From: Richard P. Hobbs
213 Edgar Avenue
Steubenville, Ohio 43952
No phone as of yet.
212-696-8984 (Voice mail But I can not check it.)
April 28, 2004
To whom it may concern:
I am a professional Busker. A Busker is a street performer. I make my living by traveling to various Cities and entertaining on street corners. I also work at fairs, festivals and private functions. I have done this work for over 35 years. I have never made a lot of money. In fact even when I work I am far below the poverty level for the U.S. I like my work and I have been able to get by most of the time. However, things have happened to me during the past four years that are frightening and have completely undermined my efforts to succeed at my work and survive.
I am making a short list of these things here, hoping to get your sympathy and cause you to realize that what has happened to me is cruel and unusual and that therefore society should grant me some mercy and grace and help me to get back on my feet. The best way anyone can help me to get back on my feet is to help me get bookings for the work I am experienced at and have done most of my life. Entertain as a busker. The other way you could be of help is to aid me during the period that I try to get back on my feet. I do not need a lot of aid but a little would help greatly.
There are also some very specific things that could be done to help me. Here is a list of them.
I need : * A locksmith: to open my car and get me a set of keys to it. So I can drive it and use it and so I can remove it from in front of my neighbors empty lot.
* A plumber: to help me repair my plumbing and get it working so I can take a bath daily. (I would be glad to exchange free room for a period of time to a person (for example who was just out of a vocational tech school and who had learned plumbing) if he was a decent guy and we felt we could get along.)
* A person who understands how to hang drywall to show me how to do it so I can replace the walls and ceiling in my house. (or again a recent vocational technical school graduate who would exchange work for free rent for a year or so.)
* Friends. I am alone and isolated. I could use some fellowship.
* Either, help paying my electric so it stays on or for the electric company not to shut it off until I get some work and some income or help keeping it on until I can earn the money to pay for it. I do not use very much of it. I am frugal.
* My water bill forgiven. The toilet tank broke and while I was away ( I do not know for how long the water was coming out of the toilet tank valve and going through the house.) The bill will be very high and for water I never got to use and was not able to control what happened. I was stranded in New York because the truck I was using to make my final trip to move to Ohio was set afire. No one knows how or why. The windows were all smashed. It was towed away. It cost me over a thousand dollars to get it back and fix the windshield and side windows, so I could drive it to my new home in Ohio. When I got home, I found this terrible catastrophe. The ceiling was on the floor in two rooms and my basement was full of water. )
* It would be great if I can find a responsible young man who I can get along with who needs a place to live whom I can rent a room to and share my house.
* Good Christians souls who will fellowship with me.
* A place in a freezer to store a five pound block of cheese and about three pounds of other cheese. I would over the next few months gradually get that cheese and use it up. ( I bought the cheese at a bargain price. Which is how I usually live. I buy things cheap and try to get by. It is how I can have such a low income and get by.)
* Places to work as a busker. ( I make kids laugh. I interact with them holding a conversation which makes them laugh. Then I make balloons for them. I charge a dollar or two for a balloon.)
* Persons and places that need or want a cotton candy machine and or a popcorn machine.
* I can do birthday parties. I can do events. I can work at storefronts or other public places and make balloons for tips.
* Someone I can teach how to operate these machines who can work for me operating those machines when we rent them out.
* To complete training in computer repair and computer problem diagnosis called A Plus.
* To get a CDL drivers license.
* To be able to go to New York twice between now and may 30th to set up and arrange a potential windfall of income for myself there.
* Some counseling to help me cope with all that has happened to me over the past four years.
* It has been so horrendous and so constant if it had not been for the Lord who has encouraged me
* And some other things I would not mention here. (To save space.)
* To get customers for my sideline of a multi level nutritional supplement business. ( I have a wonderful product which is an Oral Chelation product. It will greatly improve how someone feels if they want help improving their cardiovascular health. I believe it will prevent heart attack and stroke. I know it will help anyone who has had either of these things to feel better and get stronger than they would be if they did not use this product. ) I hope to have stands at flea markets etcetera in time to share this product with the public.)
How I got into this situation. I tried my best to be a responsible person given my circumstances. However, too much has come against me. I need help.
