If my some unlikely chance you haven’t seen the story of former radio announcer, Ted Williams, who turned drug addict and then homeless guy, the original video taken by Columbus Dispatch videographer Doral Chenoweth III is above. After Chenowith posted the video on the Dispatch’s site, along with a note urging people to pass the video along, the thing went viral and resulted in a trip to the Today Show for Williams plus a slew of job offers,

Let’s hope that Williams keeps his balance through all that is now swirling around him.

He is certainly someone who appears deserving of the second chance that is now coming his way.

On Sunday, the Las Vegas Sun has published Part 3 of LA writer/essayist/documentary filmmaker Rodger Jacobs’ series of essays documenting the descent to the edge of homelessness where he, and his longtime girlfriend, freelance editor Lela Michael, still teeter.

Part 1 and part 2 are worth reading first, if you have not already done so.

Below are some clips from Part 3—but we sure to go to the LV Sun to see the full photo-video package

….It is 4 o’clock on a breezy weekday afternoon. As I settle onto a stool at the horseshoe-shaped bar at the sports book at the Fiesta on North Rancho, a dull ache in my arthritic joints warns me of impending winter. Enduring another season of Southern Nevada’s harsh wintry wind and frigid biting cold is a prospect I am prepared to move mountains to avoid.

Even more stinging has been the reaction by many readers to my first essay on being homeless in Las Vegas — mean-spirited remarks that have fueled my decision to leave town. We had arrived here from California in 2007 to care for my ailing mother, at a time when my freelance writing business was following a trajectory parallel to the recession. After her death, we moved to an apartment for two years and then to a North Las Vegas rental home. But we couldn’t afford the cost of maintaining the house that we were contractually saddled with, and in September, under threat of eviction, we moved to a small two-room affair at Budget Suites. Along the way, we have shed most of our possessions; the rest is in a 10-by-10 storage unit, waiting to be redeemed.

We had hoped that by now we would have returned to Los Angeles. But Lela, my girlfriend, and I are still here; relocating even just to L.A. requires more capital than we have. We get by on my Social Security Disability payments of $926 a month (after a $100 monthly deductible for Medicare) and occasional freelance writing and editing assignments. At the urging of Three Square, where Lela volunteers weekly, she recently applied for federal grocery assistance.

We did receive generous donations from a few readers after I first wrote about our homelessness — money that has been spent on groceries, rent, transportation, laundry, medical expenses and IRS payments…

[LARGE SNIP]

If not for those who were generously “moved to action,” our transition from lease holders to a more uncertain lifestyle could have been a much uglier story. And there has been forward momentum since the second installment of this series ran in late September: A colleague has offered to underwrite the cost of movers when we are ready; my story has also gained a lot of traction in foreign media.

And two publishers in New York have expressed interest in a book proposal, “Shakespeare’s Hand is Missing,” based on this series of articles and features I have penned elsewhere on the marginalization of writers and artists in our current culture (think George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” with a contemporary spin). But to finish the book, I need to get back to L.A., where I have a support network and greater opportunities for supplemental income to sustain the writing. When the move can become a reality is uncertain. As Orwell writes in the aforementioned work, “The great redeeming feature of poverty is it annihilates the future.”

[BIG SNIP]

That’s the great, anxiety-producing paradox we’re confronted with constantly: How to meet our daily needs while we must remain in Las Vegas (where we don’t want to be and, according to many who commented, where we are not wanted) and how to set aside enough money to carry us across the desert and into a suitable living space with reserves for deposits and at least two months of rent.

But potential is the most elastic of human qualities and as has happened repeatedly in the past, my skill and potential as a writer will expand to meet my needs. It’s not a question of “how” or “if” but when.

Still and all, Rodger has managed to write—and write well—during this period, working on a book, these essays, plus whatever other paying projects he can land.

On a good day, writing is difficult business. When you’re living on the edge it becomes far, far harder. But Roger Jacobs keeps writing and the rest of us benefit.

Meanwhile back in LA County, as it rained, the Union Rescue Mission bus drove around scooping up homeless LA residents who normally sleep on the street. Homeless advocate, Mark Horvath, tweeted (as he helped) that he saw noone else out there but URM trying to get Skid Row people out of the rain.

