Homeless For The Holidays

Richard Craig says he chooses to be homeless, but he has a plan to get back on his feet. Back in Albuquerque, he had a successful window-washing business until his equipment was stolen.

Homeless for the holidays (By Patrick Yeagle): If you didn’t know better, you might think Richard Craig is a powerful businessman. An athletic, handsome man of 46, he’s dressed sharply from head to toe: black wingtip dress shoes, black dress slacks, a black turtleneck under a black diamond-knit sweater and a long black overcoat. He has a salt-and-pepper flat-top crew cut and fashionable stubble over tanned, weathered skin. He carries himself with confidence and seems to know everyone. Others come to his table to say hello. People passing on the street nod or wave to him as they would a well-connected member of the establishment.

But Craig is not a businessman – at least not at the moment. Right now, he’s homeless. Craig is one of hundreds of homeless people facing another winter on the streets. While he insists that he can handle it, he’s worried about those with less experience and less will to survive.

Even in the best circumstances, being homeless is mentally and emotionally draining. Homeless people interviewed by Illinois Times describe feeling invisible, lost, alone, hopeless and constantly afraid for their lives. Winter adds a physical element to the suffering, bringing new challenges and compounding the effects of homelessness on the human psyche.

This winter in particular will be challenging for Springfield’s homeless population. The Salvation Army – usually a linchpin in the battle against homelessness – doesn’t have any shelter to offer this year. The group is in the midst of renovating a new-to-them building at 221 N. 11th St., and their old facility was sold. Corps administrator Major Steve Woodard says the new facility is slated to open sometime in 2016.

That means 36 shelter beds will be out of commission this winter, putting further pressure on the Winter Warming Center, previously known as the Springfield Overflow Shelter. It’s a seasonal facility open from November to March each winter to supplement Springfield’s permanent shelters. Juan Huerta, director of the Office of Community Relations for the City of Springfield, says the other shelters expanded to absorb the people that the Salvation Army would have otherwise served. 

Rod Lane, executive director of Helping Hands of Springfield, says his organization recently expanded from 33 beds to 45 beds by moving to a new location. Still, he says there probably won’t be enough beds for everyone at some point. While demand isn’t high right now, it will likely grow as the weather worsens. Additionally, Helping Hands has not been paid in months by the State of Illinois because of the ongoing budget impasse, and Lane says his organization is running on reserves.

“If we do not get a state budget soon, we will absolutely, unequivocally shut down,” he said.

Huerta said he’s working to have the City of Springfield pay Helping Hands up front for operating the Winter Warming Center, instead of reimbursing them afterward. The temporary shelter opened on Nov. 1.

The lower number of available shelter beds may be somewhat mitigated by the current strong El Niño, which refers to warmer-than-usual surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. The phenomenon is projected to push air that is warmer and drier than usual into the upper Midwest this winter, which could mean fewer sub-zero days and less snow. Still, winter storms and cold snaps will undoubtedly happen, and one frigid night is enough to endanger the lives of those people who wind up on the street.

    

A day in the life:

Richard Craig usually wakes up before dawn. A local business owner lets Craig sleep under his shop’s awning, so Craig likes to move his suitcase and other belongings out of sight before the business opens.

Most homeless people prefer to sleep at one of the shelters, which offer protection from the weather. However, Craig is one of a handful of people who prefer to sleep outside. During the winter, Craig lines his sleeping bag with garbage bags to keep in heat. While that has kept him from freezing in previous winters, he says it causes him to sweat, which makes him even colder when he gets out of bed. He says he always sleeps on cardboard because “concrete drains your energy.”

Craig says he grew up in a family of itinerant fruit pickers, so he’s used to moving often and sleeping outside. He has lived in California, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and several other places. Back in Albuquerque, he had a successful window-washing business until his equipment was stolen. He says he actually chooses to be homeless now because being in a house reminds him that his ex-fiancée took their son, now nine years old, when they split up. He keeps in touch with them but doesn’t see them regularly. 

