Jim LaRue interview, 02 July 2024

Abstract

Jim LaRue recollects his early childhood in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, eventually leaving for college at Bucknell University where he was student body president. At Bucknell, LaRue encountered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and took inspiration from King's use of translating love into justice, which became a lifelong mantra for LaRue in his involvement in the ministry and in his efforts in rehabbing homes in the greater Cleveland area.

Interviewee

LaRue, Jim (interviewee)

Interviewer

White, Bali (interviewer)

Project

Near West Side Housing Activism

Date

7-2-2024

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

106 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Jim LaRue interview, 02 July 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544005.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1280

Related Resources

Near West Side @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Bali White [00:00:02] And we’re live. Hello, everybody. I am Bali White with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project at Carnegie West Library in the Bridge Room. Today I’m here with Jim LaRue, first and foremost. How are you?

Jim LaRue [00:00:16] I’m fine.

Bali White [00:00:18] Good, awesome. I’m just going to adjust this, move this a little closer to you. So could you introduce yourself, kind of when and where you were born? You can share as little or as much about your early life in terms of growing up, your family background, religious background, any factors that kind of shape-

Jim LaRue [00:00:35] And you can probe me for additional information? Well, I’m 87 years old right now, so I’m allegedly over the hill. I was born and raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. I was part of a very poor family. But the irony is that my family, my father’s family, had been very rich because his family had created a major dairy operation in southeastern Pennsylvania. My uncle was in charge of all the farms that produced the milk. My father was in charge of all of the equipment, the horses and wagons, and all of that stuff that hauled the milk. So my grandfather was very, very well to do, and then he invested everything in the stock market and lost it all. And so he and- So my father was out of work. My uncle was done, and my father worked in dairy as a way of working. My grandfather had a stroke, and my mother, who was a social worker, came to take care of him. And that’s how she met my father, and the two decided to get married. And I was their firstborn. And so I was born into poverty. And I like to think, though, that if the crash hadn’t occurred, I wouldn’t have been born because my mother wouldn’t have come to take care of my grandfather. So I celebrate the crash. [laughs] It’s kind of a selfish way to celebrate it. I was raised all my life in Doylestown, went to grade school, junior high school, and high school in Doylestown. I spent a lot of time helping the family because we were always in some financial trouble. And that led me to start caddying when I was ten years old. And then I got a bunch of little odd jobs and things to help the family pay the bills. It was all about making money to help the family pay the bills in those days. I worked in a little tiny restaurant when I was 13 and 14 on the outskirts of Doylestown, and had a wonderful experience there. It was really a good thing to do, and it was a little more steady than the caddying. After that, I started working in a variety of businesses, but the one that when I was 16, I was working for a contractor and had appendicitis and so had to have surgery and could not go back to working in that work. So I had an aunt who worked in a chicken processing plant. They used to kill 2000 chickens a day, and turkeys and all kinds of stuff. And I was able to stand on the line and pick feathers off the chickens for a few months while I recuperated. Not a pleasant job, but it got more unpleasant because they paid well, and I was hired, when I was well to clean up the place after school each day, which meant blood and feathers into barrels which were hauled to farmers fields and that sort of thing. So I got my hands dirty, [laughs] And one or two nights a week, I would get on a truck with other crew, and we would go to farmers who had hundreds of chickens in low grade chicken houses, and we would load chickens into crates and haul them back to, and then I would go home and get ready for school. So I didn’t get a lot of sleep in those days, but it was a good job, and it brought some regular income to the family, which was necessary at that point.

Bali White [00:05:54] Absolutely. So, after you graduated, did you go to college?

Jim LaRue [00:06:00] Yes, I went to Bucknell University. I had an interesting experience. I drove my boss’s wife, and I and her daughter, who was a classmate of mine, to Bucknell for an interview with no intention of going to Bucknell. And when we got there and they had finished their interview, the registrar came out, and he said, How would you like to come to Bucknell? I said, Well, I couldn’t afford to come to Bucknell. That’s clear. So he said, Well, you know, this used to be a Baptist school, and I understand you come from a Baptist tradition, and we have a lot of money for Baptist students, and we’d be glad to use that money to have you come to Bucknell. And that’s how I got to Bucknell, and it paid my tuition for the four years that I was there.

Bali White [00:06:59] Where was Bucknell?

Jim LaRue [00:07:00] Bucknell is in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which is about 50, 60 miles north of Harrisburg.

