A Hard Fall From Grace : He once had it all--a good job, money, power. Now he’s homeless. What happened to Terry McKelvey?

The white-haired man carries extra clothes in a plastic bucket as he weaves his way down bustling Broadway. Sometimes he pushes a shopping cart or totes plastic bags, but the bucket can be used for a stool should his back begin to ache.

His pace is hectic, as if he were late for a flight or important business meeting. His thoughts are equally rushed--even his words cannot keep up. He has no particular appointment, no deadline. Still he races forward. He pauses in front of the stately Bradbury Building and approaches slowly, like a cautious stranger. Standing beneath its arched entryway, he peers through the thick, dark glass, lifting a hand to his forehead to cut the midday glare.

For 17 years, he managed this five-story building at the corner of 3rd Street and Broadway while it was owned by Western Management Corp., founded during the Depression by his father with $200. Built in 1893, the Romanesque-style Bradbury now is a state historical landmark. It has aged gracefully--more so than the man, now 59.

The first time he walked into the building, he was 7. He recalls taking the open-cage elevator to the top floor, looking down at the floor of the open inner court and tossing a piece of paper over the railing and watching it flutter away.

Much has changed since then, much has fluttered away. And now for Terry McKelvey, it is all gone: the Bradbury, the Newport Beach properties, the $1.2 million, the boats, including the 75-foot Discovery. He lives on the streets in Downtown L.A.

For years, family members say, they warned him that drinking would devour him. They also say they witnessed symptoms of manic depression in McKelvey--expansiveness, unwarranted optimism, grandiosity, lack of judgment. He has never cooperated in treatment and has never been diagnosed.

“Manic depression is where you’re real up and then depressed,” McKelvey says. “The thing is with me, I’m very energetic, very optimistic, but sometimes I get down, especially after I have some beers, but I don’t get all depressed.”

He drinks only beer, he says--not hard liquor--and he “burns it up” real fast. When he is flat broke, he drinks only coffee and water. By his own definition, he is not an alcoholic.

Drinking, however, has caused him problems. Department of Motor Vehicle records show two convictions in 1991 for driving under the influence.

*

It is hard to pinpoint when McKelvey’s life began to change. As a child he lived in modest homes on West 77th Street and in West Adams Gardens.

He was drawn to the beach, where he learned to surf and eventually became a lifeguard. The ocean was more than a playground, it was a teacher.

“You don’t argue with the surf,” he likes to say. “You see what that wave’s gonna do. If you look, you can see how it’s shaping, and you make your moves. The wave’s in charge. You try to argue with that wave, and you’re gonna get roughed up. That’s the way I look at life. I surf it.”

He has always been an adventurer. When he was no more than 4 years old, he set out one day to explore the world with a wagon filled with stuffed animals. He walked out of the front yard of the family home in Los Angeles, and the police finally caught up with him and his merry band of teddy bears a mile away. From that point on, the front gate was locked.

There are times when he sees his life now as just another adventure, another of life’s waves, this one carrying him to a land of urban nomads and cardboard homes. He sometimes looks at Skid Row as if he were merely a visitor doing research.

Other times, however, he feels as though once again the gate has been locked on him, leaving him a star-crossed denizen, caged inside something dark and deep and terrible.

It’s an unlikely turn of events for someone who majored in business administration at USC, where he was president of his fraternity and honored for overall student achievement. In 1959, a year after graduation, he married. He and his wife had four children, all of whom grew up to be college graduates. He has an 8-year-old daughter by the second of his three marriages.

“This is a disastrous thing for someone at my age,” he says. “I don’t know what my little girl will think of me. Here’s a dad that was sitting on top of the heap, living in Newport Beach right on the water, had a home. . . . I just lost it, that’s all. I lost everything.”

*

Those who love him wonder how much farther there is to fall, believing that only when he can fall no more will he begin turning his life around. They have tried to reach out to him, but McKelvey--who tends to blame others for his descent--has rejected outsiders’ attempts.