Several people have offered to let Craig stay with them when they find semi-permanent shelter like a cheap apartment or an abandoned building. He always turns them down, in part because he sees his homeless status as a calling to protect others on the street. 

“There are a lot of predators out here,” he said.

From 6:30 until about 10:30 each morning, Craig and dozens of other people head to the Washington Street Mission at 408 N. Fourth St., which offers hot coffee, laundry service, showers and biweekly clothing giveaways. Inside the mission, people sit at tables or walk around aimlessly, seemingly paying no attention to the woman playing hymns on an old piano. The small men’s room is constantly full, doubling as a changing room and a place to groom. 

Outside, people hide from the cold wind in the doorway while they smoke and socialize. A thin, goateed man who looks to be in his late 30s aggressively paces back and forth on the sidewalk, waving his arms and issuing a profanity-laced threat to “beat anyone’s ass” who messes with him. He finally calms down when someone gives him a cigarette.

Cleaning Windows For 1 Day Or A Hundred Years?

Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich, right, cleans a first-floor window at the Valparaiso campus of Ivy Tech Community College May 25, 2011. Josh Reberg, left and Jacob Hernandez used ladders to get to the second-floor windows. Davich spent the day learning the ropes of window cleaning with the help of employees of Bren-Mark Window Cleaning Service.

Jerry Davich: Five jobs in five days, starting with cleaning windows - Today’s column is the initial installment of my “five jobs in five days” series where I work a few hours at five different occupations to experience the challenges of, ahem, a real job. First up, I join the streak-less ranks of Bren-Mark Window Cleaning service in Valparaiso during a “monster job” at Ivy Tech Community College on the city’s east side.

Jerry Davich

Candy Smith chuckled at my amateur attempts to properly clean a large office “practice window” using a professional mop and squeegee. No matter which technique I used — the horizontal swipe, the vertical swipe or the tricky swirl swipe — I left a streak or two somewhere on the window pane. It was very frustrating. Although I sported an official Bren-Mark T-shirt and tool belt, to hold my sopping-wet mop and bucket, two squeegees and clean-up towels (a white one to clean the sill, a blue one for the pane), washing windows was tougher than it looks from inside an office building. “Sometimes a window just doesn’t like you,” Smith told me sympathetically after I left yet another streak of soapy water on the window near the firm’s Valparaiso office.

Smith, the firm’s operations manager, has been here 11 years after starting as a window cleaner. She knows windows inside and out, and she made it look easy to clean them. Despite popular belief, it doesn’t matter which brand of soap is used, Smith told me. (On this day, we used Palmolive dish soap.) The secret is how to squeegee. “OK, now I’ll show you how we really clean windows” she told me as she swept her squeegee from corner to corner and back around in a swirl motion. “It’s all in the wrist.”

Within five seconds, without lifting her squeegee from the window, she removed every trace of soapy water. Amazing, I told her. “You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” she replied. (I never really did, though.) Some new employees get scared off after the first day, complaining it’s either too hard, too strenuous, too repetitive or too confusing. Others simply don’t return the next day. Still, after a half hour of practice, we headed to the day’s work site, Ivy Tech Community College, on the city’s east side for a “monster job.”

How hard can it be? At Ivy Tech, which is seemingly made from various shapes and sizes of eye-catching glass, I met with Bren-Mark’s owner, Don Markovich. “When an architect draws huge buildings like these, with so much glass, the drawing never has dirty windows,” joked Markovich, a stocky man with thick arms and a no-nonsense attitude. “But it’s our job to make them look like they did in the drawing.” Bren-Mark has experienced a 10 percent growth spurt each of the last two years, an impressive statistic these days for any business. The firm is known for charging top dollar for a high quality job. There are no contracts, per se, just a lot of repeat customers, from both residential and commercial accounts.