Bali White [00:07:07] Okay. Yeah. So, were you living on campus?

Jim LaRue [00:07:11] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I came to Bucknell with the notions of being an engineer. And after two years in the engineering program, it was my chemistry professor who said, Jim, you’re a great guy, but you’re a lousy chemist, and I think you need to find another thing to do. Well, people had been encouraging me to be in the ministry for years because I grew up in a small country church and was active in the programs of that church. But I had become a rather more liberal theologian than most of the people in my church or other places. And so I applied to a couple of seminaries, and they rejected me because I wasn’t religious enough. And so I was invited to a seminary in Rochester, New York, and I went there and was there for three years. By the way, when I was at Bucknell, I became president of the student body, [crosstalk] and that involved me in a lot of extra activities and things in the campus. Probably the most important thing that happened to me at Bucknell was when I became campus president, I was, one of my jobs was introducing chapel speakers each week. Chapels were required in those days, and I was to introduce the speakers for the chapels. And the speaker one week was Martin Luther King, who was beginning to be popular and known in the country. So I introduced Martin Luther King. But the most important thing is that I was invited to lunch with him and a few faculty and a couple of other students. And in the course of that sharing, we students didn’t share in it much. It was mostly the faculty and King talking about his emerging role in the Civil Rights movement. And at one point, King said, I am trying desperately to translate love into justice structures. And that hit me like a ton of bricks, and it became the ground of my life. It became more important than anything else. And almost through my whole life, I measure everything in terms of, if I love this, how do I translate it into a justice structure? And I spent my whole life doing that. And that’s how I got into housing, because I cared about low income people living in housing that they could afford or that they were entitled to.

Bali White [00:10:10] Absolutely. That’s an amazing story. At this time, was Bucknell University, was it an integrated university?

Jim LaRue [00:10:17] No.

Bali White [00:10:18] No?

Jim LaRue [00:10:18] I think we had three Black students on campus while I was there. We had a positive relationship with Howard University. Howard was, I think, originally a Baptist school and all Black. And so we would have exchange sessions with those. And I encouraged that. When I was president of the student body. We would go there, or they would come to Bucknell, and we would have exchange. And in light of King having come, we were involved even more.

Bali White [00:10:51] Could you recall the year this happened?

Jim LaRue [00:10:55] It would be 1958 and nine.

Bali White [00:10:59] Okay, awesome. So, after you graduated Bucknell University, what was your next step?

Jim LaRue [00:11:05] Next step was to Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, New York, which was a very liberal seminary. And it was an excellent place for me because it helped me work through what I really could do theologically and professionally. And I had some significant experiences there. Again, that justice thing in my head. I asked one professor if there was any kind of social program I could get involved in while I was at in Rochester. And he said, well, I know this woman who works with low-income people and with housing for low-income people. And one of the problems she’s been having recently is that people that are in the program were failing appointments with her, and she’s concerned about it because she did not have the time or the experience to go out and bang on their doors. So when I went to see her, she said, would you mind going out and banging on the doors of these women who have refused to come to my appointments? And I said, that’s great. So that’s what I did. For most of a year. I banged on doors, and I got people to come back for appointments because they saw a human being. It was not just a bureaucracy. And this woman was magnificent. And once these women met her, they were cool. It was good. So that was a very important and special experience there. I created the first journal, a monthly journal or newsletter for the seminary when I was there, because I thought the students were also educators. And so we created. We would create about a 30 page monthly piece with columns written by students of the different. There were three. It’s a three-year school, so that I was also head over heels in love with a childhood friend during that period. And we had decided we would get married. And after my first year of seminary, we got married. She was a nurse and helped very much pay bills, and- But she suddenly discovered herself pregnant, and we had a son. I was ordained on a Sunday, I was graduated on a Monday, and my son was born Tuesday. So he was a special event.

Bali White [00:14:08] Oh, yeah. That’s an amazing chain of events, all in three days. So after all of that, from my knowledge, you became a chaplain at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Jim LaRue [00:14:22] Yeah. When you’re graduating from seminary, churches come to interview you, and churches came to interview me, and they were no longer interested. After they interviewed me, I was more interested in justice than a lot of biblical stuff, and so I was in trouble. And so I started working for a painting contractor to pay the bills while we were living in Rochester in the seminary. But I needed to leave there by September, and in early August, I got a call from the University of Wisconsin. A chaplain at the Baptist student center there, said he had heard good things about me and would I be interested in coming to the University of Wisconsin. Well, I went out to interview. I fell in love with the place, and by the middle of September we were in Madison.

