SFTGG Code Tenderloin June 23, 2024
Kevin Fagan August 29, 2024 Updated: August 29, 2024, 4:10 am - San Francisco Chronicle
Del Seymour is one of the hardest-working advocates for homeless people in San Francisco, beloved for leading walking tours of the economically battered Tenderloin and starting a wildly successful jobs program there for the downtrodden. At 77, he has been invited to the White House, rubs shoulders with San Francisco’s mayors and tech titans, is nicknamed “Mayor of the Tenderloin” and is regularly consulted for his street wisdom.
That wisdom came the hard way. He used to be a homeless crack addict and pimp, jailed many times before he shook drugs 14 years ago and started his uplifting tour and Code Tenderloin jobs programs. But what most people don’t know is that before all of that, he was an Army medic in the Vietnam War, a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic, owner of a construction company and an electrician.
That’s where this book fills in the gaps. And how. Author Alison Owings lays out the at-times astonishing journey that led Seymour from a hard-knocks childhood in the Chicago projects through an adulthood that had him sleeping in a cardboard box in Sacramento, doorways and dive hotels in San Francisco, making and spending money like water legitimately as a businessman in Los Angeles and illegitimately as a pimp here, and finally shaking dope cold turkey when he hit rock bottom in a fight over $10 to $20 worth of crack.
“I could have gotten a Ph.D. in sidewalks,” he tells Owings. Fortunately for the thousands of people who have risen from the street to becoming employed through Code Tenderloin — so named to emulate the “code” emergency of a hospital — he used that would-be degree to better humankind.
Owings, a San Francisco writer, certainly knows how to pull narrative from people, having previously written three oral history books on Native Americans, waitresses and women who lived in Nazi Germany. It took her nearly a decade of conversations to wrangle details out of Seymour, and the mountain she complied presents a richly satisfying tapestry despite his reluctance to go into some of the darker details — on pimping, for instance, since that is a period of his life he regrets and tries to make up for with his good works.
Owings, having also worked as a television news writer, knows to back-check Seymour, and she has revealing interviews with his daughters, who struggled at times with his instability before he reformed, and with those who helped him, such as Jason Albertson, one of the more storied street counselors in the city. But at times the details get a bit thin and could use some confirmation — and she is up-front about how she had to depend a lot on Seymour’s memory, which is occasionally so hazy he has slightly different versions about what happened. Like whether he became addicted to crack in 1986 or 1989.
The narrative flow also jumps around quite a bit, and it would have been helpful to have better chapter time stamps so the reader knows what years she’s writing about.
But the scintillating volume of knowledge put forth is well worth the reading journey. Not only does this book portray the brave determination of a man to rise above turmoil, but it offers copious nuggets for those not familiar with life on the bottom. Like tricks for finding good doorways to sleep in, how to surf bus rides for hours to get out of the cold, or why shelters can feel like prison if not run well.
What shines through most is how Seymour’s heart softened toward others as he fought his way out of bare-knuckle survivor mode. While giving a guest sermon in 2018 at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, he reminds the flock that “the most famous homeless man in the world, his name was Jesus Christ” and that when we see homeless people on the sidewalk, it’s our society that has failed them most of all rather than purely an individual set of screw-ups. It’s our duty to help our world, he says, his voice breaking.
“Get you a passion if you don’t have one,” he says. “Stay with it. Be generous with it. My passion is homelessness. I live and sleep it … because these are my folks outside. Until I could see more of them coming in off those streets, I’m going to be out here, man.”
Could there be more heartfelt words from a man who used to sleep in a cardboard box, smoking crack? Not likely.
Greg