It is his oldest daughter, Laura McKelvey, 31, who became “the rock of the family” after his mother’s death in 1991, McKelvey says. “She and I have always been close. She told me once I was her best friend.”

For Laura, who sells real estate in Newport Beach, it is too painful, she says, to talk about her father, this stranger she now calls Terry instead of Daddy. She has taken a “tough love” stance to ease the pain of teetering on the edge of hope, only to be punched in the gut again and again.

“It’s like he dies and comes back over and over again,” she says. “When he finally makes up his mind that he truly wants help, you bet I’ll be there for him. We all will. Until then, there’s nothing we can do but pray.”

His son, Paul McKelvey, 33, owns a construction company in Redlands.

There isn’t a day that he doesn’t think about his father, the heartbreak and the anger. There was a time when those feelings consumed him. He has a wife and two children now, a prospering business, and he must focus on what he can do for them.

He has drawn a line through his life, an impossibly difficult one to draw. His father is on one side, his family on the other. In his prayers, they are all together again.

Terry McKelvey spends much of his time at the Downtown public library, where he has been reading up on Teddy Roosevelt and Coca-Cola. He showers and eats at the missions, has secret spots away from Skid Row where he sleeps.

Living outside is not so bad, he says, but it can be dangerous. The only time he feels truly vulnerable is when he is in a deep sleep, which is why he keeps a knife or screwdriver or rocks the size of hockey pucks close at hand.

He is pushed forward by credulity, the belief that he will pull out of this tailspin on his own terms. He will get rich quick off his inventions, return to steer the Bradbury. He will revive Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and run for lieutenant governor, he will recover his boats, give public seminars, start new businesses. He will return to USC to play football, rekindle his third marriage. That is his plan.

In his mind, he hears magical words.

“McKelvey is back.”

He turns slowly from the Bradbury and continues down Broadway--a longing in his heart, a plan in mind, a bucket in hand.

*

As he sits on a Downtown park bench, his hands are swollen and sore, probably the result of a fracas involving a parking lot attendant. His smile is missing a tooth; the sun has turned his skin dark and tough, irritated by a case of scabies.

McKelvey begins telling his story, as usual, from the middle. He managed the Bradbury from 1969 until 1986, when he parted ways with Western Management. In 1989, the building was sold.

He remains bitter about losing the Bradbury, saying he had planned on making it his life. From the buyout of his lease and stock, McKelvey left Western Management with $1.2 million in addition to his two Newport Beach homes, which, according to 1987 divorce records from his second marriage, were valued at $500,000.

After he left the Bradbury, he says he sold his homes and soaked nearly all his money into three boats: two 30-foot fishing vessels and the 75-foot, 50-ton Discovery, a replica of a 1781 British battleship named the Rattlesnake.

“I could have retired and never worked another day in my life, but I chose not to, and I bought these boats, and boy have I run into trouble on the waterfront. But I’m up to it and I can take it. I have very thick bones. I used to drink a lot of milk when I was little.”

McKelvey intended to use the vessels in a charter business. He also bought a photocopy service in Costa Mesa, but both ended up draining him financially. What was left of the money disappeared quickly. His third marriage began unraveling, and in 1987 he started living on the boats during winter, opting for the streets of San Pedro with the clemency of spring.

He began trawling trash bins for scraps of food and aluminum cans. He grew a beard and started dressing in black. He called it his Dr. Death uniform.

People in the marinas were complaining about his boats being littered with filth and attracting an unscrupulous crowd. Eventually, he got behind on his slip fees, liens were filed and the boats were taken for auction.

McKelvey says that the waterfront became vicious and that he was clubbed in the head one night. Last April 8, he hopped on a bus for Downtown, intending to file a lawsuit against a dock master. He went to the Los Angeles County Courthouse but became frustrated with the process, so he left.

A spate of memories washed over him as he wandered through Downtown. He remembered when he was a child and his Aunt Edith brought him to lunch at Clifton’s. He remembered the buildings he managed, places he worked. He remembered the Bradbury.