The URM’s executive director Andy Bales is the real deal.

iPhone photo by Mark Horvath at Hardly Normal

Photo of Rodger and Lela, by Sam Morris of the Las Vegas Sun

It was late September when we last checked with LA journalist/author/essayist Rodger Jacobs who, together with his girlfriend, freelance editor Lela Michael, has been battling homelessness.

He wrote very candidly and painfully about his experience in two long essays in the Las Vegas Sun during the early fall.  At the end of this week the sun will publish installment #3.

In the meantime, Rodger told me that he has received a pile of emails, Facebook messages, and the like, from other writer friends who are facing similar fiscal disasters and who praise him for his courage in “coming out” about his homelessness. They are afraid to tell anyone about their own situations, they say. Many mention the dauntingly vicious online commentary that his homeless essays engendered.

Frustrated at being cast as the point man for a new class of “starving artists,” Rodger has written on his blog, Carnytown, about what he’d been hearing from others.

Here are some snippets:

Since my New Homeless series began running in the Las Vegas Sun in September I have received literally dozens of e-mails, letters, and private messages on social networks (Facebook, Twitter) from colleagues in the creative sector – many of them complete strangers – who are all drifting in the same leaky boat, writing to thank me for my “courage” in telling my story as a writer whose income and sheer survival has been challenged by these hard economic times. These letters are coming from your friends and neighbors who wish to remain anonymous, for the most part.

“I’m encouraged by your bravery in being ‘out’ as a homeless person,” an east coast political columnist wrote me in October. “I am not out — I get enough hate mail for writing op-eds in the local paper. I haven’t been willing to deal with the kind of responses you received after your first piece in the LV Sun. I’ve made bad decisions along the way, but does that mean I should get put out on an ice floe?”

Citing the media attention that I have received from TV4 Sweden, Belgian Public Television, and La Presse in Montreal, she goes on to say: “It’s interesting that European and Canadian media aren’t afraid of your story, but U.S. media are avoiding it like the plague. I know from listening to NPR that Wall Street is good, therefore the economy is recovering. Very little of real life is reflected anywhere in the U.S. media. It’s disheartening, to say the least.”

The story that this talented writer is afraid to go public with is one that I am reading more and more often in my e-mail inbox:

“I’m having my own homeless experience here in —,” she explains. “It’s a long story that includes me spending 2009 as a caregiver to my husband who was dying of cancer. I’ve been out of full time work for almost three years. I recently moved to a trailer on a friend’s property, but I don’t get cell phone reception there, and it’s taking a while to get an internet hookup. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Meanwhile Rodger is still balancing on his own financial tightrope. He writes,

As of this evening we have less than $20 to our name, most of those funds on Pay Pal; tomorrow morning Lela has to take the bus to the welfare office on Rancho to sign paperwork to complete her application for SNAP benefits (this proactive move instigated by her superiors at the Threesquare food bank where she volunteers once a week in an effort to “pay it forward” to the Vegas Valley residents who have assisted us this far); after that trip to the welfare office there will be no funds left for her monthly bus pass so we have no idea how she will get to Threesquare on Friday or how I will pick up my prescription from my doctor’s office on Tuesday.

“If we don’t have $208 for rent on Wednesday,” I snapped at Lela this evening in a mild explosion of repressed stress, “it won’t matter about the goddamn bus pass because we will be locked out of our room and sleeping on the sidewalk.”

We are flat broke. We are the proverbial “starving artists” that the Otis Report hoped to debunk. We’re out there and there are thousands and thousands more like us in the night.

More soon.

And more posts on other topics later this morning.

Photo by Sam Morris, Las Vegas Sun

On Sunday, the Las Vegas Sun ran the second installment of the story of LA writer, Rodger Jacobs who, like an ever-increasing number of people in America, has been teetering at the edge of homelessness.