The rent in the apartment I was in until four years ago was under a thousand dollars a year. In New York, there are laws that limit how much the Landlord can raise your rent. My mother had lived there before I did and then we shared it for many years. She had recently moved to senior citizen housing. We had been there a long time. The landlord had made plenty of profit from us. By law the landlord could only charge us so much rent. I had a nice apartment and three off street parking spaces. I was near New York City and could not be forced out of that apartment by the Landlord. It met my needs well.
There was nothing wrong with the house. However, the city chose to do an urban renewal project in that neighborhood. I was forced out and the organization doing the Urban renewal project failed to do their jobs correctly. They tried to force me into a place that was less than equal to the situation I had been in and that never would have worked for me. It was housing they owned and operated, a type of public housing. They are not allowed by urban renewal guidelines and the law to force someone coming from a private housing situation to move into a public housing situation. However, these persons are greedy, they enjoy the idea of lording it over others, and they wanted very much to be able to be my landlord. They figured my rent as higher than it was and my income as higher than it was, they offered the apartment they wanted to force me to move into at much lower than area market rents. This made it almost impossible to find an apartment. The way the urban renewal laws work the lowest offered apartment determines the amount for which they will subsidize your new rent. It was impossible for me to find a place. Although I received a large amount to help me relocate, it was not enough to cover the costs. I ended up homeless twice during the process. First, because they forced me out before finding me another apartment. Second, because the apartment I finally found was just too much for me. I could not afford it. I realized I had to do something to find another way to survive. What had happened would never do what it was supposed to do, which is to get me permanently housed in a situation, which I could afford to maintain. Its eventual result was going to be my becoming homeless. I realized this right off but the persons doing my relocating refused to notice it and they really did not care. They would get paid regardless of what happened to me.
In the middle of this nightmare, I had taken a gamble with my work. I normally get a large amount of my income during the summer. I decided to give up my usual income in the summer of 2001 because there was a festival in NY called St. Genaro’s festival I wanted to get into. It was a very successful festival and I knew that as a busker I could make a lot money there I mean between three and four thousand dollars in two weeks. However, I needed to know the people who ran it. They needed to feel that I was good entertainment and allow me to work there without charging me and allow me to et tips for my balloons. I knew of a carnival that toured the inner city. The same Italian organization that sponsored the St. Genaro’s festival also sponsored this small carnival. They raised money for their organization through it. I would lose money working at that carnival through the summer but if my gamble worked out the Italian organization would become familiar with me and allow me then to work at the St. Genaro’s festival. What I do as a busker is very unique. Most often after seeing what I do, any fair or festival is pleased to have me. They allow me back on a regular basis. If it did not work, I had about eight or nine other festivals and fairs around the east coast which I could work that fall.
It worked. I had made friends with the leaders of the Italian organization. They agreed to let me in the fair. They had told me to call them the week before the festival and they would arrange it for me. It would have been great. Then, the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center happened. That caused the festival to be cancelled that year. It also caused the other festivals and fairs to be cancelled. I was counting on those to help me cover my losses during the summer. Therefore, I was devastated. It also happens to be a fact that my regular spot to do busking was in Liberty Square Park just outside of the World Trade Center. Across the street from where it had stood. When I did not have other busking work, that location was about the best place for me to do my busking in NYC. There was not much competition there. It was slow but I ran into enough good tips there to make it work. The police there were more aware of U.S. constitutional protections than other police in the city and that what I did was a form of protected speech. I also had been working the foot traffic there for years. It was a major access to the subway and path trains for NJ commuters. I even tried to develop some leads for my nutritional supplement business there. In the spring of the year, 2001 I was doing well. I had a very inexpensive apartment near New York City. It was incredibly inexpensive and it met my needs. I had a source of income and I was happy.
I had already lowered my income during the summer. I was under the gun to find an apartment because of the Urban renewal project. Then the World Trade Center disaster came. I was directly effected by that economically more than anyone. However, it was a nightmare to try to prove. I was also broke. As a busker, I am used to roughing it through and taking care of myself. That is what we buskers do. We go out to the streets and work. However, things were just not the same. I applied for assistance through FEMA. It was another agency just like the one I had been dealing with for the Urban renewal, which dotted the I’s and crossed the t’s but in the end really those working there did not care if it helped those it was supposed to or not. It got plenty of press as a wonderful agency . We as citizens believe these agencies are doing a wonderful job helping those we pay them to help. They are not. The persons they help are ostracized and traumatized by the approach FEMA takes. They do not care. They are protected in every way. Even if they are thoughtless, heatless and worthless as far as actually helping those they are supposed to help. They can just breeze through their jobs. No one will ever be able to make them actually do what they are supposed to do and be responsible. There is not way to effectively redress this issue. We need to fix it. That may be impossible to do.