Partly by process of elimination, partly because of fatigue and partly because of the lingering warmth of those better days, he decided to stay. After a few nights in a shelter, he opted for sleeping outdoors. (In 1992, it was estimated that on any given night in L.A., there were up to 40,000 people who are homeless, about the same as the population of Culver City.)

A nocturnal rain splattered the streets not long after he arrived in April, and he migrated instinctively like a Canada goose to somewhere warm and safe. He curled up, closed his eyes and fell asleep on the side entrance of the Bradbury Building.

*

Doris Chessler operated a telephone answering service and served as McKelvey’s assistant at the Pershing Square Building and the Bradbury. She has known him since the late 1960s. Now the owner of a small print shop near the corner of 2nd Street and Broadway, she recalls the day last spring when a man walked into her shop and stared at her.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” he asked.

She didn’t.

“Then when he told me his name I knew right away it was Terry. I could tell he was a street person. He was dirty and his hair wasn’t combed, and he didn’t shave,” she says.

Chessler is a kind-hearted woman, and she, too, has lived a tough life. Her son died at 15 in a motorcycle crash, a daughter died three years ago of leukemia. Her husband died of a heart attack. She knows what it is to feel despair.

She allows McKelvey to store some of his things in her shop, use the telephone and bathroom, make copies of his sometimes voluminous, rambling prose.

“I have respect for him, because I know what kind of a person he was,” Chessler says. “He was a good manager, and he kept everything going. He had a lot of people working for him who wouldn’t otherwise have jobs. In that regard, he helped a lot of people.”

McKelvey went into “semi-retirement” in 1977, spending less time at the Bradbury and more time at home or at the beach in Newport, tinkering with inventions, surfing, working on “tear-down” properties and fixing them up.

He implemented a concept he called the “free and open corporation” at the Bradbury--hiring young people, many of them high school dropouts, to run their own businesses. They were made owners, sharing equally in profits or losses.

The program grew to about 40 employees and more than a dozen small businesses. McKelvey reached the point where he was reporting to work only a couple of times a month to sign checks and gather his flock around him for lectures.

“He was always in command,” Chessler says, “and quite capable of everything he was doing. I don’t think he was quite as kind as he lets on, because people did have problems with him. He kind of avoided those he was having problems with.”

He was always creative, once inventing a simple toboggan he sold to Sears and Roebuck and a line of novelty items for children. He would design outlandish costumes for parties. He and his first wife once dressed as an eight-legged spider, waiting at the front door for someone to arrive and ring the doorbell.

Even in his business dealings, there were moments of creative brilliance. Over lunch one day, he sold the air rights over the Bradbury for more than $1 million. The money was used to pay for seismic work on the building.

He hired his son away from General Dynamics to take on the job, which launched Paul McKelvey’s business in seismic work and construction.

There are times when Chessler, now 71, has to ask McKelvey to leave her shop when it is crowded and he is disruptive, but she says she could never totally turn her back on him.

“I believe in God, and God says that what you do for the least of these, you do for me, so I keep telling myself I have to keep doing it. They’re all God’s children.”

*

For Paul McKelvey, Terry’s oldest child and only son, it is difficult to have hope, but it is impossible to give up. The ghost of his father is everywhere.

“I think about him every day,” Paul McKelvey says. “Yesterday, I had an appointment on the 34th floor of the AT&T; Building--dressed up in suit and tie, business is going well. To realize that within a mile radius, that my father is out there living in the streets and there’s no way of doing anything about it, is a wild feeling.

“Driving in, I should be thinking about all the details of the meeting that are going to come up. That wasn’t on my mind. What happens if I pull out of a parking lot and there he is? What would I do? I don’t know if I could keep driving. I don’t think I could.

“It happened once here in Redlands about six months ago. I was driving down the street and there was a homeless guy walking down the street pushing a cart, and he had the same hair as my father. I immediately pulled into a parking lot, got out, started to walk slowly--kind of apprehensively--as this guy was walking up. I was walking toward him, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know. I got a look at his face and it wasn’t him.

