Oct. 24, 2009
BOOK REVIEW: 'Breakfast at Sally's': Sometimes You Have to Become Homeless to Find Out Who Your Real Friends Are
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
The homeless were my new family. They embraced me. They waved and smiled and treated me with dignity and respect. We may be the most misunderstood and feared people in America, I thought, but we are still family to each other. -- Chapter 29, "Breakfast at Sally's"
Richard LeMieux had it all in the greater Seattle, WA area: multiple boats and cars, a luxurious waterfront home, a loving wife, adoring children, a prospering publishing company. Or so he thought.
Then he lost everything, except a high-mileage Oldsmobile minivan and his beloved dog, Willow. He tells his story in the by turns sad and funny memoir "Breakfast at Sally's: One Homeless Man's Inspirational Journey" (Skyhorse Publishing, 432 pages, $14.95). Sally's is the Bremerton, WA Salvation Army soup kitchen, where LeMieux joined other homeless people in the blue-collar city west of Seattle for free breakfast. But only if you're there no later than 8 a.m. If you miss the deadline, you'll have to wait for the noon lunch.
Born in 1943 in Urbana, OH, a small town north of Springfield, LeMieux graduated from Ohio State University and eventually got a job as a sportswriter on the Springfield (OH) Sun, a dream job for a man who truly loved sports and reporting. When I was starting out in daily newspaper journalism in the 1960s, the sports department was called the "Toy Store" by other, possibly envious reporters delegated to covering the police beat or city council and school board meetings. He worked on the paper for 17 years and moved to Washington State in 1981.
By the early 2000s, LeMieux was an entrepreneur, owner of The Source, a publishing concern. He lived in a 5,600 square foot waterfront house in Indianola, Kitsap County, Washington, in the same county as Bremerton but much more "upscale." Three cars, three boats, a camper "and all the toys any man would want. I was rich not only in material goods, but also in family and friends," he writes.
In 2002, thanks in part to the Internet, the business of providing printed medical and university directories collapsed and 59-year-old Richard Lemieux lost everything but his five-year-old, 10-pound female Bichon Frise, Willow the Wonder dog, and his Olds van. He parked in state park campgrounds when he had the fee, in church parking lots when he didn't. The winter climate in the Puget Sound isn't as severe as his native west central Ohio, but it still gets plenty cold and damp in the winter. He writes how the barking of his Willow in the van kept LeMieux from ending it all by diving off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
LeMieux tells of the humiliation of begging for gas money at an upscale food store where he estimated he spent nearly $200,000 over the years. And of Bank of America refusing to cash a $20 check for a homeless friend named Randy, because Randy, with a clubfoot and a withered arm, didn't have a major credit card and a drivers license. Randy finally cashed his birthday check at a mini-mart, where he bought a radio headset so he could listen to his beloved country and western music.
His best friend and "guardian angel" through his bouts with severe depression was a man identified only as "C." He writes as he goes to visit C for the last time at the mini-mart where the owner let C park his pickup camper van called the Armadillo -- the same Hong Kong-born store owner who cashed Randy's check: "I had never told C of my journey to the bridge in the year I knew him. I had never learned his last name, or his real first name, for that matter. He had never told me. I had never asked....He was a slovenly, half-blind, marijuana-smoking, drug-dealing, rum-drinking angel in training. He taught me the joy of rolling in the grass like a kid and helped me see the world through the eyes of others. He got me high by reading the works of masters and got me flaming drunk on life."
C had given Allen, the mini-mart owner, a package to give to LeMieux. Unwrapping the package, LeMieux found a 1943 -- the year of his birth -- bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. "Very good," said Allen. "Very Good Year."
With a typewriter from a second-hand store and with the help of a Methodist minister who provided shelter when LeMieux and Willow most needed it, the Midwestern-born newspaper man -- there are no former news people, it's a calling we take with us to our graves -- wrote a memoir that touched me to the core of my being. It's as if Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who wrote a book entitled "The Soloist" about a homeless musician in Los Angeles, had himself become homeless and had written about it. Lopez's book became the basis of a movie, also called "The Soloist."
I wouldn't be surprised if someone -- perhaps HBO, which produced the outstanding series on Alzheimer's Disease -- adapted "Breakfast at Sally's" for TV, creating a series on a scourge that afflicts a rapidly growing number of Americans, homelessness, from the point of view of a homeless man named Richard. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty states that approximately 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, are likely to experience homelessness in a given year (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2007). The numbers vary from less than a million on any given night to numbers in the millions.
I recommend "Breakfast at Sally's" to everybody, but especially those who think that what happened to LeMieux couldn't possibly happen to them. It could and it does, every day, as middle-class people find how unsafe is the "safety net" in what everybody calls the richest country in the world.
