Posted on 09/21/2008 9:17:45 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Abandoned as a baby, this executive wouldn't have survived without help from others. Now he's returning the favor
James McElya was abandoned, at six weeks old, on the doorstep of the Salvation Army in West Chester, Pa. A succession of 11 families took him in until he was old enough to fend for himself.
"These were poor people trying to raise their own families," McElya, now 61, recalls about the informal network of foster homes. "They were not getting paid to take me in. I was the last thing they needed. They kept me for as long as they could, and then they'd find another family to pass me on to. And that's how it went."
McElya kept his personal story under wraps for decades as he went on to build a 30-year career in the automotive industry. But now, as executive chairman of Cooper-Standard Automotive, a $2.5 billion (revenue) supplier of chassis systems, he's opening up about it in the hope that his experience will convince other companies to donate the $1 million needed for a medical clinic for homeless children in Detroit.
...
Detroit has at least 17,000 homeless people, 25% of whom are children. Most homeless kids are not immunized nor ever seen by a doctor except in an emergency, says Chad Audi, president of Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, which provides meals and housing. Homeless mothers fear their children will be taken away by the state if they reveal their living conditions to a physician.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Oh no, this will never work! It needs to have a bunch of 6-figured salary government bureaucrats to run it “for the children”. /s
Yep, to make sure the kids never see a dime of it.
Wow, what a story. Adoptees, special needs children, and Down syndrome kids sure are getting a boost in the press.
Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries seems on the up-and-up. I can only hope Mr. McElya vetted them but they seem like a lean outfit. Check out their humble headquarters:
http://www.drmm.org/overview.html
“Founded in 1909, The Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries has embarked upon its 100th year of continued service providing food, shelter and services to intervene upon homelessness and substance addiction throughout Detroit and its surrounding metropolitan communities. DRMM is a faith-based, non-profit organization, recognized by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), and has devoted a wealth of resources to meet the basic needs of humanity while motivating individuals to rebuild their lives, one life at a time.”
Let’s hope they take the “toughlove” approach, as advocated by reformed former homeless bums. Doling out “services” to addicts and alcoholics only sustains them in their self-destruction.
God bless them for helping the homeless!
That’s not what I meant. The guy may be legit; it’s the idiots that oversee the thing. And I mean someone in government is overseeing it directly or undirectly.
His white mother, the town prostitute, died of alcoholism and left him orphaned as a young boy. His white father was unknown, and his mother's family spurned him, as did the white community and churches. In the era before comprehensive government social services, by fortunate circumstance, a good-hearted poor Black family who lived nearby took him in.
As my friend explained, he had his own immediate white family of wife, children, and grandchildren, and the Black family who lovingly raised him. Both families came together every year for Thanksgiving in the once small town that he grew up in.
Contrary to expectations perhaps, my friend was a conservative Democrat who voted for and supported Republicans for years until switching parties when it was politically possible for him to do so. In his experience, the Democratic politicians he knew well were too often racists who despised Blacks, while Republicans tended to be genuinely color-blind and well-meaning.
And they should. The grants, donations and funds for politically correct diseases (read: HIV/AIDS and Breast Cancer) is astronomic in comparison to the “victims”. It’s just the opposite in re special needs children — so many more in this category, so much fewer funds.
The organization has been recently drummed out of operation by the San Francisco Supervisors.
Holy crap! (scuse’ me) That’s a great story. It would make an awesome memoir, right up there with “Angela’s Ashes” and maybe a great movie as well.
Depending on the circumstances, perhaps your friend could be persuaded to write it down or ghost it. Even in a novelized form (names and settings changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent).
Of course, in the Bad Old Days, being the orphaned, bastard son of the town hooker would be about as low on the feudal social order as you could go and still be white.
I’m thinking of James A. Michner’s most unusual (and best) book. His semi-autobiographical novel “Fires of Spring”. In interviews, he referred to himself as a “foundling” which was ye olde fashioned code phrase for “illegitmate-child-left-on-doorstep.” My mom tells me it was understood back in the day, that most “orphans” were not quite exactly that but that it was a far, far better thing to be handed over to the orphanarium as an infant than to suffer the brutal opprobrium of growing up a bastard in a small town.
The opportunity for a memoir has likely passed if it ever existed. I have not seen my friend in years as he has retired, and I am not sure that he is still with us. More than that, a published memoir requires a loss of privacy, something that most people shrink from.
That’s why I suggested a “novelization” treatment if necessary.
You said he was a boy in the forties and fifties. That would put him in his late sixties.
Now that I think of it, my lobbyist friend may have been a little older, with his boyhood during the Depression. After the election, I’ll ask some friends in common if he is still with us.
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