“I mean, what would I have done, stick out my hand, ‘How ya been Dad?’ Put him in the car and get him showered and something to eat? That wouldn’t play out. That’s not real. If I said that to him, it wouldn’t be realistic. So, what do you do?”

Long before Terry McKelvey became homeless, his brother, Alden McKelvey, formerly a minister and the ex-president of Western Management, chaired the Skid Row Development Corp.

In a July 2, 1988, letter to The Times in response to an editorial, Alden McKelvey wrote that society can only provide shelters and services for the homeless. It cannot force their use.

“Transition House has sheltered nearly 5,000 men and women in the five years of its existence. The legitimate needs of the truly homeless are serious. Let’s not let emotion allow dropouts to run our city. Shelter is available. But often, because it comes with ‘rules’--e.g. ’10 p.m. curfew, tidiness requirements and clean-up duties,’ many of the so-called homeless have just chosen not to use what is available.”

Alden McKelvey, who now lives in the Channel Islands, says he never dreamed he would be writing about his own family. He, too, hopes his brother begins to repair his life. And if that happens, he, too, will be there to help.

“It sounds cruel, but maybe the best thing you can do is help them hit bottom, so they can begin to rebuild. That’s the time to reach out to someone.”

Paul McKelvey says he fears there will come a telephone call some day or night from the coroner. Or worse, that his father might simply disappear. What should happen, he asks, if there is no bottom to this fall?

“He has a grandson in there taking a nap right now who he hasn’t even seen, probably doesn’t even know about. He has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people, but that’s not what I hang onto,” he says. “I hang onto the joys and the love.”

The memories.

“I remember him as being the most fun dad on the block. He taught me to surf when I was just a little kid. He was absolutely the oldest guy out there on a surfboard by 20 years. I was real proud of that, and my friends thought it was cool that Mr. McKelvey would take us surfing to take early-morning runs down in the trestles. He was a dad who was your buddy too.”

Perhaps it would hurt less now if he had been a mean, uncaring father. Paul was 13 when his parents divorced.

“It was a rough divorce, but he always stood by us, absolutely stood by us. He didn’t settle for every other weekend with the kids. He wanted us to know that our dad was just down the street. He got an apartment that was a bicycle ride away from the school.”

He was filled with hugs and support, never raised a hand to his children, Paul says.

“He wasn’t drinking much then. He would take a six-pack--he called them beach Cokes--and pour the beer into a soda can so the police wouldn’t bother him. He never came home drunk. It wasn’t until later that it was obvious he had a drinking problem--a case a day, then two cases a day. The drinking had a huge effect on him. That started when I was in my early 20s.”

The entire family has tried to help, he says.

“We would sit down with him individually, in pairs, as a group. Then, ultimately, as a family we would hire people to help us, professionals who would intervene and that didn’t work. We started to look at what social services were out there, what legal means there were to help him.”

He says the family would gladly pay for treatment, housing, anything that would help McKelvey get better. That is what family members do for each other. That is what a family is.

“He’s Terry now. We want our father back. We want to help him. We want to say to him, ‘OK, Dad, we’re all together again. It’s going to be all right. Let’s all get well together.’ ”

In December, it will be two years since he last saw his father.

*

Terry McKelvey has a plan for getting off Skid Row. Step One involves getting a job--any job--just to put a few dollars in his pocket. From there, he says, he will work his way to a position of management, perhaps return to the Bradbury.

He also considers initiating public seminars, charging people a dollar a question. He has a few inventions in mind that he keeps secret.

In implementing his plan, the first problem he faces is finding shoes. He has been attending the Chrysalis program, which helps people who are homeless find jobs. In addition to training, it provides clients with use of telephones, clothes to wear to interviews, bus tokens to get there.

