Every person has a story worth knowing

By Alonzo Weston

Imagine my surprise when I picked up the newspaper last week and saw in the obits that Dennis Marcinko had died.

Dennis was one of those people who you felt would always be around. Most of us knew him as the guy who walked all over town. I even once wrote about his nomadic lifestyle in a column and how he could be seen anywhere from the Belt Highway to St. Joseph Avenue.

I compared him to the character in the popular comic strip puzzle “Where’s Waldo” about a striped shirt-wearing guy hidden in various scenarios where you had to find him.

Dennis died Sept. 5 at the age of 76. I knew him as a young college student who lived in my neighborhood. Every evening he would walk from the old junior college Downtown to his house on Sylvanie Street, stopping to talk with an old man who lived in our apartment building. He would always have an armful of books, and overhearing some of his conversations I could tell he was an educated man. That he took time out of his day to stop and talk to an elderly man on his walk home told me he was also thoughtful and kind.

Through my years as a reporter, I wrote about people we all saw on the Downtown streets like Don Sherwood, Leroy Payne and others. I wanted to humanize them as well as let people know that these folks had dreams and their lives mattered.

Sherwood wasn’t just some old man with a long, white beard who some saw as a pest, he was also a poet and taught a furniture upholstery class at a halfway house. Payne, a tall, imposing Black man who walked around Downtown with a bottle of whiskey hidden in one pant leg, was a World War II veteran who suffered from PTSD.

The most I ever knew about Marcinko was from his obit. I wasn’t aware he had siblings or that he liked Western novels until after he died.

That’s the tragedy of life. We assume we know someone from first impressions, never stopping to think that these folks have a life beyond our scrutiny.

It’s as I’ve said before, everyone is somebody’s baby, a child who when they came into the world someone had big hopes and dreams for them. It’s rare people are born homeless, lonely or destitute. Life determines that.

It helps us to look at others less fortunate as somebody’s baby and a fellow human being instead of failures in society. God bless you, Dennis Marcinko. We will miss seeing you on our streets.