He’s 56, Stubborn, Independent and Down but Not Out

Bill Warren is 56 and has this stubborn streak of independence and outspokenness, traits that have gotten him into trouble. That’s one reason why he spent six months in a Kansas jail last year for telling a state Supreme Court judge where, to put it mildly, to stick it.

This 6-foot, 240-pound man--not long ago he weighed 300 pounds--is also bright, college educated and articulate, a man aware with cold clinical precision and candor of where his life has taken him. Right now, that’s in downtown San Diego, a paycheck away from destitution. He lives in a $290-a-month residential hotel called the Baltic Inn, in a room not much bigger than a walk-in closet.

He holds down two jobs--as a clean-up man at the popular Kansas City Barbecue and a new one as a clerk at the Lux, a pornographic bookstore and movie house in the Gaslamp Quarter--and yet still must eat some meals each week at the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center for the homeless to avoid going hungry.

The Face You See From Your Car

He isn’t a romantic and his story isn’t a sentimental tale of some poor downtrodden soul who needs but one break to change his fortunes. His is simply a story about one of those many faceless men who live and wander downtown’s streets, the ones you see from the closed car window while on the way to Horton Plaza.

He doesn’t fit a stereotype. He isn’t a drug addict or an alcoholic, though he’s probably been drunk more often than most. He has feelings, a sense of humor and outrage. He can be a jerk and knows it. He is an individual, with troubles that he knows all too well, but also with strength. He is Bill Warren.

“I can’t plan anything three weeks from now. That really grates on me,” Warren said matter-of-factly, contemplating one of the wearisome downsides of his current existence. “You just don’t have the certainty you can make it. Let’s say you see something in the newspaper about an event, a play or a football game--if I could afford to go to a football game--that’s going to happen. You can’t plan for it because you don’t know where you’ll be. That plays on your mind after a while.”

At one time life was much better for Warren, back when he first lived in California in the late 1950s and most of the ‘60s. Before that he had beenin the Army, where he says he scored high on their intelligence aptitude tests. They made him an electronics technician and put him to work at a missile school at White Sands, N.M., operated under contract by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech in Pasadena.

It was work he did well and liked. After his Army stint ended in the early 1950s, he landed a job with RCA as a technician at a satellite tracking station in the Bahamas. That led to California and other electronics-related jobs, including one for a company with a contract at Vandenberg Air Force Base, employment he lost when, after work, “I got drunk and screwed up.” His belligerence--aimed with unfortunate accuracy--hit his bosses, and he was gone.

No Trouble Finding Work

But the aerospace industry was booming in Southern California, and he had no problem finding another job.

He was working in Fullerton in the late ‘60s, making electronics tests of the fire-control system for the F-102 jet fighter. He joined the Air National Guard. A confirmed bachelor, he was single and free, with no worries and no bank account. Then in 1968, he was laid off.

“I was broke and disgruntled,” he said, so he went back to his native Kansas, where he found work at an aircraft manufacturing plant. He worked there for several years and hated it.

“It was good money. I got $8 an hour in 1978. But it was assembly work. It was the pits,” Warren said. He had never been to college and by then had begun taking classes at Kansas State University. Then, he moved to Topeka, to care for his ailing mother. He transferred to Wichita State University, where he received a degree in administration of justice in 1980. Did he want to be a cop or a probation officer?

“No. I got into something and it was hard to get out of it,” he said ruefully. “I just wanted to get a degree, and I had no job possibilities. I wasn’t vocationally oriented.”

While caring for his mother, who was becoming senile, he drove a school bus and worked as a property manager, looking after 52 rental houses for a dentist friend. It was while living in Topeka that Warren got himself involved in a bizarre incident that led to jail.

In 1985, more than 50 people were indicted in Wichita as a result of a cocaine trafficking and organized gambling investigation. Among those indicted and convicted were the Bell brothers, twins Mike and Mark, who were players in the National Football League and residents of Wichita. Among those also indicted was Coleman Lockett, who testified against the Bells, and who received a three-year prison term.

Lockett was a member of a prominent Wichita family. He was the brother of Kansas Supreme Court Justice Tyler Lockett and Wichita lawyer Hal Lockett, and the son of Ty Lockett, a former Sedgwick County sheriff, according to articles in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper.

A Profane Message

Coleman Lockett’s involvement in the case didn’t sit well with Warren, who felt Coleman had been given preferential treatment because of his family’s connections, while, in his mind, the Bell brothers were given the shaft.

So Warren called up the judge’s office. He got the secretary. He left a message, a profanity-spiked diatribe directed toward the judge and his brother, Coleman. Then he called an administrator in the judge’s office, someone who knew him. He left another, curse-filled message with him. But he didn’t stop there.

Warren called the Supreme Court justice at home. “I basically told him I thought his brother beat the rap,” Warren said. “I just wanted to comment as a citizen.” Since he had identified himself, it didn’t take long for Kansas authorities to charge Warren with three misdemeanor counts of telephone harassment. After a two-day trial in 1986, he was convicted.

