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Dorothy Milford was feeding quarters into a washing
machine when the Laundromat television brought her startling news: A
massive hurricane had devastated New Orleans, flooding hundreds of homes.
She froze for a moment, absorbing the terrible news. Then came the
aftershock: Katrina had hit days earlier; Milford just hadn’t heard
about it. She had been too busy dealing with a catastrophe of her own. Her two youngest grandsons, preschoolers at the time,
had been found to have lead poisoning. The paint in Milford’s South
16th Street home was the culprit. As the legal guardian of her
daughter’s six kids, Milford had to find another residence, move, and
register the kids in new schools — all within the span of two days,
all without a car. She did that, and got the kids’ clothes ready for
the first day of school (the task that brought her to the Laundromat),
without complaint.
“I am thankful to God that I insisted they get
checkups,” she says. But her problems worsened. Soon the health department
discovered that the house Milford had just rented on North Fourth Street
was also contaminated with lead-based paint. So Milford and her grandkids
moved — and changed schools — yet again. “They cried a while, but we ended up at good
schools,” she says. The bad news kept coming. The blood-lead tests had
brought Milford’s home to the attention of city inspectors. Those
inspectors discovered such a plethora of structural problems, they
condemned the property. If Milford doesn’t begin major repairs before
the end of May, the home will be torn down. The home means a lot to Milford. She and her husband,
Bob — who owned a shoe-repair shop — began buying the house on
a contract-for-deed basis. After Bob died, in 1990, a woman who had been a
steady customer at his shop hired Dorothy as a part-time housekeeper for
$80 a week, which allowed her to keep up the payments. Before the woman
moved away, she loaned Milford enough money to pay off the house. “She was actually a Christian person. A
wonderful person,” Milford says. Milford repaid the woman the entire
loan. However, finding the $40,000 that city inspectors
estimate it will cost to repair her home is entirely beyond Milford, who,
at age 70, gets by on a household income of about $1,200 per month, mostly
Social Security. She’s now paying $500 a month to rent a home on East
Kansas Street. Bobbie Hahn, founder of Loving God Out Loud, and Nick Stojakovich of Hope
Evangelical Church, met Milford recently and “fell in love with
her,” Hahn says. They are now working together to try to repair
Milford’s house so that she and her six grandchildren can make one
last move — back home. “We sat there and listened to all her family
history within the walls of that home, and we decided we want to rebuild
that home for her and the children,” Hahn says. “There
wasn’t another answer once we met with her.”
Hahn, a former mobile-home dealer, has developed her
ministry around restoring unwanted trailer houses and turning them over to
homeless clients. Milford’s house will be Hahn’s first attempt
at restoring a traditional “stick-built” structure, and she
hopes to find a volunteer foreman to oversee the project. The house needs
foundation repairs, new beams in the basement, heating and air, insulation,
siding (to encapsulate the lead-based paint), carpeting, and just about
everything else. Hahn has established a fund for Milford at Marine Bank. Milford is already celebrating the improved health of
her grandsons. The child with the highest blood-lead test results has shown
no symptoms usually associated with lead poisoning. “I’m told
by his teacher he’s one of the brightest children in school,”
she says.
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2007.