In this installment, Rodger— together with his girlfriend, freelance editor Lela Michael—moves from the rental house from which they were evicted, into a week-to-week rental at the Budget Suites of America. The couple hopes to stay at the Budget Suites while they attempt to gather the wherewithal to move back to LA on or around Nov. 15.

In LA, while the cost of living may be higher, Rodger writes that he and Lela have more “reliable social network [in LA] and greater opportunities in general.”

Gathering the needed funds is, of course, the challenge. But the move to the Budget Suites has visibly buoyed Rodger’s spirits. Both he and Lela have picked up some freelance gigs. He has even managed to get his hair cut, the hair cutter a woman at Walmart who confesses to him that she was recently homeless herself.

THE SLINGS & ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS COMMENTERS

When you read Part 2, you’ll note that the LV Sun has now instituted a new system of comment moderation. This is due in large part to the flood of unusually vituperative comments the paper received after they ran Part I of Rodger’s story,

One of the things I found astonishing about the hostile comments is that so many people focused with blind fury on the small personal details of Rodger’s dilemma, as if they themselves were entirely foible and error free.

Many commenters also seemed outraged that he’d had the nerve to write about his troubles at all, as if the writing itself constituted some kind of whining, when actually the narratives were examples of skillful and courageous storytelling, particularly in that Rodger made no attempt to sanitize his predicament, but simply told his story as it was, without literary Photoshopping, so to speak.

It should also be noted that, by writing his story for the LV Sun, Rodger was behaving proactively. He was using his talents to fashion the scary circumstances he was living through into an income-producing piece of work—which also has the advantage of shining a light on a larger issue.

ANGER AS AMULET

These are uneasy times. One in every seven Americans is now living below the poverty line, according to figures released earlier this month. Unemployment rates remain in double digits, with no sign yet of dropping. Kids coming out of college are now routinely doing free internships for extended periods because the paying jobs they assumed would be theirs have vanished.

So maybe all these angry commenters are ranting to keep their own fears at bay. But to do so, they must convince themselves that Rodger’s difficulties are of his own making. That way they can more easily believe the fiction that they could never, ever wind up in a similar predicament.

It is a form of whistling in the dark.

Anyway, read Part 2.

And let us hope that Rodger’s still-precarious situation continues to improve…..and that Rodger continues to share his progress with us in writing.

PS: Joseph Mailander has written more about Rodger Jacobs and the comments here.

Today, LA Weekly’s J. Patrick Coolican writes about the startlingly divergent reactions to LA writer Rodger Jacobs’ account of his slide toward homeless.

Coolican rightly notes that it is probably simplistic and unfair to draw any kind of conclusion about the differences between Los Angeles and Las Vegas based on the fact that one set of reactions seems to cleave to LV, the other in LA. Then again, says Coolican….

Here’s how the post opens:

Sunday the Las Vegas Sun published a first-person essay by Rodger Jacobs, a longtime L.A.-based journalist, playwright and documentary film producer, who moved to Las Vegas to care for an ailing mother, who has since died. The simple yet powerful headline: “I am frightened.” He describes how through poor health, the Great Recession, a horrible run of luck (not the gambling kind) and a few bad decisions, he and his girlfriend Lela were on the verge of homelessness, with eviction coming Tuesday. His opening exhortation seemed simple enough: Citing the classics, he asks the reader to walk a mile in his shoes. And so the people of Las Vegas did. And they basically spat on him.

Here’s a small sampling of the venom, which careens from finger wagging to beating him over the head with their conservative politics to outright hostility:

For someone who can write in a very moving way, Rodger sure has made some poor choices.

In many parts of the world this man would be rich.

I think there must be more to this story.

The guy has to stop buying cigarettes for starters….its time for a career change.

What a sob story. His girlfriend needs to get her butt out to McDonald’s and find a job.

Come on. Bad choices were made all along that got you to this point.

And a personal favorite, for its religious meaning: After reading the essay and then attending church, the commenter writes: Then I went to church, but thought about Rodger’s situation some more…The sympathy I felt after reading this story the first time has drained away, and I have read it twice more since.

No doubt, they made a bad decision or two, and sure, the nicotine addiction is a bit off-putting, but for the love of God, they’re about to be homeless.

