Archive for June, 2011

Lyn Riddle

On being a father

by Lyn Riddle

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Jun
23

There were inflatable bouncy houses and a magician.

A guy handling all sorts of exotic animals like a hissing cockroach and an albino python.

Lots of kids, too, at this celebration the day before father’s day in Greenville.

Not as many dads, though.

But it’s a start, a new initiative to bring absent dads back into the lives of their children, sponsored by the Greenville Housing Authority.

About 250 people showed. It had an almost circus-like quality with bbq and kids laughing and grandma hazing the magician.

The underside was the serious business of kids without dads.

A representative of the Upstate Fathers Coalition was there to explain what the organization could do as a mediator between Family Court and a dad behind on child support payments.

Also on hand at Westview Homes were folks from Job Corps, Greenville Mental Health, Kool Smiles Pediatric Dentistry, and The Greenville Workforce Investment Board / Personal Pathways To Success.

“We want to remove any barrier as to why a father is absent,” said Nyroba B. Leamon, the REACH Youth Coordinator and Case Manager for the housing authority.

Leamon used to work as a cop in Spartanburg. He worked in Greenville County’s  alternative school. He’s the founder of Today’s Antioch Fellowship in Greer.

The one constant through what he calls his journeyman career is working with kids.

And at the housing authority, he says, one of the biggest problems for kids is many – no most – don’t have their dad around.

“Mothers are doing an excellent job,” he said. “But the reality is for a young man and a young woman there are some things only a father can teach.”

And not having that influence – and feeling unloved or unwanted – manifests itself in so many ways – poor grades, low self esteem, getting in trouble.

He said he asked a 16-year-old girl who lives in one of the Housing Authority units if her dad was coming to the father’s day event. She said no. He didn’t care about her. Every time she reaches out to him, he rebuffs her.

“You could hear the pain in her voice,” Leamon said.

The girl is an OK student, but could be a great student if she didn’t have to spend time thinking her dad didn’t love her.

His role, Leamon said, is to encourage her to keep reaching out, which will allow him and a vast support system to reach the father.

Leamon grew up in a housing project, as did his wife. But they benefited from both of their parents being in the home, he said.

Leamon believes the vast majority of absentee father chose that route not because they don’t care but because of life circumstances: a dead-end job that doesn’t cover his bills, back child support he cannot pay that could bring arrest at any moment, bad parenting that causes a man think it’s not his responsibility to raise a child, drugs.

A society of greed and prosperity creates in some people the desire to make the quick buck by selling drugs instead of working a legitimate eight-hour day.

“I’m not excusing it, but drugs is a status,” he said. “There are many who have sequenced from selling drugs.”

A new and better life begins with education. And days like last Saturday, when the mid-day heat beat down on government housing in Greenville, South Carolina, and kids laughed and giggled in the arms of their daddys.

“It starts with a change of the mind,” Leamon said. “How we think about things determines how we act.”

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Lyn Riddle

Remembering Max Heller

by Lyn Riddle

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Jun
19

The day I met Max Heller – 30-something years ago – is one I recount to almost every journalism class I teach at Furman University.

It was a defining moment in my career.

I was not long out of college, working for the now-defunct Greenville Piedmont, the gutsy afternoon paper that competed fiercely with its sister The Greenville News.

Assigned to cover Greenville city government, I trooped across Main Street for a meeting with the mayor, Max Heller. His top-floor City Hall office overlooked a dying Main Street.

Store by store, retailers chose to flee downtown in search of the promise of the 1970s mall frenzy. Few treetops were apparent. Main Street was four lanes.

The mayor told me his story of coming to America, one step ahead of the Nazis thanks to a Greenville woman who arranged for someone to sponsor him. I don’t remember the exact amount but I know he had a few dollars in his pocket. And he had a work ethic as strong and straight as Palmetto tree.

He swept floors at Piedmont Shirt Co. He didn’t say this but it was apparent in his demeanor and language. In Austria, his family was prosperous. They owned a company. He was a member of a private gym, where he was a champion wrestler. And in America, he swept floors.