Bali White [00:15:22] How long were you there for?

Jim LaRue [00:15:24] I was six years in Madison, two years as the supporter of that person, and then four years as the director of the center myself. And my university experience was also significant. Well, our Baptist student center was actually a community of life and faith, and we had 30 students living in two big houses that we owned, and 15 students in each house, 15 men, 15 women, 15 international students, and 15 American students, because I wanted a mix of people, and we were not indoctrinating people. We were trying to share their experience, their own faith life from a different culture and our culture. And it was- It was a wonderful program. And so I was doing that during that period. But I became one of the primary leaders of the anti Vietnam war group during that period. And I felt that I had a real responsibility to counsel with students who were being drafted to go into that crazy ass war. And so I counseled with dozens of students, and a number of students were conscientious objectors who ended up going to prison for ten years. There was a hanging judge in Illinois who was sending people to sandstone prison in Minnesota for ten years. And some of these young men were fathers, graduate students at the university. And we tried to find ways of supporting them while they weren’t there. And we’re doing everything we could to get them legal counsel. And I increasingly got involved in the antiwar effort. The Quakers on campus were the real- And the faculty, Quaker faculty were tremendous. They were so thoughtful about it, and I got involved with them and was supporting them. And students started burning their draft cards, and I felt that I needed to be present to them. So I was seeing what’s going on. So I went to the- Every time they did a draft card burning, I would be there. And so I became known as the chaplain of the left of the antiwar movement. And it got me in a little trouble. I got a call one day from the Attorney General of Wisconsin, Bronson La Follette was his name. And he said, I think you have a problem. And I said, what’s that? He said, you have been secretly indicted with the YMCA director and one of the SOC faculty for aiding and abetting students resisting the draft. And if you are prosecuted, it’s ten years, prison. And so I knew the consequences of what I was into, and it didn’t change a thing for me if I already spent my dues, and I wasn’t going to waste it. So I continued, but I was never prosecuted. They went after a couple of other groups, the Chicago Seven, and I think there was another organization that they went after. I also got involved in civil rights stuff, and there was a restaurant on the outskirts of Madison that said, and proudly declared that they would not have any Blacks eating in their restaurant. Well, I called the Attorney General, who had told me about my other problem, and I said, if we picket that place or do something, would you back us up? And he said, I would appreciate it, because he was totally supportive of the Civil Rights movement. So my Y director friend and a Black friend who was a doctoral candidate for being a weather forecaster decided to go to this restaurant. So my friend, the Y director, and I went in and were quickly seated, and the place was packed. It was a Friday night. It was packed with people, and our friend Harry came to the door and they said, sorry, you’re not allowed to come in here. And we said, he’s our friend, and he has every right to come into a restaurant. They said, not this restaurant. And with that, they came and bodily threw us down the stairs of the place and threw us out of the restaurant. We called the Attorney General, who we had clued in about this. He instantly called the local police authority, and I think they were probably reluctant, but they came and closed the place down, and it was not opened again until they came to deal with the civil rights issues there. The antiwar thing got me into that political trouble, but all of those things led me to believe that it was the only thing you could do. How could I say I was a minister to students, ignore the fact that they were being sent to this silly war? The other thing that I was doing while I was a chaplain at Wisconsin is I got a call one day from the Black community. A community director there called me and said, we have a lot of kids that are struggling in school, and we could use some tutoring. Do you think you could find some students to tutor? So I had been, whenever students, I would each year get a Baptist student list of students on the campus, and then I would take them to lunch as a way of introducing myself. And I got to know a bunch of these students, though they never very much got involved in the campus ministry. But I said to them, to one of the students, would you be interested in being a tutor for black kids who are in the neighborhood? And he said, sure. And so the word spread. And when I left the university to come to Cleveland, there were 300 students, college students, on the list of volunteers for that center. It was deeply satisfying to know that these kids and I got a special greeting from the black community when I left Madison, they were very sorry to see me go. So I was in Madison for six years, and then I got a call from a campus ministry friend. He was black and he was Cleveland. There was a university Christian movement, and they were serving on the Case Western campus, Cleveland State, which was just opening, and Tri-C, which was just opening. And so I. He said, I’ve been asked by the Stokes administration. Carl Stokes had just been the first black elected as a mayor of a major city. And my friend Art Black was asked to be the community relations director for the mayor. And he said, I want you to be on the new Metro Campus and work with black students as much as possible, or at least make it easier for them to adjust to being in that campus. Because he said, it’s going to be essentially a Black campus. It’s in the neighborhoods of the black kids. So that’s what I did. And I. My first, Well, he said, would you come? And I said, I’ll come and look. So that was ’68, summer of ’68. That was on 4th of July. I came to Cleveland. I bought a house. I accepted the job. I bought a house and came back and loaded up and we went to Cleveland. And we were here by the 1st of September.

