Coming in From the Cold

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On the morning that Ronald Reagan stood under the Capitol dome and delivered his Inaugural paean to boundless opportunity, Leander V. Gilmore, 61, of "no fixed address," was found frozen to death in an abandoned house a few miles away. The cold was kinder to many others of the capital's 10,000 or so homeless. When the icy weather kept home Inaugural partygoers, several of the hosts, including a bank and a law firm, donated their uneaten goodies to the poor. Outside a Washington shelter for the homeless, ragged street people gaped as a purple van from Ridgewell's ("caterers to the elite") pulled up and tuxedoed waiters hopped out to unload leftover canapes, whole hams, mounds of crab claws, shrimp and quiche. That night at the shelter, 1,000 homeless dined like lobbyists. Though the gesture smacked slightly of "let 'em eat cake" largesse, Mitchell Snyder, director of the District of Columbia Community for Creative Non-Violence, which runs the shelter, was heartened by the heightened public concern. "Four years ago this wouldn't have happened," he said. "Americans now know that there are lots of people out there suffering."

As a record-setting arctic cold wave gripped much of the country from the Midwest to Florida last week, the plight of the nation's homeless once again became painfully apparent. Authorities and private citizens scrambled against nature's bitter blast to protect those least able to protect themselves. Even as the U.S. economy booms, so, perversely, does the number of homeless. Experts put the figure as low as 300,000 and as high as nearly 2 million. Certainly the homeless have become more noticeable as they shamble through bus depots, sleep on steam grates and occasionally die in public. The nation was shocked last December when Jesse Carpenter, a decorated World War II hero, succumbed to exposure in Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House.

The emergency efforts made during the deadly winter assault provided some temporary relief. In Chicago, where the temperature dropped to a record -27 degrees F, police picked up those in danger of freezing and delivered them to makeshift dormitories in schools and park recreation centers. As the temperature plummeted to -18 degrees in Pittsburgh, most of the city's 1,500 street people squeezed into shelters and missions, while some slept in jail. In New York City, where the temperature dipped to -2 degrees, a record low for the date, 19,269 of the homeless (another record) jammed into city shelters. Mayor Ed Koch followed the precedent set by Mayor Wilson Goode in Philadelphia and ordered that whenever the temperature, including the effect of the wind- chill factor, dropped to 5 degrees, police were to remove homeless from the street and take them to shelters or hospitals--whether they wanted to go or not.

The New York Civil Liberties Union promptly denounced the mayor's decree as an unconstitutional restraint on personal freedom. Scoffed Koch: "Does this make any sense? Do people have a right to simply go out, if they are not in full possession of their faculties, and kill themselves?" In fact, few of the homeless chose to be out in the cold. On the first night of the sweep, the police picked up only 14 street people, two of whom went against their will. One, a woman of 66, protested that she was "waiting for a ship to take me back to Panama." The other said simply, "I'm an alcoholic, and this is my life."