A Long Road Home

As a vet and his dog wandered

 Middletown streets, officials struggled to find them shelter — together.
December 25, 2006, By ALAINE GRIFFIN, Courant Staff Writer

MIDDLETOWN, CT -- It's been a while since Roger Slight had a home.

Back in April, the 54-year-old Navy veteran was told that he qualified for federally funded public housing. Problem was, Slight's dog, Malachi, a 125-pound American bulldog, didn't.

So Slight held out on a home to be with his buddy - even if it meant shivering through the nights and waking up in his tent recently with a dusting of frost covering his scraggly beard. Slight's devotion to his docile dog became the talk of the town at the local soup kitchen. Some thought he was crazy. Word soon spread to a band of social workers, who joined Slight in his quest for a home. The 8-month push reached the mayor's desk and the offices of doctors, who told housing authority officials Slight needed Malachi for emotional support.

But Slight, a shy but personable man with a smoker's-hack laugh, had struggled with homelessness before. He prepared for the worst.

"My doctor told me she had a new tent for me if this didn't work out. And there's always him," Slight said pointing to Malachi. "He keeps me warm. He's like a horse, you know."

The old tent, worn and stuffed with sleeping bags, was pitched among brush along the Connecticut River just steps from Route 9 traffic. A rusted baby carriage parked next to a suitcase there held cans of food and served as Slight's clothesline. A tattered soccer ball, chewed-up stuffed animals and empty ALPO cans marked Malachi's spot at their riverfront home.

There, man and dog battled the heavy spring rain and the floods that crept past the sandstone rock ledge. Together, they spooked the squirrels and river rats that tried to steal Slight's soup-kitchen sandwiches.

Slight relied on the hulking Malachi to scare away people who strayed from nearby Harbor Park and into their wooded home. His campsite was vandalized once while they were gone.

People worried he would be struck by lightning during the summer storms. Slight said he worried more about the rush-hour traffic speeding by less than 50 feet from his tent.

"Sometimes I would be laying there and all of a sudden I would hear brakes screeching," Slight said. "Then all I could picture was someone coming through the guardrails."

Though the nights were often long, Slight passed the time reading. With his flashlight propped up on his shoulder and Malachi's head on his thigh, Slight would escape into science fiction, immersing himself into such writings as Thomas Harlan's "Oath of Empire" series.

But the fantasies ended by morning, when Slight's back pain brought home the reality of where he had spent the night. The bad thoughts, though, didn't last with one look at his roommate's droopy face.

"Just before the sun came up, we would lay there listening to the birds," Slight said. "One morning, the sun was coming up behind the hill and lit up the Arrigoni Bridge. It looked golden. I remember thinking, wow, that's pretty neat."

But as the days grew shorter, and sounds of singing birds were replaced by the desperate honking of flocks of geese heading south, Slight knew he would soon have to find better shelter.

Back-and-forth letter writing between Slight, his advocates and the Middletown Housing Authority was not getting results. Housing rules prohibited dogs weighing more than 20 pounds unless they were considered service dogs. Labeling Malachi a service dog meant he needed special training he didn't have.

William Vasiliou, the agency's executive director, knew there was only one thing left to do. Vasiliou scheduled a meeting with Slight. He told him to bring along Malachi.

Malachi showed Vasiliou what outreach workers, locals at the soup kitchen and downtown merchants already knew - he wasn't just any dog.

Like good medicine, Malachi's name was on the prescription slips of doctors who advocated for Slight to be allowed to keep Malachi in public housing. The dog is Slight's emotional support, they said, a service dog in a sense who, like a guide dog leads the blind, serves as the antidote to Slight's depression and antisocial ways.

It was this insular behavior, born of what he called his self-professed stigma as the family black sheep during his childhood in Durham, followed by a failed relationship with his longtime girlfriend in the mid-'80s, that got in the way of his life. The girlfriend left him penniless, and he began a drinking binge in 1984. He ended it one morning when he said he noticed beer in his cornflakes. Slight still remembers that February day. It was 1989.

That year, Slight joined the carnival circuit and sold concessions for a boss whose business card Slight still keeps. Slight liked the travel, but he couldn't get over his antisocial tendencies.

"I had trouble dealing with people, and it's kind of hard to work on commission when you don't want to deal with people. You have to be the constant salesman," Slight said.

So last year, he moved in with a friend in Middletown but hit the streets in the spring when that situation didn't work out.

With a walking stick in one hand, Malachi's leash in the other and a pack on his back with a dingy rolled-up rug for Malachi, Slight walked many miles and met lots of people in the city.

When Slight ate lunch at the soup kitchen, Malachi, tied to an outside post, would nap on the rug Slight would spread out on the sidewalk for him. A bowl of water was always nearby.

But Malachi didn't get much sleep. Someone was always petting him, stuffing money into his collar or giving him biscuits. When Malachi injured his paw, Dr. Susan Hadley, one of the physicians involved in Slight's home hunt, brought Malachi to the vet. A local crossing guard helped get Malachi's shots updated, and someone donated grooming services. The attention forced Slight into conversations with people, contact he usually tried to avoid.

 

Continued to the right
 

SALEM, Ore. - If Gov. Ted Kulongoski seems a little sluggish this week, he's got an excuse: he couldn't afford coffee.

In fact, the Democratic governor couldn't afford much of anything during a trip to a Salem-area grocery store on Tuesday, where he had exactly $21 to buy a week's worth of food — the same amount that the state's average food stamp recipient spends weekly on groceries.

Kulongoski is taking the weeklong challenge to raise awareness about the difficulty of feeding a family on a food stamp budget.

Accompanied by reporters and food stamp recipient Christina Sigman-Davenport, Kulongoski headed straight for a display of organic bananas, only to have Sigman-Davenport steer him toward the cheaper non-organic variety.

The governor pined wistfully for canned Progresso soups, but at $1.53 apiece, they would have blown the budget. He settled instead for three packages of Cup O'Noodles for 33 cents apiece. Kulongoski also gave up his usual Adams natural, no-stir peanut butter for a generic store brand, but drew the line at saving money by buying peanut butter and jelly in the same jar.

"I don't much like the looks of that," said Kulongoski, 66, staring at the concoction.

Other shoppers in the store were bemused by Kulongoski's quest.

"Obviously, he doesn't shop often," Barb Sours of Salem said, as Kulongoski bounced around the aisles in search of granola. "He's all over the place."

Kulongoski did pause to chat with shoppers John and Bonnie White of Salem, telling them all about his $21 limit.

"Don't spend it all in one place," John White warned.

Along the way, Sigman-Davenport, a mother of three who works for the state Department of Human Services and went on food stamps in the fall after her husband lost his job, dispensed tips for shopping on a budget. Scan the highest and lowest shelves, she told the governor. Look for off-brand products, clip coupons religiously, get used to filling, low-cost staples like macaroni and cheese and beans, and, when possible, buy in bulk.

At the check-out counter, Kulongoski's purchases totaled $21.97, forcing him to give back one of the Cup O'Noodles and two bananas, for a final cost of $20.97 for 19 items.

After the hourlong shopping trip, Kulongoski said he was mindful that his week on food stamps will be finite and that thousands of others aren't so lucky.

"I don't care what they call it, if this is what it takes to get the word out," Kulongoski said, in response to questions about whether the food stamp challenge was no more than a publicity stunt. "This is an issue every citizen in this state should be aware of."

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