Issue #33, September 1996

A week ago at this time I was boarding a jet to Chicago, for the very first annual North American Street Newspaper Summit.This was a very intensive weekend conference, with representatives of street papers from all over the U.S. and Canada.

I am still in the process of digesting and sorting out my impressions of the heady experience. But I can tell you it was wonderful, a uniquely memorable event, and in some way it has changed my life forever. I am now part of a continental association of journalists, all of whom are working to provide a voice for the homeless. You'll be hearing more about it in time.

I want to express my thanks to all the people who helped and encouraged me to go to Chicago as the sole representative from Eugene, and who gave me such a fine reception.

THE "GRATE SOCIETY" LEGACY
Issue #34, October 1996
Since I returned from the North American Street Newspaper Summit which took place in Chicago in August, I have been watching for reports on this conference in the other street papers I receive in the mail, to see how their impressions compare with mine. The first such report so far has come from Seattle's
Real Change. It was entitled "Good News from Chicago" and was presumably written by director Timothy Harris, though his name wasn't there. The Houseless Journal is mentioned in one paragraph:

"One thing the Chicago gathering made clear to everyone is that there is no one way to run a street newspaper. Papers ranged from Chicago's
Streetwise, which has a monthly circulation of 130,000 and a staff or more than a dozen, to Eugene's Houseless Journal, a stapled xerox affair written and produced entirely by one homeless woman..."

There was one innacuracy there: the newsletter isn't
written entirely by me. There are other contributors in every issue, though my editorials have tended to dominate a lot. But I did appreciate the mention.... Tim Harris was instrumental in seeing to it that I got there, using one of United Airlines' donated plane tickets, and he also asked me to be one of the speakers.

There is a history behind all of this that goes back several years...

I first knew of Timothy Harris as the editor of a Boston publication called
Street magazine, in the latter 1980's when I lived in Boston. I hadn't met him yet, but had seen the magazine had a lot of stuff about homelessness. So one fine day I sent Tim an article I'd written about some of my homeless friends being harassed by the police....

..."The Grate Society" (the title of the article) referred to the fact that these people slept on heating grates. But for some reason Tim didn't like this story and refused to publish it. And my friends continued to get harassed by the cops and I got more frustrated, so I continued harassing Tim with phone calls and letters reminding him of the urgency of this matter. After I'd beaten him over the head in this fashion for about two years (no kidding--that's what it took!) he finally started the Homeless Civil Rights Project as part of the organization he worked for called Jobs With Peace. This project was created specifically to address the issue of police abuse against the homeless. I started working with them in March of 1991, collecting affidavits from homeless people about their run-ins with cops.

Then a few months later I became homeless myself. I was camping out in Cambridge at night and hanging out in the Jobs With Peace office during the day. A lot of those days I didn't have anything particular to do, so Tim kept trying to find projects for me. One day he sat me down at one of their IBM computers and showed me how to make a flyer. I had never used a computer before, so he gave me a few relatively simple lessons. Then he told me he had an ulterior motive for teaching me this stuff: he wanted me to start a newsletter for the homeless. (By this time
Street had long been defunct.) I liked that idea well enough. One day I asked him to show me how to use WordPerfect because I felt an article coming on; that was simple enough to do. But still I procrastinated about starting the actual newsletter. Tim kept prodding me, saying, "I mean, Bridget, you don't have anything better to do. You just sit around here all day being bored out of your skull!" I was a little put off by the bluntness of that statement, but I realized he was right. So then I started seriously collecting material for the newsletter, which I called the Homeless Times. After I'd typed it all up, Tim showed me how to do layout and I put together the first issue in August 1991.

The newsletter got an extremely good reception from homeless and non-homeless people alike, and now I had enough momentum going that I easily put out a second, third and fourth issue in rapid succession. But after that the momentum died down, as the time was nearing for me to leave Boston with my camping partner Rick and start a new life in Oregon. I was determined to use my newly-acquired skills to start another homeless newsletter wherever we landed.

We eventually ended up in Eugene after a very abortive sojourn in Portland and elsewhere. Then sometime early in 1993 I heard that a new homeless newspaper called
Spare Change had been started in Boston, by none other than Tim Harris. Several months later I started the Houseless Journal. By that time I had lost contact with Tim and didn't know he moved to Seattle and started another paper called Real Change, after leaving Spare Change in the hands of others.

Then one fine day in February 1995, when Tim was surfing the internet, he stumbled across a message that Tom Musselwhite had sent out in which he mentioned my name and the
Houseless Journal. He immediately sent Tom a message, giving him his new address and asking him to pass it in to me. So after I got the message I sent him the then-current issue of the HJ, and he started sending me issues of Real Change. That's how we got back in touch.

So you see, it's because of all this that Tim put out the effort to make sure I got to Chicago for the summit. It was quite a moment when we met in the lounge of the International Conference Center, exactly five years to the month after I put out that first issue of the
Homeless Times. He said I looked the same as I did five years ago. (I had a scarf on, so he didn't see how many more grey hairs I've gotten since then!) I said he looked the same too, except that he'd cut his hair and didn't look like a hippie any more. But he still had the same chubby face, bright eyes and impish smile.

So there you are. It's been a long haul, but we have survived and are going stronger than ever, and can look back with a lot of satisfaction on all we've accomplished. And another interesting thing I noted: one of the speakers at the conference, a veteran journalist named Abe Peck, used the term "Grate Society" in his speech! Coincidence? Did the term originate simultaneously in other cities besides  Boston? I didn't ask him where he originally heard it, but the question has remained in the back of my mind. And I also had a curiously satisfying sensation of having come full-circle somehow.

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