Of course, it’s impossible to know if these commenters are in Las Vegas, but they are among the first of the hundreds of comments and were likely regular local readers of the Sun and so probably many, if not most of them. are local.

The drubbing got so bad that the paper’s editor had to jump into the comments and defend the guy. Jacobs tried to defend himself as well.

Then something happened this week — in L.A…..

Read the rest here.

WitnessLA coverage of Rodger Jacobs’ story may be found here and here.

PS: It also might be tempting to pass off the opposing reactions to conservative versus liberal. But having just spent nearly a month in the conservative-leaning Flathead County of Montana, where I retreat for part of most summers, I cannot possibly imagine most of my Montana neighbors reacting in any way but with kindness.

(Okay, yeah, knowing Montanans, they likely would have trotted out a few pithy personal opinions as they helped, but they would have helped, no question—and no strings.)

Monday night I got an email from writer Rodger Jacobs in which he delivered good news about his seemingly imminent plunge into homelessness that I posted about Monday.

His email read in part:

“I think we’re going to be okay, Celeste, for a few months at least; some kind (and mostly anonymous) benefactors have stepped forward. We rented a room at the Budget Suites Extended Stay hotel on Rancho this afternoon — with media in tow — and it is very conveniently located to shopping, affordable restaurants, and (this is what thrilled me) both a Barnes and Noble and Borders Books only three miles away. The room is about the size of your basic studio apartment with fridge, stove, microwave, basic cable, and wireless internet (five bucks a week).

As my friend Rudy Wurlitzer is fond of saying, keep the wind in your sails even when there is no wind…

Oh — one more thing I forgot to mention: in light of our circumstances (and the media presence), the Budget Suites waived all deposits for us, which saved us about $75.

Meanwhile, in the Sun’s comment section and around the web, the reactions to Rodger’s essay swung wildly between two extremes. There were those who opined with varying degrees of disdainful fury that Rodger’s situation merely evidenced some kind of failure of character and will.

More often, however, those who commented were empathetic—evidently figuring that, in this economy, given a few really bad reversals of fortune, all too many people could find themselves facing similarly scary circumstances.

Rodger tells me he will have a follow-up essay in the very near future–which I will, of course, post as soon as it is available.

Rodger Jacobs, a wonderfully erudite, warm and funny California writer, author and documentary producer is teetering on the edge of homelessness and is frightened of what life will hold if he falls off that edge—a possibility that, at the moment, is looking all but inevitable.

At the request of editors at the Las Vegas Sun who know him , Jacobs wrote an account of his situation, which the Sun printed on Sunday.

I knew Rodger had moved to Las Vegas and was having financial trouble because of a worsening physical condition. But I didn’t know things had gotten this fiscally perilous until Rodger dropped me a note Sunday night to alert me to the story in the Sun.

Below you’ll find the editor’s note and the beginning of Rodger’s piece. It is worth taking the time to read the whole thing—and then to take an extra moment to send him whatever good wishes you can. (However, if you have some freelance writing assignments to spare, send those instead.)

Editor’s note: Think “homeless” and most minds turn to scenes of disheveled men and women living in makeshift tents along Foremaster Lane near downtown Las Vegas. Many of them have adopted homelessness as their lifestyle. But the Great Recession has created the new homeless, people with good work histories who are victims of unemployment and foreclosures. We won’t necessarily find them sleeping on a downtown sidewalk. We asked Rodger Jacobs to tell his story, in his own words.

As I write this, taking a brief late night respite from packing books into boxes, I am just days away from an uncertain future, a Black Tuesday when the Sword of Damocles will, under legal edict, fall upon my head; and, as the ancient Greek and Roman tale of Dionysius and Damocles urges, I invite you to walk a mile in my shoes for a few brief moments.

Within a matter of days I am going to become one of the more than 13,000 homeless people living in Clark County and, frankly, I am frightened.

I am a 51-year-old professional writer; throughout my 20-year career I have been an award-winning feature documentary producer (“Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes” and multiple educational documentaries), a trade and arts magazine journalist, a successful playwright (“Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller”), a true crime author and a literary event producer. For the past two years, I have enjoyed my role as a book and literature columnist for Pop Matters, a popular online journal of cultural criticism.