Bali White [00:24:52] Were you living in the Near West Side of Cleveland?

Jim LaRue [00:24:54] No, we were living in Warrensville Heights.

Bali White [00:24:56] Okay. Awesome.

Jim LaRue [00:24:58] And, well, it wasn’t awesome. It was terrible. The deed for my house said no Blacks, no Negroes or Jews are permitted to own a house in this community. That was on the deed. So a whole group of young lawyers and me and some other religious types began buying houses in the neighborhood to defy that rule and become part of the community. And the mayor was just terrible. Just awful. Fortunately, the school board was made up of some of the more liberal members of the community, and it was possible for black families to move in more quickly, get into the schools. And in the. I forget how many years we were there. I think almost nine. Yeah. Because my son was going into 9th grade when we moved to Shaker. Yeah. So that’s- Yeah.

Bali White [00:26:12] So could you kind of describe what Cleveland looked like upon your arrival? The conditions, crime rate, demographics?

Jim LaRue [00:26:21] Well, I was not looking at the big picture at that point. I was excited that there was a Black mayor. It made it easier to deal with a number of issues related to being a chaplain. I could suggest things to the new administration, and they knew where I was coming from, not just from the church, but from the support of the administration. And so it was possible to talk about a variety of things, like, we need to create a tutoring program for students in college. We had a lot of students coming who were bright but not together in terms of good stuff. So and then I got involved with Catholic chaplain, and then it became a. A chaplain and a woman, and then there was a Jewish woman who came to be present to the campus. And then I found a young man who was, he was not a very knowledgeable Muslim, but he was a Muslim, he called himself. And so we decided to make him our Muslim member of the staff. And so the four of us, well, there were two Catholics, five of us, working with students, and that was tough. In a campus like a commuter campus, where do you go to meet a student? What do you do to connect to people? And I spent a year when they were downtown, and then the new campus opened. And when I was first on the new campus, I was really wrestling with how in the world do we find a way to connect to this faculty and the students? Can you just walk up to a student who’s sitting on a thing and talk to them? Can you bang on the faculty member’s door and say, I’m the chaplain. We couldn’t have an office because we were religious in a state institution. So it was looking a little grim. And I talked it over with our staff back at Case Western, and they didn’t have any ideas. They weren’t familiar with that kind of campus. So one day I was standing in this large room. It was a lobby in one of the buildings, and I did get into conversation with one of the faculty, and I said, you know, I wish that we could have a coffee stand in this lobby here. It would be a chance for people to talk to each other. He said, why not? So he was a supporter. I went to the campus president, and I said, here’s a way I think we can be present to faculty and students. We’re not converting anybody. We’re just trying to be present to people. And what I would like to ask is if you would turn over, if you would ask the cafeteria to create at 7:00 each morning, they’re there already. A coffee and donut tray cart that I can push out into that area, we’ll charge a certain amount for the coffee and donuts, and then it all comes back to your place, to the kitchen. So we started the Coffee Pot, and by God, it worked. We had a terrific amount of exchange. I had faculty members who were going through divorces, sharing their lives. I had students who were in trouble, struggling with their lives. And it was- It was magnificent. One funny story, we couldn’t have an office, and I was sharing that with the members of the board of the campus ministry. And one of the board members said, I have this small trailer. I wonder if they let you- Did they let you park your car on the campus? I said, yeah. He said, I wonder if we could get my small trailer into the parking garage, then you could use it as an office. We did. We got the trailer. I had to let air out of the tires to get it under the door, and we parked it in the parking lot, and it was fun, and everybody laughed about it. Even the administration had to appreciate the craziness of what we did. It was only there a year. And with that, the administration said, I think we can find you an office. We know more about you. We know you’re not converting people, you’re not being obnoxious, and, in fact, you’ve been very helpful to us. And so that’s what happened. One of the most important things that happened to me in that year, not the first year, it was into the second or third year after the school opened, I was talking to a student who just came back from Vietnam, and I began to count how many students there were, Vietnam veterans. And you could tell some because they had burns, just all kinds of problems. And I suddenly realized we had a ministry to these people, and it wasn’t about converting them, it was about caring for them. And so I went to the administration, and