I was destitute. I had no funds left. I applied for the FEMA help. Wanting to get by I also found a job ringing the bell for the Salvation Army for Christmas. I worked with them for two weeks in November. I was paid. Then in December FEMA notified me that I had in fact qualified for Disaster Unemployment Assistance for the Self Employed and would get Unemployment Assistance help for six months. Then they told me in January, that because I had worked for two weeks in November I would only get one months worth of help. The two weeks of work disqualified me for the rest of the Disaster Unemployment Assistance. After the first two weeks I had worked for the Salvation Army, I had to stop working for the Salvation Army because my car had broken down and because of the grief of that came to me because of that disaster. I had worked outside of those buildings for years. After the disaster I often thought about, How many of the dead were persons I had once entertained? How many of their children had been brought there by them for me to entertain? How many of them did I know? Yet what I did was transient so I did not know for sure if I had ever entertained any of them. The point was I needed help to get back on my feet and get back to my work. I lost income because first, I could no longer work at Liberty Square Park, ( It was one of the organizing points for the demolition of the World Trade Center debris. ) The St. Genaro’s festival was cancelled. All the fall festivals that would have given me income and replenished my savings were cancelled. I was in deep trouble.
When you work for yourself as I have done most of my life you have to keep about a year and a half of wages in the bank. You have to be able to weather the storms and periods when you do not do so well. Two things I do not have. One is credit. The other is much income. Even when I am doing well I am below the poverty line. However, I get by and get by well because I know how to be frugal. I love what I do and will do it for the rest of my life; if God would only let me work.
Then it was a combination of having no funds and being evicted twice. Having to fight the evictions and trying to deal with the grief of the WTC which directly effected me I could not maintain getting future bookings and everything went from bad to worse. One frustrating thing after another occurred. It was even more frustrating when I realized most persons in the nation probably thought those of us who were victims were being helped effectively and in a meaningful way. I saw many persons getting paid salaries to supposedly help ‘the likes of me’ who were disconnected from the reality of what was going on. They were setting the standards with which to use that money. I saw how intentionally or not it was used up paying them to help us while they did not help us effectively. It was maddening and there was nothing I could do about it. The media and the nation were wrapped up in how wonderful they all were and how good a job they were doing. I literally saw FEMA send persons away who had come there for help. FEMA employees saw the persons coming towards the front door of the application tent and made judgments of the persons based in their appearance and sent them away before they even got into the door of the tent. They sent applicants away without even taking their names or any information about them. No body even knows who all those persons are. Many of them were directly effected by the disaster yet probably never got any help. Or like me got too little too late to really help them and then what they did get was dished out to them without any concern for their ability to benefit from it. It was an absolute violation of their rights and what we stand for as a society. We, supposedly, do not discriminate against persons, based on their appearance. I went there one time twice with a prearranged appointment to see someone inside. The woman at the front of the tent, a FEMA employee, turned me away even though I had an appointment. They turned me away it was clear because they thought I looked homeless. It was terrible. The disaster was bad. The attitude and actions of the FEMA employees was inexcusable. I suppose that is how they work at every disaster at which they supposedly help. Yet there has been neither opportunity nor means to question their negligence and unprofessional approach. I suppose under they are cloaked with the idea they are helping and that allows then to continue their misbehavior. Worse yet, they get paid regardless.
I got help but it was not helpful. Then, I finally did get some help but it was too little too late to help me get back on my feet. I just was enough to allow me to continue in the state of limbo I was in. The most important thing in my arsenal is a working vehicle so I can get to work. Sometimes I must travel to get to festivals. I also knew I needed to find an inexpensive house. I needed to buy it. It had to be near a larger city and it needed to be in a nice neighborhood so when I was away the house would be safe and not broken into. I had been looking at the Internet and praying about where I should move to. I kept finding the least expensive houses in the country with the lowest taxes and the nicest surroundings in the Ohio Valley. That is the area where the West Virginia Pan Handle reaches up between Pennsylvania and Ohio. There were houses there that seemed too cheap to be possible. I researched it. In fact, I had been researching it for several years before. Because we knew, the urban renewal project was coming eventually. I had already for a number of years rented a summer room in the middle of Ohio. I had my official office for my business as a busker located there. I had worked a few festivals there. I found several low priced homes on the internet in that area and finally I went to my summer room. With the help of a fine Christian friend we went to the Ohio Valley. A realtor showed us houses.
