Street Smart : ‘You’ve Got to Use Your Imagination’ to Survive, Homeless Man Says

Every morning, usually by 7, Ralph Campbell rises from the boxwhere he sleeps. He walks his two black Labrador retrievers, finds a newspaper in the back of a doughnut shop and sits down to sip some coffee.

He visits his friends, runs errands for merchants or, if he can’t find an odd job to do, he returns to his box at the back of a parking lot and checks on his dogs.

Later, he often walks to a sunlit park to read, or he buys a beer--if he can afford one. For dinner, he often eats pizza or fried chicken he’s found in a Dumpster.

The 57-year-old Navy veteran is among thousands of homeless in Los Angeles County who struggle to accomplish daily tasks most people take for granted.

With few exceptions, experts say, Campbell’s routine is typical of the way homeless people try to bring order to a disorderly world. They must work hard each day to find the food, shelter and companionship they need to maintain a life on the streets.

Campbell collects cans and sells discarded items--as well as working odd jobs--and survives on as little as $12.50 a week. He refuses to panhandle or accept government assistance.

He drops in on neighborhood businesses where he has developed good working relationships. Twice a day, the doughnut shop gives him discounted cups of coffee. A newsstand loans him newspapers to read.

Every little bit helps. “I might not get satisfaction getting things together to solve a problem,” Campbell says, “but afterwards, I’m sure happy the problem is solved. I call it ‘Make do.’ You’ve got to use your imagination sometimes.”

Experts say Campbell’s self-sufficient attitude is shared by many who live on the streets in Los Angeles County, where there are an estimated 30,000 to 183,000 homeless people, depending on the source.

“Only about half the homeless receive (public) assistance,” says sociology professor James Wright of Tulane University in New Orleans, author of the 1987 book “Homelessness and Health.”

“Many take a certain undeniable pride in the fact that they are not a bum. They try to look neat and clean and avoid panhandling.”

Campbell, who has lived in a neighborhood near Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue for three years, acknowledges that sense of pride and makes no excuses for his situation.

“I’m comfortable with myself. I’m not comfortable with being homeless. . . . I’m not going to say I admire what I’ve done. But I don’t regret anything. I can’t manufacture excuses. I’m not in that game. . . .

“You get in a tough situation and you agree it’s uncomfortable and you make the best of it. Some guys bemoan the fact that they are out here and keep knocking themselves over the head. . . . They try to blame the world for being down here. They can’t accept that they got themselves here.”

Sitting on a bench in front of a restaurant one sunny afternoon, Campbell talks about his life on the streets.

During his 30 years of homelessness, Campbell says, he’s worked as a gardener, painter, miner, telephone installer and pressman’s apprentice and has lived in cities including Dallas, Miami and Salt Lake City.

He says that until seven years ago he usually earned enough to buy food. When jobs became difficult to find, however, he started searching restaurant Dumpsters for meals.

“They put out a variety of stuff: hot dogs, cheeseburgers, muffins,” he says, watching his dogs play behind him. “Usually the food is wrapped up. What they don’t sell, they throw out. . . .

“It’s an experience. It doesn’t bother you after a while. It just makes sandwiches taste that much better when you get them from somebody. . . . Some guys would rather go hungry than go through a Dumpster. Me, I’m not going hungry. . . .”

Campbell says he finds pizza and fried chicken most often. “I’m almost to the point that I don’t eat fried chicken,” he says, explaining that he finds so much he’s tired of it.

Campbell feeds his dogs, Jackpot and Little Joe, restaurant scraps and dog food. The Labradors were given to him by neighbors over the past three years.

At night, the dogs are supposed to sleep in their own box next to his, but frequently they crawl into Campbell’s makeshift bed. He wraps sheets of vinyl plastic around the refrigerator-size boxes to protect them from the rain.

“They’re my boys. I couldn’t give them up,” says Campbell.

While food is sometimes difficult to come by, clothing is easier. Campbell says he finds his clothes behind Laundromats or tailor shops. Wearing navy blue pants and shirt, a sleeveless jacket and a baseball cap during an interview, Campbell says his wardrobe consists of a half-dozen shirts and pants. He has enough clothes that he often can throw things away rather than spending “good money” cleaning them.

Campbell washes himself at cold water faucets. His shirt, pants and hair are usually tidy, but dirt often blackens his hands and jackets.

Despite his meager income, he says he has enough money for recreation. “If I get money on a Wednesday or Saturday I buy a lottery ticket,” says Campbell. “Or I buy my cigarettes or a couple of beers.”

Campbell stays out of the way of pedestrians and merchants, a tactic that ingratiates him with both groups. A store owner hosting a barbecue recently sent his dogs three plates of beef. Three neighbors with apartments let him shower and cut his hair once a month.

“He cleans up after himself and the dogs and he doesn’t bother anybody,” says John Clayburgh, who owns the parking lot where Campbell and his dogs live in a 3-foot space between a wall and a small building.

Nevertheless, his relationship with merchants and residents is “very fragile,” Campbell says. “They want me to stay but they don’t want to give me any permanent job because they think I’m (a transient). They say, ‘You surprise me. You’re still here.’

