She stayed enrolled in school until it was just too difficult. Cheerleading, serving on school council, my grandmother, Marjorie Leahy, bused to school from the Porter Hotel in “Portland’s Skid Row” on Southwest Third Avenue and Pine Street.
“It was a crummy hotel with bedbugs,” she wrote in “Good Timber,” a memoir of her childhood she put together with my mother when she was approaching 90 years old. “These were tough times.”
She couldn’t quite hold it together. So my grandmother dropped out of Lincoln High School her senior year in 1943.
She found a job at J.C. Penney to get by, then decided to start anew. So she, her brother Buddy and his friend Tom, who was homeless, boarded a Greyhound to Los Angeles. She asked a taxi cab driver to take them somewhere safe. He drove them to the Alhambra Hotel, where she secured a job in the drugstore, paid in lodging. She’d sneak Buddy and Tom in at night.
That was one of many times that my grandmother started over in her childhood. Unstably housed with her sister, her brother and their mom, who struggled with alcoholism, they were a close family, always on the move. I grew up hearing many of her stories – how she moved from town to town to town along the West Coast as her mom found new boyfriends. How she learned to sew Gibson Girl dresses of white linen from a woman sleeping in a neighboring tent in a migrant worker camp. How she was humiliated when a teacher offered her a coat. They doubled up with relatives, lived in a trailer, moved from mining town to apricot orchard, always trying to get by.
When she was 15, a boyfriend of her mom’s found her housing in exchange for labor – Mother’s Helpers she was called (“Although I was treated well, I had to work hard”). She often tended to her mother.
She tried to hide her poverty, resourceful with style. She and her sister shared one pretty blue skirt by moving the hem up and down. I know people now who, living in shelters, carefully pair their hats with their socks; a man who lives on the streets who saves up to dry-clean collared shirts.
FURTHER READING: Six letters from Sunnyside: Student perspectives on homelessness
While she lived decades ago, some of her story feels contemporary to me. This week and next, kids in this region go back to school, and there are many children who are unstably housed in the way she was, doubled up, or in tents, or in motels, or staying many, many people to a room – falling under the federal definition for homeless students who “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.”
In Portland Public Schools – the district that my grandmother dropped out of more than seven decades earlier, fatigued from the stress of living in a motel – at least 1,000 kids will start the school homeless. Some kids go to great lengths, like my grandmother did, to pass as housed.
FURTHER READING: To make it on the streets, I had to look like you: not homeless (commentary)
My grandmother’s close ties with her siblings helped her resilience. Her older sister, Virgie, sometimes absorbed the hardships so Marjorie and Buddy felt them less. My grandmother was optimistic to her core. In her 30s, she finished that high school degree, and in her 40s, her college degree.
She valued education wholeheartedly, becoming a first-grade teacher in Marcola, a rural community outside Eugene. She was passionate about teaching kids to read, always with a deep understanding of how difficult it was for some of the kids in her classroom whose families struggled to be housed.
FURTHER READING: Teachers get schooled on living with poverty and homelessness
I carry my grandmother with me in my work at Street Roots, often wearing her style. I don her Irish newsboy cap on new-paper Friday, and pin corsages to my clothes, such as the red silk flower she wore on her 90th birthday. I often walk by that Porter Hotel, only blocks from Street Roots, adjacent to the Bijou Cafe and close to where two Street Roots vendors were recently housed. There are photos of the old hotel in the lobby.
I keep her close in this work – her depth, her optimism, her openness toward other people, her love of stories and the long arc of life. So much can happen in the life of a child.
During the last count in the 2017-18 school year, 7,226 students were counted as homeless in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties. I think of them finding their way into classrooms this week, some resourceful and exhausted, attention flicking through crises. Their ability to show up a feat in itself. I dedicate this column to them as they start their school years, with love.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.