He pressed on, became general manager at Piedmont, co-founded another shirt company, sold his interest then founded his own shirt company. Max always had nice shirts.

Decades passed and he sold the company to dedicate his life to public service. Elected to City Council in 1969, he ran for mayor and began his term in 1971.

He’d been in office six years when I met him. He had a vision for downtown that made me think he was Greenville’s own Walt Disney. At that point, the vision had not taken root, but I knew it would and I was grateful to be watching. I knew it would be a fun ride.

At the end of the interview – Max actually spent more time asking about me than telling his story – he walked me to the door. The words he spoke then are what I tell my Furman students.

He said, “I want you to know, everything I tell you will be true, but everything that is true I won’t tell you.”

I responded, “And, Mayor, it’s that last part I’m going to be trying to find out.”

He said, “Fair enough.”

That, in the most succinct form, describes the relationship between a journalist and a source. The “fair enough” belief, though, comes from so few people in public life these days.

But Max Heller understood the value of a free press. He also knew how to be a leader, how to inspire others.

I am sure he was not happy when I broke the news that the Hyatt Corp. was going to build a hotel on Main Street and that it would be the centerpiece of a renewed downtown. Or the other stories that followed about Main Street such as giving voice to the people who thought narrowing the street to two lanes folly.

But he never said.

It was never boring covering Max Heller.

And when he left office, I was not too far behind in asking for another beat.

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Lyn Riddle

On remembering, and moving on

by Lyn Riddle

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Jun
6

On a day when a $100 million project was announced for a Main Street tract that proved pivotal in the life of Leola Robinson-Simpson, she was working away at her desk at Greenville Technical College.

The site once held a Woolworth five and dime, where Robinson-Simpson and dozens of other teens staged a sit-in almost every week for two and a half years. They didn’t want to sit at the crowded Negro lunch counter in the back of the store any more.

Many of Robinson-Simpson’s fellow protestors attended Wednesday’s announcement that an eight-story retail-office tower would be built there. But Robinson-Simpson preferred to stay away.

“Main Street got a piece of me, 100 pounds of flesh when I was at a tender age,” she said. “I’ve done my part.”

She holds those memories close, all these many years later.

Greenville’s Main Street in the 1960s was a busy place – movie theaters, hotels, all manner of retailers, banks. And it was a place of division. White and black water fountains, entrances, waiting rooms. The public pool was closed to blacks as was the library. At Kress, a block from Woolworth’s, black patrons had to take their meals from a side door.

The first sit-in at Woolworth’s came in the spring of 1960. Robinson-Simpson was there. She and the others sat quietly at the white’s only counter in the front of the store until asked to leave. They returned the next week and the next.

“Once the statement was made, we left,” she said.

In time, when it became obvious their statement was not being heard, they waited until the police were called. Robinson-Simpson was 15 the first time she was arrested. She spent a week in youth detention.

As a youth leader for the NAACP, she traveled the state and was arrested protesting at the State House in Columbia, in Rock Hill, Raleigh, twice more in Greenville.

The arrests weren’t working so they appealed to the City Council. It was after Robinson-Simpson left for college, first in North Carolina, then in New York, that the lunch counter was integrated. It took white business leaders sitting down with the civil rights leaders to make it happen.

“We had no doubt change was going to come,” Robinson-Simpson said. “We felt this was the time and we went forward.”

She went on to work as a floor clerk at New York Hospital, then set up tutoring programs at the Greenville Urban League and Greenville Tech. In 1996 she was elected to the Greenville County School Board, where she’s served as a voice for all children who in some manner might not have as big a voice as others.

This is her last term on the board.

“It’s healthy to pass the mantle,” she said. “There’s one young lady I’m trying to push into running.”

Robinson-Simpson never believed the Woolworth’s property should be left as some sort of shrine. The store had been empty from the mid-1990s until it was torn down last year, and had become dilapidated.