“Just about every piece of glass you see will be cleaned at some point by somebody,” Markovich said during a tour of the work site. “Most people think of window cleaners as hanging off high rise buildings or maids on ladders with Windex and paper towels. We are somewhere in the middle.” Some of the firm’s customers get their windows cleaned once a month or even weekly, while others only once a year. But if windows remain dirty for too long, it only makes the job that much harder, especially if the business is located near grimy steel mills.

Josh Reberg cleans windows at the Valparaiso campus of Ivy Tech Community College May 25, 2011. Reberg works for Bren-Mark Window Cleaning Service based in Valparaiso.

 Bren-Mark’s niche is “low-rise” buildings, three stories or below, simply because there aren’t many high-rise buildings in Northwest Indiana. “Once you go over three stories, equipment requirements and cost of insurance jumps dramatically,” he added. Standing outside Ivy Tech’s main building, Markovich handed me a towering “Tucker pole,” a long, heavy extension tool which uses filtered water to clean high-rise windows with a spot-free rinse. Unfiltered water has minerals that leave stains on windows, and steel wool is often used for such stubborn windows, I learned.

He explained that his job takes a certain mix of intelligence, friendliness, persistence, professionalism and good old-fashioned elbow grease. “Cleaning windows is a simple business — it’s not called Bren-Mark Rocket Science — but it is not easy,” Markovich said as I slowly guided the long (and did I say heavy?) pole back and forth across each window. “We have to provide service, without any mistakes or problems, on schedule to hundreds of commercial customers and dozens of residential customers each week. This can total up to thousands of individual windows, even in the extreme cold.”

Not rocket science, but… In addition to using the Tucker pole, I also climbed to the roof of the building to clean outdoor windows overlooking a lobby. With the sun beating down, I worked alongside Josh Reberg, Scott Sliger, and Jacob Hernandez, who showed me the ropes of the job as well as how to use extension ladders to clean second story windows. Bren-Mark workers say they’re often asked, “How hard can it be to clean windows?” “We don’t just spray Windex on a window and wipe it off,” Hernandez told me. “We make it look easier than it is. It took me a few months to get it down.”

Inside the school building, I worked alongside veterans Mary Martin and Marlon Sayles, an older man who’s taught many other professional window cleaners through the years. Together, we stood on a high-lift machine to clean second and third story windows. Sayles didn’t say much so neither did I. My only goal was to not slow him down. Bren-Mark workers routinely begin their work day at 8:30 a.m. and they go home when their list of jobs for the day is done. Some days end earlier than others.

 Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich uses a squeegee to clean a window at the Valparaiso campus of Ivy Tech Community College May 25, 2011. Davich spent the day learning the techniques of window cleaning.

They are paid per job, based on a percentage, with new hires earning 31 percent of the total price and more experienced workers earning 35 percent, Reberg said. This averages between $15 to $20 an hour, depending on their speed, experience and quality of work. An agreed perk of their job is the freedom to work at different locations without having a boss always looking over their shoulder in a (windowless) office. The toughest part of the job is often gaining access to clean windows, and I can vouch for that after straddling a tipsy ladder planted in mushy grass.

Another downside of the job is cleaning off more than merely dirt from windows. For instance, bird droppings, rotten eggs and paintball remnants. “You name it, we’ve seen it all on windows,” Markovich told me. As I cleaned yet another dirty window while wondering how much longer until my lunch hour, I had a minor epiphany: I don’t want to be a professional window cleaner. Or, as they say in the trenches, the job is a pane in the glass.

Springfield janitorial service achieves rare century mark: Springfield janitorial service achieves rare century mark. Witenko Enterprises Inc. began a century ago this year when a man who fled the Ukraine in the late 1800s began washing downtown Springfield windows to make money. Dmitri “Jim” Witenko began in 1911 what became a 100-employee company by going door-to-door offering the service. It was a time when dozens of manufacturing facilities, stores and office buildings populated the city center and beyond; the demand for window cleaning was high, according to current and third-generation president Mike Witenko.

