THIRTEEN

Richard A. Penney: Project Renewal

For Richard A. Penney, it can be fairly said that life had not worked out as he would have expected, or as anyone would have expected for so gifted a man. In the late 1980s, Penney was a member of the army of the homeless in New York City, one of those many people who used both to frighten and trouble the liberal conscience. He had served time in jail, separated from his wife, and lost touch with his only son, Richard Penney, Jr.; he was depressed, and he had essentially stayed indoors from 1976 until the late 1980s. He needed help.

And yet, years before, Penney, who grew up on Green Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, had been the valedictorian of his class at Metropolitan High School in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1966. He was the star of the block, where his parents, Allie and Inez Penney, a retired construction worker and a domestic for a Manhattan family, owned the four-story house where Richard grew up. He was an athlete and a scholar, captain of the varsity handball team, and a two-time finalist in the city-wide handball championship tournament. There is no more quintessentially urban a sport than handball, played ardently, fiercely in small pocket-sized parks throughout the five boroughs, and to be a champion, or, certainly, the best player in your neighborhood, conferred a lot of prestige, and to be a handball star and a valedictorian at the same time meant that you were exceptional.

Penney had many college scholarship awards, but he elected to go to a technical school in Brooklyn instead. The year after finishing high school he married his childhood sweetheart, Valada Porter, and in 1968, when the country was being torn both by anti–Vietnam War protests and racial demonstrations, Richard, Jr., was born. That same year, Richard, Sr., finished at the RCA Institute, where he studied electronics, and he went to work as a communication craftsman for AT&T, remaining in the job for the next seven years.

But things started to go wrong. Richard and Valada separated in 1970, and Richard and his son moved into the top floor of Allie and Inez Penney’s brownstone on Green Street.

“It was a perfect situation, since my grandparents lived below us,” Richard, Jr., recalled later, “good for babysitting and such.”

Clearly, though he didn’t show it to those close to him, Richard, Sr., was a troubled man. In 1975, he quit his job at AT&T, began to associate with criminals, and started shooting heroin. That year, he was arrested for holding up a token booth, and, like a lot of people who get into drugs, he dragged those closest to him down. His parents mortgaged their brownstone to pay for defense lawyers. But Penney was convicted anyway and went to prison.

He got out on parole the next year, but by then too much of his life had fallen apart to put it back together. Valada moved to Virginia, taking Richard, Jr., with her. And though Richard and Valada remained on good terms—and Richard, Jr., went regularly to visit his father—Penney seemed strangely unengaged. “He was a recluse,” Richard, Jr., said. “He was depressed, I think, and just stayed in the house. I mean, to think he stayed indoors from 1976 to the late eighties! Prison life changed him and there wasn’t much the family could do about it.”

Sometime in the mid-1980s, after the death of his father, Penney learned that he had been adopted, that his birth father was Jewish and his mother an African American acquaintance of the family. The news devastated him. When his adoptive mother died, he didn’t even go to the funeral. Around that time, Valada and Richard, Jr., went to New York to see Penney. They talked for many hours trying to persuade Penney to move to Virginia and, as Richard, Jr., put this, “to start a new life with us, to start over.”

“I had already graduated from high school, so I figured while I went to college, me and my dad could get a place together, some place where he could get some support,” Richard, Jr., said. “You see, my family is quite old, so all of my dad’s cousins and nephews are much older than he is. So nobody really was around after my grandmother died. She was his family. But even after pleading with him, he refused to come with us.”

Valada and Richard, Jr., went home. A cousin of Penney’s arranged a room for him in Brooklyn, but after he got back to Virginia, Richard, Jr., realized that he no longer had his father’s address or telephone number, and the two lost contact permanently.

“Back then,” he said, “I was really hurt, really hurt that my dad didn’t come with us. I was so disappointed that he wouldn’t come. Even though I knew he had a lot of problems, we still had a great relationship. I knew I was important to him, but I immediately thought that I wasn’t important enough to convince him to come down, spend some time with me, to get to know me as a grown man. It really hurt.”

But when Richard, Jr., contacted his father’s cousin in order to get back in touch, he learned that Penney had left the room where he was living and disappeared.

“I thought maybe I pressed him too hard,” Richard, Jr., said. “Maybe he got angry with me. It was maybe, maybe, maybe. I figured I would give him some time, and I figured someone, or something, will come up and I would get back in touch with him again. But after a few months, I still hadn’t heard from him. I knew I had to do something. So I started to look for him. It was the early ’90s and we weren’t hooked up with computers back then. I started out by calling information, asking for any Penney in the Brooklyn area, and my search went wider and wider and wider from there.”