But in the larger scheme of things, my credentials are utterly meaningless. In less than two weeks, my girlfriend and I will be without a home in a town where we have no friends, no family, and apparently no safety net to catch us when we fall.

I have been medically disabled for the past eight years; my primary source of income is my monthly Social Security disability payment of $926 and whatever supplemental income I can earn within the $1,000 monthly limit, but with jobs in the freelance market few and far between in the new economy, several months often pass without additional income.

My girlfriend, Lela, and I relocated to Las Vegas in 2007 from San Francisco to care for my terminally ill mother; the plan at the time was to liquidate my mother’s meager estate upon her passing, see to her funeral arrangements and return to California. But by the time my mother succumbed to her illness two years ago this week, the recession had hit, jobs for myself and Lela — a freelance editor — were scarce, my health was worsening, and we found ourselves effectively stuck in Southern Nevada. We were living a hand-to-mouth existence, with no savings and uncertain where the next month’s rent was coming from — let alone money for groceries, transportation, prescription and doctor co-pays and medical supplies not covered by Medicare…..

Read the rest.

The photo, by Sam Morris of the Las Vegas Sun, was taken as Rodger talked to one of his editors to see if he could expedite a check he is owed. Reportedly, the editor wasn’t able to do anything about speeding up payment.

UPATE: Commenter sbl pointed out that the blog Griffith Park Wayist has information as to how someone can help Rodger if anyone has a mind to do so. They’ve also posted the video that the Sun made of Rodger and his circumstance, which is assuredly worth watching.

Here are two more stories from the Boot Camp projects from the Annenberg Master’s in Specialized Journalism Program.

The two featured below each take different angles on Skid Row, the 55-square block area just east of downtown Los Angeles where one of the nation’s largest homeless populations resides.

Homelessness is one of our city’s most pressing problems. In the present economy that fact truer than ever. Yet it is a problem that is so complex and difficult to solve that, after a while, many of us simply tune the issue out. It his challenging, therefore, for a reporter to find a way to focus the reader/viewer’s attention on this important topic.

Christin Davis addressed the challenge by looking at one of Skid Row’s expanding demographics: single dads, which she examines through the lens of a newly-homeless father who sees Skid Row as a helpful place that may be used as a “great stepping stone” back to stability.

(Note: Kristin’s report first appeared on Neon Tommy.)

Jussi Jormanainen’s approach to humanizing the homeless issue was to do the first of what he imagined as a series of personal portraits, with the pilot portrait focusing on Skid Row’s best known (and arguably best-liked) cop, LAPD Officer Deon Joseph.

REPORTERS’ BIOS

Christin Davis, B.A. in Journalism from California State University, Fullerton (2008). As an undergraduate, she lived abroad each summer and spent her time teaching English, running kids’ camps, and facilitating soccer game showings. Through her work with The Salvation Army’s magazine Caring, she has covered stories abroad, including The Salvation Army’s community involvement in the 2006 World Cup in Berlin and on their involvement in the education system in Hong Kong. Additionally, she has overseas Journalism experience in New Zealand, Romania, Scotland, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Italy. As the managing editor for Caring, she continues to travel for news stories while maintaining responsibility for all phases of editing and production of the magazine. Davis lives in Long Beach, California.

Jussi Jormanainen, Master’s Degree Studies in Journalism from University of Tampere in Finland (2000). Since 1999, he has been a freelance director and documentary director for the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) where he has directed and helped to film, edit, and produce over 50 documentaries or documentary series. He has worked as a freelance television reporter with MTV3 and as a freelance news reporter with Finland’s national newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. Also, he lectures and leads workshops on screenwriting for television and visual storytelling at the University of Tampere. Jormanainen speaks Swedish and Italian and resides in Helsinki, Finland.

By the way, I was on vacation when the LA Times ran its wonderful four-part series on Project 50,
the LA County initiative sponsored by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, to find and house the 50 most at risk Skid Row residents. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and take a look.