I said, I noticed there’s a small area down on the lower level that’s not being used, and I would like to create that into a space for veterans to just gather with each other and be supportive of each other. He said, do it. So I found a student, Jay Lamposone was his name. And I said, Jay, you’re a vet. You know other veterans, and let’s figure out a way to get this open in two weeks. We were open, and the veterans all knew then. I mean, we had veterans who were burned, had all kinds of scars and psychologically damaged, and we had 30 or 40 vets a day coming into that space and just being themselves, just relaxing, talking to other vets. And an example of what happened. I got a call one night from Jay, and he said, can you be with me in court tomorrow? And I said, oh, Jay, what have you done? Have you gotten yourself in trouble? He said, no, just come. So I went, and it turned out Jay wanted to change his name to John Died. His friend John was blown away right next to him while he was in Vietnam. He changed his name to John Died. I just stood there and cried. That’s all I could do. But it was that kind of exchange that was going on. And when the administration realized that that was the kind of thing we were able to do, and we couldn’t count any conversions, all we could count was people who were being cared for, just like translating love into justice structures. So the other chaplains and I were talking one day with the President, and he said, I think you ought to create a comparative religion course, and it would be a way of sharing without proselytizing. And with that encouragement, he appointed me the one to organize it, and I did. We created a comparative religion course that went on the rest of the time that I was at Tri-C, and it was still there when I left. I don’t know whatever happened to it, but that was another significant experience that was worth doing. And then I would mention one other thing that was part of my translating love into justice thing, because it was still ringing in my ears. One day, one of the counselors called me and said, you know this stupid university, they won’t let us talk to students about their lives. We have to talk to them about their grades and their course load. And she said, we are all thoughtful people. We could be helpful to people. She said, I have a list of 20 women who have been students here and have dropped out just before the last quarter. And she said, we don’t know what it’s about. We don’t understand what the hell is going on. And I said, I’ll go bang on their doors because I can do that. You can’t. So I took the list, but 20 some women, and started banging on the project doors. And I got into conversations with these women, and it was just amazing what happened. They were dropping out because they were scared to be in a new environment which their education would have provided them with. In other words, they knew who they were in the projects. They didn’t know who they were going to be if they were out working in a business or an office or some other thing. And they were just petrified. So I came back to the counselors in the school, and I said, that’s the problem. You got to get them together. Well, the woman who was the head of the library heard about what I had done, and she called me in, and we talked, and she said, I have been wanting to get a women’s program started in this campus from the beginning. And with everything else happening, it was impossible. This is the day. And so in the lobby of the theater, I think 19 or 20 of the 23 women showed up. And this woman led the discussion with the counselors to get these women back into school and to help them talk through what it was that was hanging them up about being out of the projects, because they were motivated enough to work in the projects and fight for their kids and fight for things in the projects, but they didn’t know how to do it in another environment. And that was the beginning of the women’s program at Tri-C, and I was out of it the first day. [laughs] There was no room for me in the project after that first day, but it was good. And I consider that one of my major contributions during the campus years. My last story about campus, I was also involved in the anti war movement in Cleveland. It was very active. And my last involvement with campus ministry was one of my colleagues, a woman, was at Case Western, and she was gay. Well, she wasn’t very well received by the board. I had been involved with gay women and men, but mostly gay women, while I was at the University of Wisconsin. And I used to do weddings for gays that were not legal. And they would come and there would be as many as 200 gays gathered, and I would do the wedding, and they would celebrate like it was a wedding, but of course, it was not a real wedding until lately. So Nancy, the student, said, I mean, a colleague, said, I want to come out with my partner, who was our lawyer, our family lawyer. And so we knew them well, both very well. And the next. That night, the board fired her from the ministry. And I learned about that the next day. And that was on Thursday. And on Friday, I resigned the campus ministry and then began my life in housing.

Bali White [00:39:46] Awesome. Yeah. So we’re gonna switch gears into that, actually. Housing.

