Help Warms Homeless Man Who Lost Legs to Frostbite : Oklahoma: Man’s plight moves small town to action. The local hospital is paying for his stay and for amputation surgery. An artificial limb firm will give him free prostheses.

Davis (Slim) Hamilton spent his nights inside a cold, vacant dairy building. It got so bad one evening that he suffered frostbite on his feet and couldn’t walk.

He lit a fire to keep warm, but feared it would spread when he tried to put it out. As he struggled to crawl away, his left foot snagged on something and tore off.

Residents in the small city of Ada saw Hamilton dragging himself down an alley, blood oozing from a stub at the end of his leg, and took him to the hospital--where he slept in a bed for the first time in six years.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t start the fire,” Hamilton said. “I probably wouldn’t have lived two or three days anyway. I didn’t know when I went to bed at night if I’d wake up in the morning.”

Folks in Ada, a town of 15,000 about 90 miles southeast of Oklahoma City, say they were surprised to discover a homeless person in their community--but their surprise didn’t stop them from taking care of him.

The hospital is paying for Hamilton’s stay and for the surgery to amputate both of his legs below the knee.

“As far as we’re concerned, this is free care because it needs to be done,” spokesman Dan Pizzino said.

When Hamilton is released, Gerald Faulkner, the owner of Ada Artificial Limb and Brace, plans to fit him with prosthetic legs--for free.

“We could all be in that position,” he said.

Assistant Police Chief Harvey Phillips said there are no more than a dozen homeless people in town who would rather drink than go to a shelter, but many of them have relatives they can stay with on occasion.

“It’s a nice town, a good place to raise kids,” said Cindy Polacek, who moved from Chicago nine years ago. “Occasionally, you’ll see someone on a corner who would have a board that says ‘Work for Food’ or ‘Work for Diapers,’ but only once every five or six months, and that’s on nice days.”

Hamilton, who prefers the dairy building to a shelter, had been surviving on sardines, sausages and, sometimes, food brought to him by the building’s owner.

It wasn’t always that way. He graduated from high school in 1953 and found occasional work as a roughneck in oil fields. He had three jobs in Ada, the last with the Solid Waste Department. But he doesn’t remember the last time he worked or the number of abandoned buildings he claimed as home.

Hamilton vows to make the most of his second chance.

“I’m a fairly intelligent person,” he said. “I could have made something out of my life, but I didn’t. When I was in that dairy building, I about gave up. The devil put me in that building. God got me out.”