Early on, Dmitri Witenko’s window cleaning service weathered such significant events in human history as the Great Depression and World War I before incorporating formally in the 1930s as the Springfield Window Cleaning Company. Few companies can claim such longevity as Witenko Enterprises, and even fewer can claim a fourth-generation family company. Kristina Witenko, Mike Witenko’s daughter, joined the company in 2005 and currently serves as operations manager. She plans to be the family’s fourth-generation president in the future, she said.

A search by the Clark County Historical Society of 1911 business directories resulted in only a handful of companies known to be operating locally in some fashion today. Companies with recognizable names like Littleton & Rue Funeral Home, International Harvester, Chakeres Theatres, James Leffel Co. and Woeber Mustard join a few others in that select club. As demands declined, Witenko Enterprises found it necessary to fold together some operations and cease others. Employment is down significantly from its peak of nearly 100 workers in the 1970s. “As need disappears, you back off,” said Mike Witenko, who joined the company in 1968. “When need goes down, we have to make a decision (to stop operations).” “Business has always been up and down, but this might be the worst,” Mike Witenko said of the current economic climate.

Staffing now is down to 10, but Mike Witenko said things appear to be turning around. “We’re seeing see good signs coming, but it’s going to take a while to build back up,” he said. Tom Kaplan, Ness Chair in Entrepreneurship and associate professor of business at Wittenberg University, said a long-running family business has a different approach than others. “It’s the stewardship mind-set,” Kaplan said. “It’s the way that you run a business. You’re not looking at meeting the next quarter’s goals. You’re thinking ‘I’ve got grandkids and what do I need to do’ ” to get them and the business ready for the company’s future.

As economic times evolved, so did Witenko Enterprises, launching a host of other service businesses and a venetian blind sales and service division. In 1945 it added window blind sales and service to their list of companies. That chance paid off when Levolor blind company named Springfield Venetian Blind Sales & Service a national distributor. Then, in the 1950s, the window cleaning service added an inside and outside wall cleaning service under the leadership of Dmitri Witenko’s son, George Joe Witenko. That same decade, the company took another chance and added Springfield General Maintenance to their list of services. The division tackled jobs like cleaning the facade of the Clark County Courthouse and cleaning ink from the walls and ceiling of the Springfield News and Springfield Sun’s press room.

The next decade George Joe’s son and Mike Witenko’s brother, then president George Louis Witenko, saw more room for expansion and opened Springfield Janitorial Services. In 1960, the company brought its many divisions together under the umbrella Witenko Enterprises Inc., which exists today mainly as a janitorial service. It reached peak staffing levels of close to 100 in the late 1970s. Said Wittenberg’s Kaplan: “A fourth-generation company is unbelievably rare, and it’s not an accident.”

The Cowboy Window Cleaner

They call him Cowboy (By Dave Bakke): "They call me Cowboy. Cowboy the Window Cleaner,” says Robert McClure. “I can’t hardly walk down the street in this city without someone calling out, ‘Hey, Cowboy!’ ” McClure has been a fixture on those Springfield streets for about 35 years. You might not know his name, but there is a good chance you have seen him. He does windows — cleans them from one side of Springfield to the other. Forty clients or more use him. He cleans the glass at Fairhills Mall, Mel-O-Cream, Capital City Shopping Center, Henry’s Appliances, Qik-n-EZ, Fifth Street Flower Shop, doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, Caritas Bingo Hall, and that’s only a few. Name a place. The Hilton? Yep. He washes both sides of the glass from inside the tallest building in town. “All but the 30th floor,” Cowboy says. “You can’t clean those from the inside, and it’s too dangerous for me to get out there.”

