Commentary : Stretch Was a Good Guy; He Brightened Your Day and He’ll Be Missed

A Santa Ana citizen was found dead of pneumonia on Fairmont Street several weeks ago. His name was Keith Holmberg, but if you knew him you probably called him Stretch.

If you ever passed him on the street but didn’t know him, you most likely thought, yikes, there’s one of the homeless, and you ignored him, or offered him a dollar, depending on your philosophical stance. He wouldn’t have taken the dollar, in any case.

Stretch made his entire living by digging aluminum cans and old car radiators out of various dumpsters around town. That’s where you might have seen him, if you live or work anywhere between 20th Street and Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana. He was the tall thin fellow with the baseball cap who pushed around a stripped-down baby carriage. Ring a bell?

Stretch was born in New Jersey in 1932. He was a veteran, and had lost his last job because of circulatory problems and lung damage from exposure to asbestos. For 10 years, he lived under an avocado tree on Grand Avenue in Santa Ana. Then he moved into a 17th Street apartment with an elderly friend who is confined to a wheelchair. As a taxpayer, you never paid a penny toward his upkeep. But if you were fortunate enough to live in the area defined by his aluminum-can run, you found that he constantly brought you odds and ends, interesting articles clipped from the newspapers, and flowers for your wife.

The nine children being cared for by a Latino woman on Lincoln Street will be wondering what happened to the old guy who brought them lollipops every day.

And if you had the time and a couple of beers on a Saturday afternoon, you’d find that he could humorously hold his own in conversations on any topic from Shakespeare to Steinbeck to current news.

A friend and I had the melancholy duty of driving around and delivering the news of Stretch’s death to a number of his friends. Some live in nice houses and one sleeps behind a dumpster in an alley off Bush Street. Every one of them cried.

You read a lot of articles in the paper about this and that disadvantaged family, and, of course, you are free to come to your own decisions about whether or not they deserve the plight they’re in. But Keith Holmberg, with his humor and independence and generosity and quintessential gentlemanliness, represented a kind of Forgotten Man in Orange County.

Supermarkets throw away tons of produce and cheese and sandwich meat and a hundred other sorts of food; it’s wilting, or the date on the package was yesterday. Stretch and others like him can salvage and eat it. But many supermarket employees will stand on the dock in sight of such people and routinely slash and break the food containers before tossing them into the trash bin. I’ve seen this done behind the Alpha Beta and Ralphs markets on 17th Street.

Stretch was disabled, and his big ambition was to get back some of the money he had put into Social Security during his decades of hard work on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. My wife is a legal secretary, but despite her skills at cutting through the red tape of bureaucracy, she had not managed to pry any money loose for him before he died.

On his cart Stretch carried a plastic bag that he filled with aluminum cans to take to Bruce Metals & Salvage on 6th Street. One day in Orange, a police officer stopped him, took an empty beer can from the bag, and gave Stretch a ticket for having an open container of alcohol.

And, like many another, he lost all his personal belongings when city workers in Santa Ana were cracking down on people sleeping in parks, and were throwing away all the furniture and bedrolls and eyeglasses and false teeth they could find.

Stretch never took charity--he didn’t need a Good Samaritan--but he would have had an easier time of it if Orange County had not worked so hard to crush the very sorts of hard-working poor that put the place on the map in the first place. Stretch just played the cards dealt, and somehow he was so good-natured that he never resented anything.

Me? I’m not so good-natured. I look at people being arrested in Orange County for being at a street corner at dawn to try to get a day’s work; and I watch eminent domain being invoked to drive poor people out of their hard-earned houses; and I read about 5 a.m. intrusions into apartments in the south part of the county to count the number of tenants; and I read the Costa Mesa mayor’s contemptuous and contemptible opinion of the poor, and, sitting here on my porch with no longer any reason to watch for that approaching cart and lanky figure and broad wave and big grin, I find very, very much to resent.