At his sentencing, court officials recommended that he be placed on three years’ probation.

“I told them to shove their probation. I’ll take jail,” he said. And that’s what the judge did, sentencing Warren to six months in the county jail. “The way I looked at it, I was scot-free of all probation. They wanted three years,” said Warren.

He appealed the conviction. Meanwhile, his ailing mother became worse. She was placed in a nursing home and her house was sold to help pay for costs. “So I ended up on the street in Topeka, . . . and you know how cold it gets there in the winter.”

So, pending his appeal, he headed to San Diego. He arrived downtown and lived in the Rescue Mission and the Salvation Army. For a while, he bummed around the beach. He worked briefly as a “car shuffler” for a rental car company at the airport. He had never been to Yuma--and now he knows why--so he hitchhiked there. He called his attorney. Bad news, the lawyer told him. The appeal wasn’t going well, and the authorities were growing increasingly antsy that no one knew where he was.

“I was staying at the Salvation Army in Las Vegas, and I hitchhiked back to Kansas. It only took me two rides,” he said. “On Sept. 2, 1987, I reported to jail.” And there he stayed for all but two days of his six-month sentence. In March, with $200 in his pocket, he headed back to San Diego. “I went to the Rescue Mission and stayed there for nine days and then went to the Salvation Army and started hunting for a job.”

He found one in mid-May, driving a cab. He was able to save enough money to get a room at the Baltic Inn on 6th Avenue and Island Street, a new single-room occupancy hotel. On Aug. 17, though, “I had an accident. I hit a 1977 Toyota. It was my fault.” No one was injured, and he says it was his first accident--though he had been caught drunk driving in 1972. The cab company’s insurance wouldn’t cover him. Out of a job again.

Panic Set In

“That’s when I really fell out. I was panic-stricken.”

He went to the welfare office, where they put him in a workfare program.

“They had me filing paper,” Warren said. Then, he found a job at the Gaslamp Court--a building on 5th Avenue that houses small offices--working as a janitor for $67.50 a week.

One of the offices in the building belongs to the Alpha Project, which helps find jobs for the homeless and near-homeless such as Warren. They helped him get a job at Kansas City Barbecue, the well-known restaurant on Market Street. On most mornings, he cleans the place, mops floors, sets up tables, wash dishes, or whatever needs to be done. The labor lasts four to six hours and pays $4.50 an hour.

But even with the two jobs, which he walks to because he doesn’t have a car, he finds it difficult to keep both a roof over his head and food in his stomach. He usually brings home about $400 a month and finds himself eating lunch at the St. Vincent de Paul Joan Kroc Center about three or four times a month.

“I’ve been living on beans and chili for the last couple of weeks,” he said of the canned food he heats in his room.

“If my job fails for a week, I’m doomed,” Warren said. “I’m just having to scrabble constantly.”

He has applied for work as an electronics technician at a local aerospace company but he never heard back from them. He thinks that because of his jail time it will be hard to get government clearances to work on some projects. He also thinks he weighs too much.

“No one says anything, but those places won’t hire you if you’re over 210,” said Warren, who has dark blond hair speckled with gray and wears large framed glasses.

Though he is thinner than he was three years ago, Warren says he has this habit of eating too much, out of fear that he won’t get another meal. “When I eat at St. Vincent de Paul, I eat every bit of it that’s on my plate,” he said. “And if some other guy hasn’t eaten all of his, I ask him for it and eat that, too.”

This happens, he said, even though he knows there is plenty of food to eat at places throughout downtown that help people on the street.

A little more than a week ago, Warren landed a new job working 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. at the Lux Theater and adult bookstore on 5th Avenue in the Gaslamp Quarter. It pays $5 an hour, and if it works out, he thinks he’ll be able to quit his other job. He is a clerk and sells pornographic books and rents out adult videos, which customers view in private booths.

Undesireables Tossed Out

“I’m a clerk, and I have to make sure I throw the whores out,” he said.

His goal now is to maintain some stability to show potential employers. He has no particular interest in staying downtown, and wouldn’t if a good job came along.

Of his life right now, he says, “It’s so unproductive that it’s really hurting me. I don’t have a nest egg and I’m getting close to retirement.” Warren is tired, he said, of “staying on a peg.”

He has learned a few things downtown. One is that though many men walking the streets might be homeless, they aren’t transients.

“I recognize most of these people. You see the same ones over and over.” The same goes for the dope dealers and dope users. The same ones hang out at the same places, Warren said.

And though he acknowledges his dependency on the generosity of various downtown institutions, he criticizes some for forcing men to sit through sermons or lectures before they are fed or given shelter. It’s something that doesn’t rub him the right way.

“I’m 56 years old and I’ll take their guff,” he said. “If I was 25 or 28 years old, I’d sleep in Balboa Park.”