Unknown to his son, Penney had become part of what was called “the problem of homelessness.” In fact, for the three years after his disappearance in 1987, nobody even knew what homeless shelter he was in, or whether he went to a shelter at all, or whether he slept on the street in some cardboard box next to the doors of a church or over a metal grate or in one of the underground archways of Grand Central Station. His disappearance not only from the world of his son but from the world altogether seems to have been complete. And then, in 1990, he turned up at the Harlem Men’s Shelter on 155th Street and he seems to have stayed there, at least some of the time, until 1994.

It was then that Penney met Jon Bunge, now a staff member of the Hope Program, a nonprofit agency that helps homeless people find jobs and get their lives back together. Penney had applied to the Hope Program for a work internship and his application was referred to Bunge by the Harlem Men’s Shelter.

“He came across as shy and there was little eye contact,” Bunge recalls. “He seemed very intelligent but something was a little off. He wasn’t social and wouldn’t mingle with the other people in the program at all. But he was definitely a sweet, nice guy.”

Penney worked hard. He showed up every day and did an internship at the Christ and St. Steven’s Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But Penney’s rehabilition does not seem to have always gone smoothly. He dropped out of sight at times. He resisted therapy. It is not clear that he stopped using drugs. He appeared and reappeared at the Harlem Men’s Shelter, which was taken over by another program, Ready, Willing and Able, in 1996.

“From the time he came into the Hope Program, we did conduct the routine medical and psychological examinations,” Bunge said. “We figured that jail really changed Richard. He really didn’t want to open up at all and it was extremely hard to get any information out of him. We knew he had a son, and as I look back there is a part of me that wishes I could have spent more time looking for Richard, Jr., but my work to find jobs for everyone sometimes overwhelms any personal desires to do more than that.”

Another social worker, Khimo Pereyra of the Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services Corporation, which provides food and shelter to the homeless, recalled that Penney was withdrawn. But he did talk about his family with Pereyra who believes that he wanted, sooner or later, to be back in touch with Valada, whom he had never divorced, and hoped to be reunited with his son.

“He was thin, around one hundred thirty-five pounds,” Pereyra said, recalling her first meeting with Penney. “He had a backpack and a book or a magazine in his hand. He sat down and we talked. I asked him questions, where he was from and stuff like that. He told me New York. I asked him if he had a family and he said yes, that he was married and had a son. I later found out he never told stories about his wife and son to any social workers, only me. He said he hadn’t seen his family in a long time and that he was trying his best to recuperate.

“Penney was a man with a lot of respect for himself, his wife, his son, and friends,” Pereyra said. “He often told me he was saving money so he could go down to see his son, with money. Basically I think he was ashamed of going down there with nothing. He felt he couldn’t go down there empty-handed.”

In 1999, Penney made a major step forward. He got a job with Project Renewal, a social services agency that held the recycling contract for the entire World Trade Center and gave jobs to about twenty people who circulated through the towers collecting paper, plastic, and cans. Penney got $6 an hour, enough for him to get a room in a rooming house in Brooklyn, paying $235 a month. The house was shabby by any standard, its parlors crammed with bunk beds. It was also very close to Green Street, where Penney had grown up under far better circumstances, and nobody knows exactly how he felt about that, whether he felt good to be on familiar turf, or whether it reminded him of how far down his life had slid. But at least he was living independently, saving a bit of money, and going regularly to work where he soon got a reputation for reliability, for being the first to show up at the Trade Center every morning.

And maybe that’s why Richard didn’t make it through September 11. If he had been less conscientious, if he had only shown up a little bit later for his job at Project Renewal, maybe he would still be alive. And in this sense it was his very determination to turn his life around that cost him everything. In fact, nobody who survived September 11 actually saw him that morning, but everybody knew that he was never later to work than 8:00 A.M., which would have meant leaving his rooming house in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn at about 7:00 or earlier.

He had a routine. He always started on the 105th floor of the north tower, on the top floor of the several floors of offices occupied by the bond trading company Cantor Fitzgerald, and he worked his way down through the offices of Marsh & McLennen, dumping recyclable paper into a big wheeled cart. Around noon, he would go down to the basement to dump the paper, which was loaded onto trucks from New Jersey, but because he tended to work from the top floor down, at 8:46 he would have to have been near the beginning of his daily round, someplace above the 100th floor, which was a very bad place to be.