Jim LaRue [00:39:52] I would like to switch gears and find a John. [laughs]

Bali White [00:39:57] Let’s pause this real quick. All right, so I guess my next question is, so how did you get involved with repairing and rehabbing houses in the Near West Side?

Jim LaRue [00:40:08] Well, but can I tell you how I got into that? First, [crosstalk] because my wife is a nurse, so we had income, but I didn’t know quite what I would do for income. So I called a friend who owned a number of apartment buildings. He was an active churchman. And I said, do you have any work? And I told him what happened. He was so pleased at what I had done that he said, I have a building with ten toilets that don’t work, and if you can get him working, you’re on board. So my first job, the day after I resigned from campus ministry, was fixing ten toilets.[laughs] And it wasn’t pretty, but I was able to work with him for a year. And then a friend, two Black folks who I met while I was working for him to do some repairs on their house, said, we’re members of the Glenville Presbyterian Church, which is Black, mostly Black, but there are some Whites. And we understand you are a minister, and would you be willing to be an interim pastor of our church while we’re looking for a new minister? And I thought about it, and I said, well, yeah, why not? So I spent a year as a pastor of that Black church in Glenville, and I repaired the building. [laughs] The building was in desperate shape, and so that’s what I did for a year. And then a colleague from campus ministry, Lutheran, said he was going to start Lutheran Housing Corporation to start rehabbing housing in the inner city. And I said, well, that’s of interest to me. And he said, I want you to supervise the rehab of the housing. And we’re trying to get families that can pay a mortgage, but they can find housing. So I started working for Lutheran housing, and I rehabbed several dozen houses and one 13 suite apartment building and several smaller apartment buildings. And I began to learn what was happening in housing in the inner city. And it was. It was hard. It was not easy to find work, workers who could afford to work in that kind of situation. There were good contractors, but they weren’t going to work for what we could afford to pay. So I continued to do that work. That 13 suite apartment building, I reduced to a seven suite building, and a whole bunch of bigwigs from Washington came out to see it because they said that’s something that we could afford to support if we can get housing that can take larger families and keep them in that, in the neighborhoods. So, that’s what I did for the next four years. And then the director and I and the guy who had been in charge of the publicity, he was a graphic artist, decided that we wanted to create a Housing Resource Center, a demonstration house that people could come to to see how to repair their houses. And, oh, while I was with Lutheran Housing, I started a tool loan on West 45th Street. Well, I spent several months looking for a place that we could use and finally found the building, and it’s still there and still providing tools. Although it was a struggle. I got a call at 4:00 in the morning one day, and the funeral director at the next door house said, somebody is in your building. And I jumped in my car from Shaker and came over, and there was a huge hole in the roof. They had cut a hole in the roof and gotten in and were hauling tools out of the tool loan. And then I had another call in the night, and a big truck had backed into the parking garage, which has all the big tools, like power lawn mowers and so on. And they backed the truck in and knocked the door down and then hauled off all of the power tools. So once we solved how to protect this stuff, the tool loan started, and I think it’s still going. And I would go out to the houses of people and show them how to use a tool. And that’s one of the things that encouraged us to do the Housing Resource Center, and so on West 48th Street, we bought an old house with the help of the Gund and another foundation. We opened it, and I started doing workshops at the Housing Resource Center as we were putting the house together. And we left all the walls open on the inside so that people could see how a house looks inside the walls. And it was a wonderful experience. The graphic artist was interested in getting into green building and environmental building and healthy housing. And there was a group called Environmental Health Watch that was started by Stu Greenberg at the same time that we were starting the Resource Center. And we worked with him to create the first national conference on healthy housing. It had never been done before in the country, and we had major professors and other people come because they were looking for the exposure and had not been able to pull it off yet with their own faculty and administrations. So it was wonderful. It was wonderful. It was amazing. We had to rent space in other places to hold the events, and it worked very well. And it was one of the most important things that we ever did in the Housing Resource Center. We were at it for ten years. Oh, in the course of that time, two things happened. George Voinovich, who was mayor, said, Jim, I’d like you to come and do workshops on the steps of city hall during the summer. And I said, well, yeah, I can do that. So I did. And he said, now, in order to have you on the steps, I need publicity, and I have a staff person who I’ve assigned the task of coming up with a name for you. And I said, a name for me? I said, I got enough trouble with my own. So he said, no, she’ll do it. So the next day, I get a call from her. She said, I’ve decided you’re The Housemender. And I said, I like it. I love it. And with that, I did the steps, and I get a call from Fred Griffith, who does the Morning Exchange. And he said, Jim, I’d like to meet you, and I think I’d like to have you come on my program on a regular basis to talk about housing issues. And I did. And I was 15 years with Fred on Morning Exchange until Morning Exchange ended. And it was wonderful. And I had. I can tell you a million stories that came out of that. One particular story is related to foam insulation. Foam insulation was becoming popular, and people were having it blown into the walls of their house. And some people started calling me, saying, the house doesn’t feel any more comfortable. I don’t understand what’s going on. So I called a friend who was a building scientist in Boston, and I said, Joe, what can you do for me? He said, I’ll be there in a week, and I will bring infrared cameras, and we will take pictures of the walls and see how the insulation looks in the wall. So he shows up. We go out to the homes of half a dozen families that had agreed to have us come look, and they took pictures. We took the pictures. The foam wasn’t doing squat. It was just shrinking up to nothing. So I got on Morning Exchange with these pictures, [laughs] and all of a sudden, law firms are calling me to sue me for damaging the businesses of their companies. And I said, I’m sorry, but if you’d like to come see the films, fine. And if you think those films are going to get you through the court, forget it. So we got the translating love into justice structures. It keeps going on. And so we then had some installation companies who were doing good work surface and business took care of itself. But that was an interesting story, too.

