Some say that Allen Wilfred drove his city bus to the corner of Canal and Broad streets, walked off for the last time and ended up spending the next 20 years sleeping at that bus stop, becoming one of the city’s most familiar homeless people. Then, last week, Wilfred, now 62, disappeared from the bus bench where he usually sat, with only his transistor radio’s white earbuds interrupting his mass of woolly hair. In his place was a handwritten cardboard sign that read, “My family took me home.”
His wife, Joanne Wilfred, said that she didn’t know who put up the sign. But she confirmed that she and other family members met mental-health professionals at the corner last week and put him in the hospital.
“We’re trying to get him evaluated, to get him some help,” she said. Now, she said, the difficulty will be keeping him in the hospital until he can be medically stabilized for what they believe is late-onset schizophrenia.
Her husband does not want to take any medicine. Last she heard, he was still pledging to return to Canal and Broad.
A few days after he was admitted, doctors at the Veterans Administration hospital in Alexandria called to say that they were going to release him and put him on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans. She pleaded with them and got others to make phone calls on his behalf.
On Tuesday, he was still hospitalized, but how long he’d be staying was unclear, sources say.
Joanne Wilfred said that her husband served in the Navy as a young man and then drove a bus for the Regional Transit Authority for about a decade.
“He was a workaholic. Loved to work. But then his mind just snapped,” she said. At the time, his three children were young, 16 and under. Sometimes they’d go out to the corner to see him.
The breakdown came too long ago for former supervisor Weldon Frazier, now 70, to recall whether Wilfred drove his bus to Broad and Canal.
But Frazier remembers Wilfred fondly. “Before he ran into these problems, he worked and worked hard. So I was shocked to find out what happened to him,” said Frazier, who would occasionally stop to see his former employee en route to RTA’s Canal Street station. Sometimes he’d give him a few dollars.
Frazier often asked, “Wilfred, why don’t you try to get help?”
But Wilfred always said no.
“From what I understand, he refused a lot of people,” Frazier said. “His brother told me once, ‘Don’t think that Wilfred doesn’t have family. But we try to get him help and he refuses.’”
UNITY director Martha Kegel said she couldn’t speak about Wilfred or any other homeless person because of confidentiality concerns. But, she said, she’s realized that some people seem like stereotypical homeless people because they’re so visible. “People who just won’t go in are the extreme minority,” Kegel said, noting that most homeless people are eager to be housed.
In an interview with The Times-Picayune two years ago during a severe cold snap, Wilfred had scoffed at the weather, suggesting that a visitor might be “too comfortable in her lifestyle” for shivering in the frigid air while he sat calmly inside an abandoned doorway clad only in an Army jacket with a hoodie underneath. When a UNITY outreach worker stepped out of a van with five blankets, Wilfred took only two.
He said at the time that he’d grown up in Central City, not far from where the Red Cross has established a public shelter. But he didn’t plan to head there, he said, because doctors have been trying to find him and medicate him and he didn’t want to deliver himself into their hands. His father had submitted to medical treatment and died shortly afterward, he’d said, and he feared he’d meet the same fate if he took any pills.
In place of prescription pills, he self-medicated, usually with Night Train fortified wine or Busch beer.
Because he lived outdoors, he was often unshaven and grimy, the whites of his eyes blood-red from an untreated medical condition. His meager belongings were usually scattered across the pavement and the bench. Despite that, he earned the admiration of many, who said that he carried himself with a certain sort of dignity.
“He was so respectable, so intelligent,” said Rite Aid customer Murlene Johnson, 62.
Johnson has lived in Mid-City for 22 years. “And for all those years, he’s been out here,” she said.
Often the two would talk. Sometimes Johnson would give him 50 cents for coffee or tell him about a service center where he could wash clothes or take a bath.
Sometimes, as evening approached, Wilfred would fall asleep on that section of concrete behind the Rite Aid store that neighbors called “his spot.”
After Hurricane Katrina, he was one of the first people back in the neighborhood, returning within months, Johnson said, recalling how, after Katrina, she’d heard about a corpse found floating at Canal and Broad and cried, thinking it was him.
Instead, people say, his former colleagues at the RTA persuaded him to come inside while the storm raged outside. But then he left. He somehow ended up on a FEMA plane to Austin, Texas, but insisted on returning as soon as he was able, they said.
So when Wilfred disappeared last week, neighbors worried. Not many saw the cardboard sign, because it disintegrated in a rainstorm.
“I wondered where he was,” said Johnson, who always looked for him as she rode the streetcar past the corner, and saw that he was rarely without visitors. His family stopped by, as did a steady stream of bus drivers and old friends. Almost daily, she said, he saw outreach workers from UNITY, located a few blocks away on Canal Street.
People from the RTA had brought him paperwork to sign so he could receive a pension, neighbors said. But so far, they hadn’t succeeded.
People who worked at that corner’s fast-food places and retail stores tried to feed him, though he accepted donations only from certain people. They’d seen longtime customers take shoes off their feet to give to him, they said. Some said he chastised schoolkids who cursed or misbehaved while on his corner.
A few months ago, after a new bus bench was installed, he told a visitor that it was his 16th bench.
Then, last week, word spread that Wilfred had gone inside.
“I’m so happy,” Johnson said. “I thought he was going to die out here.”
“I was glad to see him taken away,” said Keke Brown, who has worked at the nearby Chevron station for two years and grew fond of Wilfred. His recent physical decline was noticeable, she said, as he began walking more slowly and using a cane.
Then a few months ago, neighbors say, the city’s mobile crisis unit picked him up and brought him to a nearby hospital. Sometimes hospitalization can be a turning point for homeless people, since federal law prohibits releasing patients into homelessness.
But it wasn’t — not this time, anyway. Wilfred was back on his corner within a few days.
With the state’s mental-health system in tatters, it’s hard to be optimistic that Wilfred will get the help he needs, Frazier said. But he’d like to know that his old friend wasn’t sleeping on concrete and spending his days outdoors, in searing heat and bitter cold.
“Somehow, he got comfortable there on that corner,” Frazier said. “And maybe he will go back there. But I’d like to see him get back to the good man I knew 20 years ago. I’d like to know that he finally got some real help.”
Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@timespicayune.com
http://www.nola.com/health/index.ssf/2012/05/homeless_mans_saga_offers_glim.html
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