“Hi,” he said, after he poked his head in the window. “I’m Mickey Mantle. Do you want to . . .?”

That night at the ballpark, Hank Aaron, baseball’s all-time home run king, had to be helped into his uniform, then was too blitzed to hit the ball during a home run contest.

Aaron, who later admitted to drinking too much, said he was taking medication at the time.

After last Friday’s affair, some of Laing’s supporters say it was the asthma medicine he took that afternoon, but Laing himself makes no such excuses. People frequently ask him if there’s something wrong with his mental processes or if he is “on drink,” he says. That’s just the way he is.

For his part, Lenny Dee says he’ll give anyone who walked out a subscription to the Clinton Street Quarterly or a free ticket to a future lecture. But no refunds.