We went to two real dumps and I was discouraged. Then as we rode along to another place, I prayed. Oh lord, you know my situation. I do not have much money left to spare. You know what I am looking for and need. A good house that I can move into and live in. It has to be affordable. It has to be livable. I need good neighbors. The next place we went to appeared to be just exactly what I had just prayed for. The Lord had heard my cry and I realized it was for me. I took it.
Even though I did not know anything about the town it was in. Steubenville, Ohio. I seemed to remember something about it having to do with the Catholic Charismatic renewal. Even though I was somewhat Jewish and had been raised in a Presbyterian church when I was about, ten or eleven I remember reading the bible and being Saved, or Born Again by the Spirit of God. It changed my life. I had often afterwards sought to share the Gospel with Jewish and catholic relatives and friends. They were as though they had blinders on and could not see or understand the Gospel. I remember once, as a teen, sitting outside of Catholic Churches and Synagogues and crying for those poor lost souls (Persons who were going faithfully through the motions to worship God but who clearly were doing it because it was something they were supposed to do. They acted sort of as puppets with no real understanding about who God was or why they should worship God. In tears, I asked the Lord. “Can any of them ever possibly be brought to understand you and your truth?†Catholics at that time were not even allowed to read the Bible for themselves. However then in time I saw God answer my prayer. The Vatican II came about. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal occurred and many person of every denomination had started to read the Bible and they got to understand. It was wonderful. It seemed to me that I had heard something about Steubenville. It had something to do with the renewal. I think there had been a yearly conference in Steubenville during the seventies.
My plans were to buy an old short school bus and take four trips and move everything I owned into that house. This is what I did. I bought the house in July and expected to move in over the next month. However, one problem after another has made this a horrendous experience. When placed on top of the many difficulties I had already had it has become more than I can bear alone. I have tried to muddle through but now I am in a big mess and I will only get out of it by the Lords help and the Kindness of my new community. I wanted to come here, work my trade and be a meaningful contributor to this community. Instead, I find myself in need of your help.
· My transmission went on the school bus, twice, I had to replace it. It cost me too much.
· I bought a tow dolly so I could bring my cars behind the school bus. I had three flat tires on one trip here. I had to buy a new one because they do not give road hazard warrantees on tow dolly or trailer tires.
· On another trip, I got three flat tires again. Twice I bought a new tire for my vehicle. I went a few miles and it went flat. The same tire I had just bought.
· When I went to NY to get my last load it was near New Years. I had just gone for one week. However, I decided I would stay and see in the New Years in NY and then come to my new home. After New Years, it snowed. I do not like to drive when it has snowed. It increases the chance of an accident. It snowed repeatedly. The snow got deeper. You probably remember how hard the winter was. I waited. Then I was about to come back in February and somehow a fire was set in my school bus. Fortunately, not much inside the truck was damaged. The fire department quickly responded and put it out. However, they smashed all the windows all the way around the school bus converted into a moving van. It cost me over a thousand dollars to replace the windshield and the side windows and for the towing and storage. (The extra money I had set aside and was counting on to use to get re-established in Ohio. To pay my taxes, to have electric, water and a phone so I could live while booking myself at future fairs and events.) It was a nightmare. Then when I came to Ohio finally in April, it turns out I had forgotten to turn of the water off coming into the house in the basement. When I left I was only planning to be gone for a week in December. When I got to Ohio, I found that the toilet tank in the second floor bathroom had cracked. Even though I had, left the heat on the tank must have froze up and cracked and God only knows how long it had been running. I had a disaster on my hands. The ceiling in the room under the toilet became waterlogged and has fallen to the floor. The dining room ceiling pealed off. It fell on top of my partially unpacked moving boxes and many of my belongings are ruined. My happy dream home is ruined. I have no idea how high the water bill will be. I have lost the money I had planned to use to keep myself afloat while I tried to get bookings and work. I do not know what I am going to do. I just got here last Friday April 23, 2004 and do not know who to turn to or who will help. Will anyone even give me work? I am extremely frustrated, isolated, and feeling forsaken. I have very little money left and do not know how to handle it so I do not end up completely broke and unable to do anything. I need to figure out what to do. And if you can do so I would appreciate your help. Sincerely, Richard P. Hobbs.
