Educated, experienced and homeless

Even with three college degrees, Henry Navin has been unable to secure employment.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Henry Navin lumbers along the streets of downtown Cleveland like an urban gypsy, lugging white plastic bags — one or two at a time — to and from the homeless shelter.

Navin, 61, hauls his eight or 10 bags everywhere he goes.

Inside the bags are work boots, copies of his résumé and cover letters, a tattered winter jacket and everything else he owns.

Navin moves one or two bags 25 or 30 yards, then goes back for one or two more until he has moved them all. He continues this routine until he has moved his last bag to his final destination.

It takes him three hours, just about every day, to walk five city blocks from the men’s homeless shelter on Lakeside Avenue to Cleveland State University — where he audits classes and uses the library computer to look for work.

His long daily journeys seem to have captured the imagination of downtown residents, workers and passers-by. Some even offer him rides.

He continues this monotonous routine through the seasons — rain, snow and unbearable heat — as he has for the past 17 months.

All the job prospects that have fallen through this summer will probably force him to spend another Cleveland winter on the streets. He is determined to go somewhere else for work and milder winters.

His credentials have become irrelevant. Navin holds a law degree from CSU, an undergraduate business degree and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.

He is both visible and invisible in a world with mixed and often unsympathetic feelings toward men like him.

“You see someone poor and you look away,” said Navin, who has been homeless for nearly a year and a half — living on the streets and in shelters. “The thing to do is keep a low profile.”

He acknowledges that onlookers may find his pack-rat nature peculiar. But he said he has been robbed before, and he can’t store his bags at the shelter.

He also is burdened by poor health. He said he has a hernia, chipped and broken teeth and problems with his eyes.

Navin’s downward spiral sent him to the doorstep of the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry’s homeless shelter at 2100 Lakeside Ave. in Cleveland. To its residents, the shelter is known simply as 2100.

Navin’s predicament does not surprise David Titus, who heads the Women’s Community Shelter on Payne Avenue downtown.

“Ten years ago we had a guy who had his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his law degree from Yale, and he was schizophrenic, wandering around our agency,” Titus said.

Even though some of the homeless have mental health, drug and addiction problems, Titus says that about one in 10 people passing through homeless shelters is mentally healthy.

“Everyone has their time when the biorhythms seem to be off and they have trouble managing their life and they end up in these situations temporarily,” Titus said.

Henry C. Navin was born in June 1946, in a small suburb of Detroit. His mother, Julia, was a talkative housewife, and the complete opposite of his father, Charles, a cook whose trademark was silence.

Navin won’t talk much more about his family. “It’s just me.”

How things turned out for Navin is unclear.

He held business administrative positions in Chicago and New York before joining the Cleveland Clinic in 1978 as an assistant administrative director, he said.

The Clinic confirmed that Navin worked there for four years but did not provide details about his departure.

While he worked at the Clinic, Navin said he was offered another job in Texas, which he told his boss about. He did not take the job. Sometime later, the Clinic let him go.

Navin never quite recovered from his 1982 dismissal from the Clinic. Navin said he can’t forget the chilling words: “I’m letting you go.”

A few years ago, he worked for Triangle Machine Products in Cleveland and his boss, Mike Casper, said Navin was a good worker, got along with fellow employees and was well-spoken.

He has worked a number of temp-agency jobs since then and lived in a boarding room in Lakewood for a while. In late October 2000, Navin was evicted from a house on Portage Avenue in Cleveland. His belongings were put on the tree lawn a few days later, and then they were removed by garbage collectors.

Navin, representing himself, appealed the eviction case to the 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals. He lost.

Shortly after, he landed on the streets. Navin recalls going for 14 days without food in April 2006. It was bitter cold, and he was sick. He could not stop shaking and could not get warm. He went inside the Lakewood library and was flipping through résumé books under the watchful eye of a police officer.

“It’s hard to imagine what he was thinking about me,” Navin said.

He left before he could get warmed up.

His job search is as routine as his walks with the bags. Navin’s résumé proudly pronounces that he has no felonies, misdemeanors or substance abuse problems.

In February last year he got a job interview at a telemarketing firm. Everything went well over the telephone, but when he showed up with his bags, things soured.

“He saw the way I looked,” Navin says. “He was so sad (for me). I thought he was going to cry.”

Navin didn’t get the job.

The temp jobs he can get hardly pay enough to live on, Navin says.

So he continues to sleep at 2100.

Things begin to quiet down at the shelter around 10:30 p.m. when hundreds of men tuck themselves in beds that are an arm’s length from one another.

A chorus of loud snores lulls him to sleep.

At 6:30 a.m., Navin must rise along with everyone else for a typical breakfast of oatmeal, one-third of a hot dog and a doughnut.

But on Christmas and Thanksgiving, he says, “everyone gets to sleep in late.”