So Far, So Good, as Homeless Man Adjusts to His New Life

Harold Thomas works in a junkyard six days a week, tearing apart old cars and rebuilding the engines. The other day is spent working in the fields at a church-run orphanage, where his benefactors have volunteered his service.

Roy Gilman, 75, and his wife, Ethel, 68, gave him the job and a chance in January to leave the lean-to residence that he shared other homeless men in Chicago.

They gave him the old 8-by-30-foot trailer home at the junkyard that he shares with a stray cat named Cleo.

They have their son Ralph drive him to church on Sundays.

They pay for his groceries, but they haven’t paid him any wages yet.

“Those Gilmans believe in working,” Thomas says, adding that a paycheck will probably come when business picks up.

“A month from now, it’ll be planting season,” he says. “I think I’ll do good. I’m fed, I’m healthy, I’m working.”

Room and board are Thomas’ pay for now, Ralph Gilman says. Thomas will be paid “when he gets where he can do anything. I think we’re going in the hole part of the time now.”

Thomas is a stranger in a strange land, and the circumstances that brought him here on Jan. 16 were just as strange.

Before he arrived in this ranching and farming community of about 11,000 people on the flat high plains of eastern New Mexico, Thomas lived in a rotting wood and canvas shack along the Chicago River. He didn’t have a job and he got his meals when he could. A 2-inch scar across his forehead is testimony to a fight he says started in a soup line in Chicago.

The Gilmans read of Thomas’ plight in an Associated Press story published in the Portales News-Tribune in January, contacted the AP bureau in Chicago and said if Thomas was willing to work they would provide him with a home and a job.

By the time Thomas, 35, was on a westbound Greyhound people had donated new clothes, new luggage and spending money.

Thomas isn’t completely at ease in his new surroundings.

He isn’t quite sure how people will react to him.

He shunned a suggestion of one restaurant for dinner, saying he’d heard that “rough cowboys” hung out there.

Thomas likes to talk about his past. He speaks with animation of his days as a wanderer, traveling through the South looking for work.

He speaks also of a future when he will own his own ranch.

But for now, he goes to work at the junkyard each day and says he enjoys the time he spends in the fields at the orphanage.

When the director of the orphanage drives up to the remains of an old corral that Thomas is sawing into firewood, Thomas quickly extinguishes his cigarette in his calloused hand, saying putting it out is the respectful thing to do.

“New Mexico is nice and warm,” he says. “I want to stay here and try to make something out of this opportunity.

“I ain’t getting no younger. I want to settle down.”

Since his arrival, Thomas has received dozens of letters: from women who have read of his good fortune and want to share life with him, from homeless people wishing him well in his new life, from 28 fifth graders in Corrales, N.M.

The Gilmans also get letters--mostly commending them for offering Thomas the opportunity to work again and to have a roof over his head.

Thomas, a burly 5-foot, 10-inch former carpenter, answers his letters, particularly those from the women. “I get lonely for a woman,” he says.

Ethel Gilman saves her letters in a notebook that she likes to show visitors.

People in the community have been receptive to Thomas, she says, but adds: “So many people want his place if he doesn’t work out. If he doesn’t get started drinking, he’ll be all right.”

Thomas isn’t drinking. He can’t go out to bars at night because the 16-year-old car the Gilmans gave him doesn’t have an engine yet. But he is learning the skills he will need to get it in working order.

Ralph Gilman says Thomas is a good worker but still needs time to adjust to his new job.

“Some things could be better,” he says. “I think there’s a communication gap, but a bunch of that is probably my fault. He can’t read my mind.

“A lot of it is the way he’s lived,” Gilman says. “His brain has worked on survival for the last couple of years. He’s got to develop it for this now.”

Thomas begins each day at 8 a.m. by helping feed the half-dozen cows that also live at the junkyard.

When warm weather comes he will help with ranching chores on the approximately 2,000 acres the Gilmans own in several tracts.

“He’s not completely satisfied. I can tell,” Ralph Gilman says. “Other days things are good. There’s ups and downs.”

Thomas says the downs come mostly when he begins missing his longtime girlfriend and her 16-year-old daughter he helped raise. They live in a government housing project in Chicago.

“I want to help my stepdaughter out; she’s pregnant,” he says. “I’d like to try and save my money and do something for my own. I’d like to bring them down here.

“I never knew I’d end up like I did,” he says. “I hope I don’t end up in a slump like that again. That ain’t no kind of life for a man.”