Bali White [00:50:54] So in your email, you had mentioned the Commonwealth Lumber Company.

Jim LaRue [00:51:00] Oh, yeah.

Bali White [00:51:00] Could you talk a little bit about that?

Jim LaRue [00:51:02] I burned out on the Resource Center, and we were all burning out, and other things were happening, other opportunities, other work, other things. Oh, I will mention one other thing about that, though. I was discovering young people who wanted to be contractors, and mostly Black. And I showed them a method that they could take one, find contractors that can do plumbing, find contractors that can do electrical, find contractors who can do general construction and a fourth, and work for them until you feel that you understand what they’re about. One of those kids was Antonio, and he did it. And one day I saw Antonio’s truck in a lumberyard, and I went up to, I knew he was there. And I said, well, what happened? He said, I did all the things you said, and I just started my own business. And he said, I already have more business than I know what to do. It was just wonderful turning justice into loving into justice structures. It was one more way. And so your question [cross talk] Oh, Commonwealth Lumber. I used to do workshops every year at the home and flower show, and there would be a couple hundred people that would come to my workshops, and the Commonwealth Lumber was one of the companies that would come every year to the show. And the president of that company or the head of it said, would you be willing to do workshops at our site at the show? And I said, oh, yeah, I’d probably be willing to do that. In other words, to be present all day to talk to people about building and that sort of stuff. And he said he would really appreciate it, and he would pay me a regular salary to do that. Well, that led to my decision to end the days at the Resource Center, which were coming to an end anyway, and start working for Commonwealth Lumber. So I did that for two years, and it was okay, but it was not as satisfying as I wanted it to be. So what was next? Excuse me. Now my 87-year-old brain is crumbling.

Bali White [00:54:08] We’re on the topic of Commonwealth Lumber Company.