“Most people I meet feel like they want to be friendly, but they’re afraid. Occasionally someone will open up and you get a little insight into them, but it’s very rare.”

Serious relationships with women are almost impossible.

“I wish I would,” says Campbell, who never married. “The women I meet are just people on the street. Not that many are looking for a guy in my situation.”

The absence of close relationships leaves him with long hours to fill.

“I think all night long about what I’m going to do tomorrow,” he says. “I’ve got too much time on my hands.”

To escape boredom he sips coffee and reads in restaurants. When he finishes, he sometimes runs an errand or walks the dogs again.

When he goes for walks, he carries a black bag with a shoulder strap, but never a sleeping bag. “People see a sleeping bag and they think you’re a bum,” he says. “It’s like hanging a sign around your back, and people see a sign a block away.”

He uses public restrooms, usually in a nearby gas station, bar or office building. On weekends, the gas station and office building are closed and Campbell doesn’t want to antagonize the friendly bar owner by disturbing customers. “I go somewhere else and buy coffee so I can use the facilities,” he says.

At night, he often drinks coffee and reads at a doughnut shop before going to bed by 10.

“If I’ve got a few bucks, I like to sit in a bar and watch TV,” he says. “I’ll do that maybe once a week. But I have to get back to the dogs before long. I don’t want them to think I’ve abandoned them.”

Unlike most homeless people, Campbell says he’s had no serious illnesses in his 30 years on the streets.

He did scare himself once four years ago. While searching a Dumpster in San Diego, the broken edge of a glass liquid-filled vial pierced his hand. He developed an itchy rash and red spots on his chest and shoulders. After a public health clinic sanitized his clothes and treated him with salve, the condition vanished.

“The truly unusual aspects of this guy’s story are the dogs and the fact that he’s been free of medical problems for all this period,” says Tulane’s Wright.

He says common medical problems for the homeless include colds, flu and vascular disorders. Other concerns include hypertension, dental problems, nutritional disorders and burns, broken bones and abrasions.

Campbell “may have a lot of these problems and not consider them serious,” Wright says. “He could probably do well with a good medical workup just to find out.”

Campbell grew up in Casper, Wyo., but felt alienated from two older brothers and a younger sister.

“I was a troublemaker,” he recalls. “If I wanted to do something, they were always busy or gone. They did not have time for Ralph to tag along. I was the odd man out.”

Because he felt like an outsider, Campbell ran away at age 14.

“I had been gone 2 1/2 days, and my father didn’t even know I had left,” Campbell says. “I had picked a weekend when he was working double shifts in the refinery.” (I called him and) he sent money by Western Union for me to come home.”

Campbell finished high school and served in Japan and the Philippines with the Navy during the Korean War. He liked Casper and returned when he left the service in 1953.

“I felt content when I was doing well,” he said. “(But) I was always job-hopping and looking for something better. That does not look good after awhile. People say you are not going to settle down. Why should we bother (to offer you a job)?

“I’d always take a job and fall on my face. I felt like a punching bag. You do not want to look everybody in the face if you are not getting ahead. I got tired of putting up a pretense, so I took off.”

Once he left Casper, the transition to homelessness was easy.

“The first two or three days you think it will be temporary. Then the intervals get longer. It becomes a couple of weeks, a couple of months, then years and you are there,” he says.

He returned to his hometown two or three times to start over. “That gets old, so you cut away.”

He has not been back to Casper or talked to his family since his mother’s funeral in 1970, but has wondered about his family since the war started in the Persian Gulf.

“I wonder if some of my nephews and nieces are there. You do not think much about the family until something like that happens. Then it comes to the surface.”

After leaving home, Campbell worked so many minimum-wage jobs that he grew tired of them. Today he prefers scavenging.

“Some jobs I would detest and I would turn down. Some people need that job and I’d be taking their slot,” he says.

He also considers training programs a dead-end. “No one wants a 45- or 50-year-old man. They say go through schools if you want, but we aren’t hiring you.”

Campbell held several temporary jobs in his neighborhood and recently painted and laid tile in apartments.

He’d prefer work “where they would not only employ me but I could utilize my dogs or have them with me--like taking care of an estate or maintenance or security.”

Campbell hopes any job would allow him time to work on several inventions he has conceived to help the disabled. He doesn’t want to describe his projects because he fears someone will steal his ideas. Recently, he says, he wrote New York entrepreneur Eugene Lang seeking backing for a specific proposal, but Lang said he was not financing inventions. Lang sent the letter to a local business whose owner allows Campbell to use his address.

Campbell sees himself as being as capable as anyone else of creating inventions because he sees no difference between himself and those who are more fortunate.

“You take that person in the house and restrict his income and he’d be thinking about survival first,” he says.

“I call it the luck of the draw. . . . Look at Aaron Burr. He was vice president one day and he kills Alexander Hamilton in a duel and his political career ends. . . .

“Besides, from what I read, Donald Trump may be down here in a couple of months.”