Henry’s Story

Henry has come a long way. He grew up in a home where his father beat him and put wine in his baby bottle to pacify him. Taking to the streets at 12 was not much different from living in a house with one room, no phone, no TV and no heat. A rebellious teenager in the late 60s and early 70, he was attracted to drugs, the civil rights struggles and the anti-war movement. Work for the disenfranchised began with his activism in the 60s and the homeless cause became his “calling,” a justification for his existence.

In September 1991, he enrolled in an adult education and technical center to pursue the field of Building Trades Maintenance. He hoped that this trade might be a viable vocation to help his cause. Then, as Henry says:

“Due to my schooling, everything has changed. I mean, totally everything!” … I continued doing my work at the state and national level with the homeless but sort of got tired of that and moved into working here in my own neighborhood as the project coordinator which I’m really excited about. It was a lot of work, but it has a lot of rewards, not monetary rewards, but a lot of rewards.

So here I am as the project coordinator, working in our neighborhood, trying to make our neighborhood a better place to live for everybody and a better place to work. I enjoy it. One of our city baseball fields which is used by our little league which is part of the Athletic Association has a field called Young Field. Instead of letting it go, we decided to work diligently to make it a nicer place. I worked with [a] Councilwoman who is a personal friend of mine and a personal friend of the group, to get some funding to have the field completely redone. We put a concession stand up there, we had it completely fenced it, we brought 140 tons of play dirt in to redo the infield which was given to us through the Public Works Department. We’re real excited…The completion date should be soon.

One of the other projects that we’re really proud about is on May 20, 2000, [our] Civic Group with the help of Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and [the] Councilwoman, we were able to put in our own neighborhood garden. There were several of them placed throughout the entire city… We have never had one. I took it under wing, and I now am the actual caretaker of the garden. May 20, we had some volunteers on a cold, misty, rainy morning. We had hot coffee, we had refreshments down there, and we had some very fine volunteers. It’s in and it’s beautiful.

Another project is we’re working on complete clean up and the beautification of our business district and our main streets. I worked on Operation Clean Sweep with the city …and they asked me to put together a packet of work that I thought was necessary for some of the things we needed around here. When I put this packet together, they said, “Boy, he really did his homework”. I got them to do street cleanings and paving, and paint the fire hydrants. Then I got some volunteers of our own and we went out and we worked right along with the city. We set up mobile command here at the office. It was a very beautiful day and it worked out very nice. I had some fine volunteers. Again, they went up to Young Field which was my big project and they did some of the hillside, and we had some people do some city steps, and they walked through the area and picked up debris and stuff like that. It was a one day project, but it was a very successful one.