The Hilton calls every year or every other year. It takes Cowboy a month or two to clean the windows on 29 floors. The Hilton is a nice paycheck for him. Other places, not so much. But he makes up for it in volume. When he started washing windows as a student at Lanphier High School, Cowboy never thought he would still be at it today. It was Lanphier where he earned his nickname — he always wore cowboy boots to school. He says his epilepsy made it impossible for him to get hired anywhere after high school. “As soon as I put that down on the application,” Cowboy says, “it’s ‘bye-bye.’ ” Of course, that was long ago. He doesn’t fill out applications anymore. He realized that washing windows was his path. In his early years, he did The Hub and Fishman’s Sporting Goods on Washington Street and Sandy’s Drive-In on North Ninth Street. All of them are gone. “I’ve seen a lot of businesses come and go,” he says.

In the meantime, he has met the rich, the movers and shakers and the regular folks just trying to keep their business’s doors open. Developer Denny Polk? “That’s my buddy.” Mega-Realtor Charlie Robbins? “I knew him.” Hercules Gekas at the legendary Coney Island hot dog shop? “I did their windows for years.” It wasn’t long after Jack Gibson opened Gibby’s Orbits, his restaurant on South Ninth Street, that Cowboy showed up. That’s how he does it — goes to new businesses and makes his pitch. “I told him I clean my own windows,” Jack says, and Gibby’s is practically all windows. “But then he told me about his history and the epilepsy and about how he has cleaned windows all over Springfield for almost 40 years.” The result is that Jack has one less job to do, which is good because he is already the waiter, owner and janitor.

Cowboy starts working as early as 4 a.m. seven days a week. He has a few buildings to clean, and those are done early or on weekends. Because of his epilepsy, someone else has to drive him to jobs. When no one can do that, he walks. “By god, I can walk,” says Cowboy. “I’ve walked this city from one end to the other. I’ve walked it many and many a time.” “He’s a character,” says Pat O’Connor, owner of Fifth Street Flower Shop. Cowboy was born in Alabama, and Frank likes to tease him about that. Cowboy, as you can probably guess, can give as good as he gets. Cowboy says he sometimes draws a crowd when he cleans windows on a busy street. “They must love the way I swing that squeegee around,” he says. “I can wash some windows now, I’m telling you.” And what do you wash them with? “I ain’t tellin’.” Moving on, then …

There are perks to having washed Springfield’s windows for so many years. Sometimes, for example, a dentist will clean Cowboy’s teeth for free in exchange for window washing. The day he cleaned the glass at Gibby’s, Jack gave him a box of his famous mini-donuts. And there are the flowers and that bench in the park. On a warm summer’s day, in the fall, and in the snow, Robert McClure, not Cowboy the Window Cleaner mind you, but Robert McClure, finds a bench in Enos Park and he relaxes. He lights up a cigarette, and he thinks about … her. “I think about her all the time,” he says. He still can’t talk about her without being overcome with emotion. She is Bobbie Jean McClure, his wife. His late wife. “We were married 20 years, somewhere in there,” he says. Bobbie Jean was manager at Coney Island. After she died in 2002, the restaurant closed for a week. Robert still carries in his wallet a cracked and worn memorial for her that the funeral home gave him.

Robert had pictures from their wedding engraved into Bobbie Jean’s gravestone. He goes to Oak Ridge Cemetery to see it almost every day. He told me it’s nobody business if he goes 100 times a day. I am surmising from that that someone might have told him he goes there a little too much. There is a bench in Enos Park. Professionally engraved into it are the words, “In Loving Memory of Bobbie Jean McClure.” I asked him, “How did you get that put on there?” “Friends,” Robert said. Like he says, he knows a lot of people. Sometimes he knows the right ones. That includes Pat O’Connor at Fifth Street Flower Shop, the guy who teases him about being from Alabama. Every week or two, Frank manages to find an extra bouquet of flowers lying around. He gives those flowers to Robert. Robert lays them on Bobbie Jean’s grave. “I loved that woman,” he says through his tears. Still does.

When we were done talking, we walked out of Enos Park. The farther we went, the more Robert vanished and Cowboy returned. I tell you, it was like a window closing.