“We don’t want to stand in the way of progress,” she said.

What matters is that the statue paying tribute to Sterling High School, which served the African American population until it burned down in the 1970, remains at the corner of Washington and Main. On Wednesday, Mayor Knox White told the crowd the site was sacred for the African American community and, to loud applause, said the statue would not be moved.

Robinson-Simpson believes Greenville would never have emerged from its small-town textile cocoon without the civil rights movement and the changes it brought. The Sterling statue is there for everyone who wants to acknowledge how far the community has come in the past 50 years.

“We need to preserve the markers of who we are and the growth that’s taken place,” she said. “It keeps us grounded.”

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Lyn Riddle

On living life, no matter the challenges

by Lyn Riddle

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Jun
5

It is our tendency as journalists to celebrate those who come in first.

But sometimes the one who comes in last has the best story.

And that was so in the Stars and Stripes Challenge, held last Sunday to raise money for cancer research and its victims.

Jana Morse was the last bicyclist to cross the finish line. She’s a 44-year-old internist who before Sunday had ridden no more than 45 miles at a time.

She took on the 100-mile challenge, a grueling ride from Gateway Park in Travelers Rest to Camp Spearhead to Campbell’s Covered Bridge to Dacusville and back to the park. Hills, mountains, flatland, the ultimate biking challenge.

Morse said she signed up simply because she wanted to help the cause. Her husband, Hywel, has been diagnosed with cancer twice, in December 2009 of leukemia and last October he unwent surgery – she calls it a seek and destroy mission – after a knot in his jaw was found to be malignant.

“I’ll do anything to raise money for cancer,” she said. “But when I signed up it was 70 degrees.”

Last Sunday it was in the 90s. She missed a rest stop at about 30 miles and by 50 she had severe cramping in her legs. She was becoming dehydrated but as a doctor knew the signs and knew just how far she could push herself. She’d been pedaling since 7:30 a.m. It was well past noon, and all the other racers had finished.

“We had heard this lady was out there,” said Kevin Dunn, the race organizer.

The sweeper vehicle, sent to pick up cones and make sure everyone is off the course, found her at about 90 miles. Inside the car was a medic and a coach. And the coach just happened to have his bike and gear.

USA Cycling coach John Williams rode with her the last 10 miles. He offered information about what the course ahead looked like and, perhaps most important encouragement.

When they rolled across the finish line at about 4 p.m., the dozen or so race volunteers still there, all cried.

“I had to walk away,” Dunn said. Three girls gave her roses. Her husband and their son, Timmy, were there.

By then, all the folks waiting for Morse had heard her story.

It’s not only the uncertainty and fear that cancer brings, but also that the couple has lost two children to a rare genetic malady called Vici syndrome. This syndrome is so rare the Morse children were the seventh and eighth children in the world to be diagnosed with it. Most patients live no more than a year, some as long as three.

Tomas, the eldest, and Carys, the youngest, were never able to walk or talk. Some days they suffered hundreds of seizures. Eventually they could not swallow. They had heart problems.

The syndrome is a lifetime of hospitals and dashed dreams. Timmy does not have the syndrome.

“Our vacation home was Greenville Hospital System,” Morse said.

Tomos defied the odds and lived for eight and a half years.

“We’re stubborn,” Morse said. During the ice storm of 2006, the Morses lost power and moved in with her brother. When they returned home, they got Tomos out of the car and he was dead.

Carys, with the same platinum blond hair and porcelain skin as her brother and other Vici syndrome patients, died in her sleep last October, two weeks after her father’s cancer surgery. Hywel had quit work as a chemical engineer to stay home with her. He nursed her even as he went through chemotherapy, which put the leukemia in remission.

And that – all those life challenges – was what she was riding for last Sunday.

“A lot of people are dealing with stuff like this and they want to hide from it,” Dunn said. “She didn’t want to hide. She was a zest for life.”

“Remission is not a cure,” she said. “I’m not going to lose anyone else.”

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