MOORPARK : Many Respond to Family’s Plight

Patricia Kemper is a writer.

So it was only natural that, at 3 a.m. one day in October, the 40-year-old Moorpark resident sat at her kitchen table to write about what was happening to her family.

“I sat down and started writing it because I wanted to remember,” Kemper said of the piece that was eventually published in newspapers nationwide. “I couldn’t accept that this was happening to us.”

Kemper’s article chronicled her family’s slide from middle-class stability to the edge of foreclosure over a three-year period. She said she wrote the article for herself. But soon after the story was published in The Times on Dec. 17 and reprinted in other newspapers, letters and checks started pouring in from readers living as far away as North Carolina and Illinois.

In the more than 100 letters that Kemper received, people wrote that they had also experienced hard times. The letters included $5,600 in donations that have allowed Kemper’s family to catch up on mortgage payments on their three-bedroom condominium, replace some of their ragged clothes and tear up their bankruptcy papers.

The article also led to two sales for her husband in his new position with a financial services company. And Kemper has been asked to write for several publications.

The family’s financial problems began when Kemper was confined to bed because of difficulties in her pregnancy with her second child. She was forced to leave her job as a business writer, and shortly thereafter, her husband’s business failed.

Kemper wrote in her article that she “was not at all prepared for the violent, demoralizing effect of poverty.”