Gloves for The Needy: One Heart Warms Many Chilly Fingers

The old man sits on a bench off the Bowery, glazed eyes staring into a void, sipping on a tall can of Bud enclosed in a brown paper bag. "Twelve dollars and 50 cents," he mutters. "Twelve dollars and 50 cents." It is the sum total of one man's life -- the amount he says he has been trying to borrow from his family in Detroit to ensure his burial in potter's field, and to escape from the death beyond death: "They send you to medical school and cut you up into little pieces -- that's not for me. No sir."

/ This observation on oblivion was prompted by something as mundane as a pair of gloves, which had been proffered tentatively by a short man wearing a cap and an aging leather jacket, with a faded green cotton bag slung over his shoulder like an Irish peddler. For the past 24 years, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Michael Greenberg, 60, has been taking his bag of gloves to Manhattan's Bowery, long the haunt of the down-and-outs and the lost- weekenders, and wandering the gritty neighborhood looking for "the old, the reticent and the shy." When he finds one, like the old man on the bench, he dangles a pair of gray or maroon woolen gloves and says, "Take them, please. They're free. They're a gift. No strings attached." Then he shakes a trembling hand. This simple act of communion, says Greenberg, "will almost invariably bring a smile of acknowledgment. You can tell the handshake is in earnest because they press your fingers."

It is hard work for this retired advertising account executive, handing out 300 pairs of gloves every year on New York's infamous skid row, which runs from Chinatown a dozen or so blocks north to Cooper Square. "Oh, if I just wanted to stand here and give them away, I could get rid of 1,000 in an hour. Easy. But I prefer to go looking for the people I want. The ones who avoid eye contact. It is not so much the gloves, but telling people they count."

Greenberg was shaped for his role of Samaritan of the streets by his memories of Depression hard times and by the charity of his father, Pinchus Joseph, who owned a Brooklyn bakery. "My father would often include a coffee cake or a sandwich in the bag without his customer's knowing," he says. "He would always tell us, 'Don't deprive yourself of the joy of giving.' " Money was short, and Michael has a searing recollection of losing a glove while helping bring supplies into the store on a bitterly cold morning. "I was never able to find it, and for years I went around without gloves. I never asked my father to replace them because I felt so guilty."

When his father died in November 1963, he searched for an appropriate memorial. "I remembered the incident of the lost glove, and it occurred to me that gloves are a powerful symbol because being warm is being well-off and being cold is being poor. At that time there weren't as many homeless people on the streets, and so I immediately thought of the Bowery, and I decided to put a pair of gloves on some poor fellow's hands just as my father had slipped free Danish rolls into customers' bags." Greenberg was then teaching sixth grade in a Brooklyn public school, and the following year, despite his modest salary, he bought 72 pairs of woolen gloves, took them to the Bowery, and handed them out (very timidly, he admits) to the destitute and the derelict. Why 72? Because 18 is the Hebrew symbol for life, and "four times life is 72."