TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010289/01028900.043

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.6 KB | 147 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 16

Gloves for the Needy


One Heart Warms Many Chilly Fingers On the Bowery, a Samaritan
of the streets ministers to the old, the reticent and the shy


    The old man sits on a bench off the Bowery, glazed eyes
staring into a void, sipping on a tall can of Bud enclosed in a
brown paper bag. "Twelve dollars and 50 cents," he mutters.
"Twelve dollars and 50 cents." It is the sum total of one man's
life -- the amount he says he has been trying to borrow from
his family in Detroit to ensure his burial in potter's field,
and to escape from the death beyond death: "They send you to
medical school and cut you up into little pieces -- that's not
for me. No sir."

    This observation on oblivion was prompted by something as
mundane as a pair of gloves, which had been proffered
tentatively by a short man wearing a cap and an aging leather
jacket, with a faded green cotton bag slung over his shoulder
like an Irish peddler. For the past 24 years, between
Thanksgiving and Christmas, Michael Greenberg, 60, has been
taking his bag of gloves to Manhattan's Bowery, long the haunt
of the down-and-outs and the lost-weekenders, and wandering the
gritty neighborhood looking for "the old, the reticent and the
shy." When he finds one, like the old man on the bench, he
dangles a pair of gray or maroon woolen gloves and says, "Take
them, please. They're free. They're a gift. No strings
attached." Then he shakes a trembling hand. This simple act of
communion, says Greenberg, "will almost invariably bring a
smile of acknowledgment. You can tell the handshake is in
earnest because they press your fingers."

    It is hard work for this retired advertising account
executive, handing out 300 pairs of gloves every year on New
York's infamous skid row, which runs from Chinatown a dozen or
so blocks north to Cooper Square. "Oh, if I just wanted to
stand here and give them away, I could get rid of 1,000 in an
hour. Easy. But I prefer to go looking for the people I want.
The ones who avoid eye contact. It is not so much the gloves,
but telling people they count."

    Greenberg was shaped for his role of Samaritan of the
streets by his memories of Depression hard times and by the
charity of his father, Pinchus Joseph, who owned a Brooklyn
bakery. "My father would often include a coffee cake or a
sandwich in the bag without his customer's knowing," he says.
"He would always tell us, `Don't deprive yourself of the joy of
giving.'"  Money was short, and Michael has a searing
recollection of losing a glove while helping bring supplies
into the store on a bitterly cold morning. "I was never able to
find it, and for years I went around without gloves. I never
asked my father to replace them because I felt so guilty."

    When his father died in November 1963, he searched for an
appropriate memorial. "I remembered the incident of the lost
glove, and it occurred to me that gloves are a powerful symbol
because being warm is being well-off and being cold is being
poor. At that time there weren't as many homeless people on the
streets, and so I immediately thought of the Bowery, and I
decided to put a pair of gloves on some poor fellow's hands
just as my father had slipped free Danish rolls into customers'
bags." Greenberg was then teaching sixth grade in a Brooklyn
public school, and the following year, despite his modest
salary, he bought 72 pairs of woolen gloves, took them to the
Bowery, and handed them out (very timidly, he admits) to the
destitute and the derelict. Why 72? Because 18 is the Hebrew
symbol for life, and "four times life is 72."

    In 1966 Greenberg left teaching for the advertising
business, and with a higher salary he could afford to buy
gloves regularly; if they were on sale, he bought in bulk. For
the next ten years the Bowery became his route every November
and December. In 1976 he was in the subway, taking two bags
containing $220 worth of newly purchased gloves back to his
office, when someone grabbed the gloves and ran. He reported
the theft to the police, the New York Times heard of the
incident, and for the first time the world read about the "glove
man."

    As a result of that and many other television and newspaper
stories, Greenberg has been inundated with gloves. A Girl Scout
troop held a glove drive for him. A Colorado ski resort sent him
its entire lost-and-found department. And when a story about him
appeared in the International Herald Tribune four years ago,
gloves flowed in, from Europe to India: leather gloves, driving
gloves, fleece-lined gloves, children's gloves, even work
gloves. Some people send pairs, but most often they send only
rights or lefts (the rights outnumber the lefts by four to one,
for some curious reason). Some also send cash, which is quickly
returned "because I am not an organized charity."

    Greenberg's tiny apartment in Greenwich Village is piled
high with 1,600 mismatched gloves, and he regularly has friends
in for a glove-matching party because, "I would never give out
mismatched gloves. That's denigrating." The group sits around,
drinking beer and matching gloves, "and the next day we
discover there are not as many matched as we thought."

    Greenberg has witnessed a parade of defeated humanity in his
quarter-century of giving on skid row. He has offered gloves to
his former professor at Brooklyn College and to a once famous
baritone at the Metropolitan Opera, recognized by Greenberg
from his days as a youthful walk-on at the Met. Most of the
people he meets are confused, seemingly uncertain of where they
are or what they are doing. The more frightened refuse the
gloves, and he will follow them for several blocks, insisting,
"They're a gift. I really want you to have them." One elderly
man finally stopped, took the gloves, then asked, "Do you have
them in blue?"

    Major changes have swept down the Bowery since Greenberg
first ventured out. Sad, abandoned men can still be found in
the few remaining missions, and in hotels with names like the
Prince and the Sunshine. But most of the 82 bars and dozens of
flophouses that once served a floating population of aging,
mostly white, casual laborers and alcoholics, have gone.
Instead the area now boasts expensive apartments and chic
restaurants. The newer homeless inhabitants of skid row are more
likely to be young, unemployed men who clean car windows at
intersections or mill in groups on street corners. Drugs have
become a perennial problem on the Bowery. "It's a fearful
place," says Greenberg. "The men are a lot younger, a lot
tougher and a lot meaner."

    But the man with the faded green bag continues to stalk the
Bowery and its tributaries, staying clear of "the tough people,
who have gloves anyway," and seeking out "the little old guy
who is frightened of people." Sometimes he hands gloves to men
who are muttering aimlessly over the rubble of their lives,
barely aware of what they are clutching; some quickly trade them
in for a pint of cheap wine. "It doesn't make any difference.
When you give a gift, you let it go."

    Occasionally, a star of hope radiates through all this
gloom. Recently he was waiting for a train at Penn Station,
when a well-dressed man asked him if he was "the glove guy."
Says Greenberg: "He said that I had given him a pair of gloves
on the Bowery five years previously and that now he was married
with two children, and he wanted to give me $20 to buy more
gloves. I told him the same as I tell others who want to write
me a check: no thank you. You spend the money on gloves, and
you give them out."