Publisher's web site: www.skyhorsepublishing.com
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BOOK REVIEW: 'Breakfast at Sally's': Sometimes You Have to Become Homeless to Find Out Who Your Real Friends Are
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
The homeless were my new family. They embraced me. They waved and smiled and treated me with dignity and respect. We may be the most misunderstood and feared people in America, I thought, but we are still family to each other. -- Chapter 29, "Breakfast at Sally's"
Richard LeMieux had it all in the greater Seattle, WA area: multiple boats and cars, a luxurious waterfront home, a loving wife, adoring children, a prospering publishing company. Or so he thought.
Then he lost everything, except a high-mileage Oldsmobile minivan and his beloved dog, Willow. He tells his story in the by turns sad and funny memoir "Breakfast at Sally's: One Homeless Man's Inspirational Journey" (Skyhorse Publishing, 432 pages, $14.95). Sally's is the Bremerton, WA Salvation Army soup kitchen, where LeMieux joined other homeless people in the blue-collar city west of Seattle for free breakfast. But only if you're there no later than 8 a.m. If you miss the deadline, you'll have to wait for the noon lunch.
Born in 1943 in Urbana, OH, a small town north of Springfield, LeMieux graduated from Ohio State University and eventually got a job as a sportswriter on the Springfield (OH) Sun, a dream job for a man who truly loved sports and reporting. When I was starting out in daily newspaper journalism in the 1960s, the sports department was called the "Toy Store" by other, possibly envious reporters delegated to covering the police beat or city council and school board meetings. He worked on the paper for 17 years and moved to Washington State in 1981.
By the early 2000s, LeMieux was an entrepreneur, owner of The Source, a publishing concern. He lived in a 5,600 square foot waterfront house in Indianola, Kitsap County, Washington, in the same county as Bremerton but much more "upscale." Three cars, three boats, a camper "and all the toys any man would want. I was rich not only in material goods, but also in family and friends," he writes.
In 2002, thanks in part to the Internet, the business of providing printed medical and university directories collapsed and 59-year-old Richard Lemieux lost everything but his five-year-old, 10-pound female Bichon Frise, Willow the Wonder dog, and his Olds van. He parked in state park campgrounds when he had the fee, in church parking lots when he didn't. The winter climate in the Puget Sound isn't as severe as his native west central Ohio, but it still gets plenty cold and damp in the winter. He writes how the barking of his Willow in the van kept LeMieux from ending it all by diving off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
LeMieux tells of the humiliation of begging for gas money at an upscale food store where he estimated he spent nearly $200,000 over the years. And of Bank of America refusing to cash a $20 check for a homeless friend named Randy, because Randy, with a clubfoot and a withered arm, didn't have a major credit card and a drivers license. Randy finally cashed his birthday check at a mini-mart, where he bought a radio headset so he could listen to his beloved country and western music.
His best friend and "guardian angel" through his bouts with severe depression was a man identified only as "C." He writes as he goes to visit C for the last time at the mini-mart where the owner let C park his pickup camper van called the Armadillo -- the same Hong Kong-born store owner who cashed Randy's check: "I had never told C of my journey to the bridge in the year I knew him. I had never learned his last name, or his real first name, for that matter. He had never told me. I had never asked....He was a slovenly, half-blind, marijuana-smoking, drug-dealing, rum-drinking angel in training. He taught me the joy of rolling in the grass like a kid and helped me see the world through the eyes of others. He got me high by reading the works of masters and got me flaming drunk on life."
C had given Allen, the mini-mart owner, a package to give to LeMieux. Unwrapping the package, LeMieux found a 1943 -- the year of his birth -- bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. "Very good," said Allen. "Very Good Year."
With a typewriter from a second-hand store and with the help of a Methodist minister who provided shelter when LeMieux and Willow most needed it, the Midwestern-born newspaper man -- there are no former news people, it's a calling we take with us to our graves -- wrote a memoir that touched me to the core of my being. It's as if Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who wrote a book entitled "The Soloist" about a homeless musician in Los Angeles, had himself become homeless and had written about it. Lopez's book became the basis of a movie, also called "The Soloist."
I wouldn't be surprised if someone -- perhaps HBO, which produced the outstanding series on Alzheimer's Disease -- adapted "Breakfast at Sally's" for TV, creating a series on a scourge that afflicts a rapidly growing number of Americans, homelessness, from the point of view of a homeless man named Richard. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty states that approximately 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, are likely to experience homelessness in a given year (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2007). The numbers vary from less than a million on any given night to numbers in the millions.
I recommend "Breakfast at Sally's" to everybody, but especially those who think that what happened to LeMieux couldn't possibly happen to them. It could and it does, every day, as middle-class people find how unsafe is the "safety net" in what everybody calls the richest country in the world.
Publisher's web site: www.skyhorsepublishing.com
Share This Story:
Make HNN Your Homepage (IE Users Only)