He awakened early to shower and shave at the missions. By 9:30 a.m., he is digging through the rack of clothes at Chrysalis. He finds two black shoes that seem to match. They are the right size but both for the left foot. He settles on a pair of tan suedes and builds the rest of the wardrobe around them. The fourth jacket he tries fits good enough. It, too, is tan. He finds matching pants, a brown striped tie, blue shirt and a pair of brown socks.

He has chosen security as a field that can get him started and has made telephone contact with a business not far from Downtown. It will be his first interview since 1959, when he landed a job as office manager for Mutual of New York.

On the bus, he rehearses his lines in preparation for the interview. He finds the building and pauses to straighten his tie and untangle his hair with his fingers in the reflection of a window. He looks professional, all together a different person.

The small waiting room is filled with younger, almost military-looking applicants. After finishing the paperwork, he is called in and talks to a man for about 15 minutes. There is laughter coming from the room. When he comes out, he is smiling, certain he has landed a job. His mind is racing.

“I need to call them back with telephone numbers for my references, but I’m sure I got it,” he says. The discussion did not progress to money, but McKelvey says he will push for $7 an hour.

He promptly provides the business with the numbers, but they never call back.

He sees a classified ad and interviews the following week at a hotel and comes away with the same confidence and optimism but also the same result.

“It’s sinking in and it’s something I just have to live with of what I blew, what I lost,” he says after being turned down. “It’s hard to live with, and I’m having real trouble seeing my way out of it. Very few people had it made like I had it made. Now I have nothing.”

He is no longer thinking about his grandiose plans, no longer slinging the anger that seems to swell by the day.

“Part of the problem,” he says, “is that I have big dreams.”

He is thinking about his 8-year-old daughter. He wants her to know something.

“I’m sorry.”

But even in his down moments, something tells him to hang on, to fight his battles in the only way apparent to him--to ride the wave. He says he has never been suicidal, and he is determined to survive.

“If I would die now,” he says, “I go out a loser.”

*

The street is lined with Benzes and Beemers, and off to the side, Terry McKelvey lies passed out on the sidewalk. He has been drinking since his general relief money came through the previous week. His chest is bare, grime stains his unshaven face.

When his check arrived, he opened a bank account, fearing cash would wind up with thieves. During the weekend, he was robbed of his weapons, papers and a few cans of beer.

He wakes up and stands on the sidewalk, heads for the bank, then to the liquor store, then back to the sidewalk with a six-pack of Blitz beer.

“L.A. County made the biggest mistake in the world,” he says. “They approved my G.R.”

He spent Sept. 6, his 59th birthday, in court for an open-container violation. He was sentenced to one day of community service. That was on Tuesday, and now it is Thursday. What happened, he wonders, to Wednesday.

His eyes are red, his voice is loud--both happy and sad--as he shouts to a man sporting a gray suit and a ponytail as the man climbs out of his car.

“I hope you’re on my side. You look like a winner,” McKelvey says, suspecting the man is a lawyer.

“I am,” the man says as he loads his briefcase and a box of files onto a luggage caddy. He is friendly and smiles at McKelvey. “Good luck,” he says as he walks away.

A siren from a firetruck screams and McKelvey becomes infuriated, yelling at it to shut up. He lifts the tab from a beer can but it breaks off in his hand.

“Never buy cheap beer,” he says.

Something invisible and cruel shoves Thomas Jefferson to McKelvey’s consciousness. “The founders of this country were fantastic,” he says, suddenly serious, “a great bunch of guys, but I didn’t know them.”

The beer slows his racing mind to a crawl. It is the only way he knows to relax. He stabs the can with a pen, and foam surges out. He raises the beer, blows foam in all directions and laughs.

Hours later, the light has softened to orange, reflecting off the tops of skyscrapers, abandoning streets in encroaching darkness. The parked cars are gone, and the last of the Downtown professionals are emptying onto the freeways.

McKelvey sits torpidly and alone, talking to himself on the sidewalk. The stench from nearby trees and bushes thickens the air. His words are slurred and sodden. There is something almost childlike in his voice.

“You know,” he says, “I made it. I really made it, didn’t I? Fifty-nine years. I made it.”