Tom Schuman was rushed and exhausted. After a draining night at the homeless shelter he runs, he faced a 7 a.m. deadline to get everybody out.
At 6:45 a.m., a homeless man, barefoot and holding a pair of tattered tennis shoes in his hands, approached him with a plea.
“Do you have a pair of socks?” he asked Schuman.
Schuman winced. It was October, early in the shelter season, and there hadn’t been many clothing donations yet. He walked back to a storage closet, rummaged through what was there, and pulled out some thin tube socks about half the size that the man needed. It was all he could find.
The homeless man shrugged. “It’s better than what I’ve got,” he said, and proceeded to try squeezing on the socks.
Schuman ran back and picked through the clothes again. This time, he found a pair of heavy wool socks.
“I bent down to him and I said, `Look what I found,’ ” Schuman said. “The guy turned around and I saw the smiles of my children in all their Christmases past, collectively, in this guy’s smile. I had never seen anybody’s face light up like that.” For Schuman, it was a defining moment in his unlikely career as the volunteer director of a homeless shelter.
Here was the former general counsel of a Fortune 500 company. The man who had turned away from a lucrative career at just 54 in search of work that would give his life more meaning.
And in that moment, in the sparkle of that young man’s grateful eyes, he had found some of that meaning. “I was so thankful then,” Schuman said. “Never in my life have I not had a pair of socks or a pillow to lay my head on. And that theme just comes back up to me all the time. Whenever I start whining that I don’t have this and that, I have to tell myself to knock it off now. It just illustrates how incredibly gifted so many of us are.”
That moment last October came in Schuman’s first year as director of the Sunday night site at Christ Lutheran Church in Palatine. The shelter is one of several run by Northwest Suburban PADS, which places volunteers at temporary shelters inside churches throughout the area.
For many volunteers like Schuman, the experience of working with scores of displaced people from year to year has been nothing short of life-transforming.
A good number of the volunteers work full time in demanding, high-profile jobs and otherwise would never confront the face of a homeless person up close. In fact, many said that before their work as volunteers they barely realized that their community even had a homeless problem.
But after pitching in at the shelter sites for a few nights, they found their attitudes about the homeless quickly changed.
Schuman is one of the more remarkable examples.
Just two years ago, Schuman was accustomed to life as a successful corporate attorney, complete with a Triumph TR-7 sports car, well-made suits and a very comfortable, six-figure salary.
In his new job as homeless shelter director, the trim, gray-haired Schuman’s lifestyle is about jeans, T-shirts and New Balance running shoes. And the Palatine man is happier than he’s ever been.
“It has taught me more in a year about life than I’ve known in my entire lifetime,” Schuman said of his shelter experience. “Spend one night in a PADS site and I believe it will change you for a lifetime.”
Schuman’s path from the corporate desk to the church basement shelter started after he graduated from law school at Case Western University in Ohio in 1966. After working in Cleveland for a few years, he moved to Palatine in 1972 to take a job with the Deerfield-based Baxter Health Care Corp.
He worked his way through the ranks at the Baxter law department for several years and, when Baxter prepared to spin off Caremark as a publicly traded company in 1992, he was asked to be the new company’s general counsel.
The appointment was a huge career kudo, something Schuman had worked toward for decades. When he took the job, he knew the federal government was about to launch a criminal investigation of health care fraud at Caremark. But he welcomed it.
“I knew what was going on. In fact, that was what attracted me to the job because I thought it would be a challenge,” he said.
But the job turned into a grueling, seven-day-a-week proposition as scores of FBI agents turned their attention to scrutinizing Caremark. For three years, Schuman was immersed in his work, with little time or energy for his two grown sons and wife, Mary Ellen.
Then in 1995, he presided over the second-largest settlement ever for health-care fraud. Caremark agreed to pay $161 million in criminal and civil fines to settle the four-year investigation into federal mail fraud and kickbacks. The company pled guilty to two counts of mail fraud for paying doctors for patient referrals and defrauding government medical programs.
Afterward, Schuman was physically and emotionally drained. No longer interested in carrying on his legal career at the company, he retired at age 54 with plans to launch his own public speaking business.
But some months later, the pastor at his church, St. Thomas of Villanova in Palatine, made a plea during mass for a site director at the homeless shelter the church ran jointly with Christ Lutheran. The priest told the congregation they might have to close the shelter if they couldn’t find a director. It was then August and they had been searching for someone since April.
Schuman decided he was their man.
“It was like he was talking to me, one-on-one,” Schuman said.
But even then, he didn’t count on the impact the shelter would have on his life.
For most of his 15 years in the northwest suburbs, Schuman said, he must have seen homeless people. He looked through them and around them at the train stations and local libraries where they gather during the day. And like many of his friends, he often questioned why they would choose to live such an unsettled and desperate existence. He wondered why they just didn’t get a job.
But during training for his new position, Schuman learned the typical profile of a homeless boarder at a PADS site. The majority suffer from mental illness, alcoholism or substance abuse problems.
“When I started to focus on that and spend a little time with them, I realized many of them are not employable and if they are employable, it’s for a very basic kind of job,” he said.
Once he settled into his new work, Schuman was amazed by the numbers of homeless people in the relatively affluent northwest suburbs. Typically, the shelter brings in at least 40 people on Sunday nights. But this season, the numbers have gotten as high as 63. That’s 15 more than the church basement can comfortably handle, but Schuman hasn’t been able to turn anyone away.
And so the people keep coming.
On a recent December morning, the count was 48. That included one family with two teenage children and another couple with a 16-month-old baby nestled in a pink snowsuit donated by shelter volunteers.
Many of those boarders know the shelter routine. Because PADS has no permanent shelter, 12 local churches offer space one night a week. To keep themselves out of the cold, the homeless must travel from site to site, night after night.
At Schuman’s site in Palatine, the basement is normally a meeting room. But on Sunday night it’s transformed into a shelter with pillows and cots lining the brown tile floor. In search of a sense of privacy, many of the homeless people carry cots and the paper and plastic bags containing their belongings behind pianos and lecterns or inside tiny alcoves.
Schuman stayed at the site until about 11 p.m. Sunday, then went home a few blocks away for some sleep, and returned at about 5:45 a.m. Monday.
In the darkness of that early morning hour, the basement smelled of body odor as the sleepers began to wake. A teenage girl dried her hair in the bathroom alongside a red-haired woman with a wrinkled face who was brushing her teeth in her underwear.
While some of the boarders congregated around the low-volume television for the morning news and coffee and doughnuts, Schuman walked the halls to wake up the late sleepers.
In the meantime, several people hurried up to an observer to tell their stories. They seemed desperate to be understood.
“This is degrading. It’s disgusting,” said one woman with wild hair. “I grew up in Wheaton. I come from money. And look where I’m at now.”
Mike, a 34-year-old man with blond hair and bright blue eyes, said he is a graduate of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. After earning a degree in psychology, he said, he got a graduate assistantship at SIU, but left after falling back into a chronic drinking problem. He has been in and out of treatment programs ever since.
“There’s reasons why we’re all here,” he said. “For me, alcohol is the reason.”
After little more than a year at the shelter, Schuman said he believes Mike is right on.
“We got those 48 people through the night,” he said later that same morning. “And at 7 a.m., as dysfunctional and as troubled and as distraught as they were, they all walked out of there. They all did something.”
