Canzano: It's the little things that keep us warm
A Thanksgiving column.
It’s a little thing — a sweatshirt with a company logo on the chest. My friend, Kevin Betker, had them made for the employees of his window-and-door business years ago. And why not? He’s proud. It took a leap of faith to launch that enterprise.
Betker sat with me over coffee once and told me the story of his business. His wife was a school teacher. He’d been working for a national window-installation company. The Betker family decided to take a line of credit out on their home and start the business known as Bridgetown Window & Door.
This independent writing endeavor was born in March 2022. I’ve told the story of my own leap before. I’m not celebrating an anniversary today. I’m just out here on Thanksgiving, my laptop in front of me, thinking about how grateful I am for you as a reader. You don’t just read me. You support my children.
I met with a line of entrepreneurs and business owners in the months before I left the world of newspapers and launched this pirate ship enterprise. Newsrooms were gutted. The industry had stopped trying to win. The business strategy had shifted to trying to die slowly.
I wanted to work for you. I aimed to provide sourced, in-depth reporting and commentary that readers couldn’t get anywhere else. Before I made the jump, though, I needed to know what it was like to be out there on my own.
“It’s terrifying and wonderful all at the same time,” Betker told me. “I wake up every day feeling exhilarated because it’s all on me. It’s going to be on you. Every day. And if you love that, you’ll love it, but I was scared at the beginning that my wife and I were going to lose our house.”
Weeks later, he was among my first paid subscribers.
This week, Betker happened to be watching a TV news report on KGW, Portland’s NBC affiliate. A story by reporter Kathrine Cook about a Navy veteran named Tony James caught his eye. James was living in his car with a dog, named Elvis, and a 250-pound potbellied pig, Roscoe.
Fire and rescue personnel saw James standing on a corner near an Interstate overpass, panhandling, with a sign that read: “VETERAN trying to get back home!!!”
It’s been a rough go for James. His appendix burst. He lost his job. He couldn’t pay his rent, so he lost his home. Later, his girlfriend of 13 years had a heart attack and died.
One of the firefighters got in touch with Tony’s family in Chicago. The city is flying Tony and his dog home. It’s part of Portland’s ongoing homeless relocation project. The pig is going to an animal rescue farm in Scio.
“There’s a lot of good people out there,” Tony said on camera.
Love that story, right?
It hits some sweet and important notes. Especially around the holidays. We think “first responder,” and we think about a burning building, a car accident, or gunfire. We don’t think “Help a homeless veteran get home to his family,” but that kind of social work is frequently part of the job.
I wrote a column once about a homeless guy named Fred. He was struggling with mental illness, lost his job, and found himself on the streets in Portland. It was a degrading existence. I bought Fred a cheeseburger. Over lunch, he told me that he’d been robbed and physically assaulted, and that he was so cold at night he’d ride public transportation to keep warm.
I looked down at Fred’s feet.
He was wearing a pair of new black Danner boots. I figured he’d stolen them. But when I asked about it, he told me, “Officer Parik Singh gave me his boots.”
I tracked down Singh the next day. He told me he’d encountered Fred in front of the Federal Courthouse one evening. It was freezing outside. Fred was barefoot. Officer Singh unlaced his boots on the spot and handed them over.
My friend, Kevin Betker, was watching that news report when something on the screen caught his attention. The veteran on TV was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with the Bridgetown Window & Door logo over the heart.
Betker started making calls.
Turns out a Bridgetown window installer named Chris encountered the homeless man a few weeks ago. He handed over his sweatshirt on the spot.
“I can’t lie. It felt pretty cool,” Betker told me on Thanksgiving morning. “I was so proud of Chris when I found out he gave it to him because he needed it.”
It wasn’t a plane ticket home.
It was a kind gesture.
A little thing — a branded sweatshirt.
The sort of thing that warms us all.
Please consider a paid subscription for yourself. Or a gift subscription for a friend or family member, or the donation of a paid subscription to a senior on a fixed budget:
John, thank you, you’ve got your head screwed on right and you challenge us to be great human beings. Love your columns
John, part of the journalism's death rattle is putting ideology over integrity. Insttead of trying to heal the polarization of our society, the traditional publishing organizatons now work to polarize it even more. There was always bias in journalism, it's inevitable there always will be, but now it is pure activism.
Part of the reason I support you is that you tell stories everyone can support instead of only one particular ideological view point. Thank you for that...