Jim LaRue [00:54:11] Yeah. Yeah. And that’s done because I would talk to people who are coming in for lumber and materials and building materials, and I would go to their houses. If they were building a new house, I would go, oh, I started my own company. The Housemender Inc. was the next step, and I wasn’t quite sure how that was going to work, but what I did was go to all of the community development corporations, and I said, I’ve done a little work with you guys, especially through the Housing Resource Center. And I said, I wondered if I could, if I get a contract to do this kind of work, if I could start a business with this, would you be willing to hire me to do it? They were thrilled. So I started with Detroit Shoreway. I started with Chuck Ackerman in the Near West Housing, and then I started to work with Detroit Shoreway, and Ray Pianka was the councilman there. And it was just a matter of picking up all kinds of odds and ends and stuff that were going on in the community. I worked with a young gal named Colleen at Detroit Shoreway, and we would go, and they would get calls from people that houses were having trouble, and we’d go to the house and work on fixing it, putting it together. Maybe I didn’t do the work, but they would figure out a way to finance it. I’d figure out a way to, to do the work, and then we get people to do it. Some of the work I did, and it was during that period that I did another translating love into justice structure thing. There was the vocational school on West 29th Street. There’s a new one now. That one was practically falling apart itself. And I went in to talk to the guys who were running the carpentry department, and I asked them to show me their department and what they do there. And they had kids putting frames together and materials together where they had pulled the nails out of, and they were putting the nails back in the same holes. They had no money to do anything that was really creative, and the kids were just wondering what the hell to do. So I talked to Detroit Shoreway, and I said, you know what? We got to figure out a way to help these kids and their faculty in the carpentry department to get a life. So we came up with the idea of finding people who wanted to rehab their homes, but they were lower income, and how could Detroit Shoreway slide some money or Near West Housing slide some money into the pot that could help the work get done? And it worked. We had the students in one house. They rewired the entire house. In another house they practically rehabbed the whole house. They did the plumbing, the electrical. And it was a thrill for me because all I had to do was say, here’s the house. And they did it. But the kids were doing real stuff, and they could leave the school and say, I am real. This is what I can do. And they had the pictures of the houses that they did. They had pictures of the work that they had done, and they had a faculty that were thrilled to talk about these kids. I had a downside to that program. There was a young woman who was getting active in rehab housing, and she came in one day and she said, you’re done here. And I said, what do you mean? She said, the women have to take over now. You’re out. And I said, well, I don’t mind. I’m totally supportive of what you’re becoming, but I hadn’t planned to leave this program. And she said, well, it’s time. And so I left, and she took over. And it wasn’t bad, but. And I would have been totally supportive, but it was hard to feel like you had been thrown out and it didn’t have to be that way. We could have been friends and do it. So that was over. And then I was doing as The Housemender, I started working with Ray Pianka in the Detroit Shoreway area on all manner of stuff. Ray was just a wonder. The day I heard about his dying, and I didn’t hear about it till two weeks after he had died, he was the master at putting people together and getting stuff done. And when he saw that I was now The Housemender, Inc. He said, Jim, we got to do some work together. And so I started looking at houses that he would come up with. It before for his court stuff, and I would try to help the people with Colleen, the gal who was there, and we would go, and she would be the person who would break the ice. I would be the grunt who would come in after and look at the house and try to come up with ways of looking at it. And we had some. I have stories out the kazoo I could tell you about that work. Two gals who had been flunkies for one of the big bands around the country who finally got cast away, and they ended up in Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, living in a house that was falling apart. And Colleen and I were able to not just fix the house, we helped fix those two women, too, because they were in desperate shape. And they got it together. They got it together. And that’s the kind of thing that Ray could celebrate and do. And so I would. I was doing work for Detroit Shoreway and Near West. I worked on a big building in Detroit and Near West Housing. It was a ten-story building. It’s not far from here. And it was in terrible shape. And what I had to do was come up with a model for how to rehab a particular unit so that they could then put it out for bid to contractors to bring the house together. So I wasn’t doing the work. I was actually helping to create the work. And they were then able to raise the money to make it happen. And that was really exciting. Although I had a little trouble with a group that was in charge of maintaining the character of housing in the neighborhood. They weren’t happy with me. They weren’t very happy with me because I was coming up with ideas that, like, let’s eliminate this door and let’s eliminate this thing. And, no, you don’t do that. And so I was. I was in trouble for a while with them, but that was pretty good. But Ray was. I could just start thinking about all kinds of stuff. And with Chuck, too, I could think of all kinds of things now, something that is not about low income housing but occurred during this period. I met Buck Harris, who was a gay guy who was sort of the gay champion for the Detroit Shoreway, I mean, for Near West Housing area. And he called me one day and he said, I think you can help us. I said, well, I don’t know. Let’s see what we can do. So I got down with him and he said, there are a whole lot of gay men and women, but mostly men, who want to buy housing in this neighborhood, have a lot of skills and interest and have income and would like to fix up the housing. Would you be willing to work with us? I said, of course. So rehab started on several blocks in west, in the Near West neighborhood. And I am convinced that it was the gay housing that was the principal support for anything that was going to happen in that neighborhood in terms of significant rehab. Because when they took hold of a street, they took hold of a street. They didn’t- They just didn’t sit down in their little house and do their thing. They were concerned about the neighborhood and what was going to happen in the neighborhood. And it was a thrill to work with the gay community. It was. And Buck was a piece of work. He was. I don’t know if he’s still living, but probably nothing. Not. But he was a total character, [laughs] but just the precise kind of character was needed at that time. And so once more translated love into justice structures. It was the way it was supposed to be. And then Ray decided to get into running for housing court. So he hadn’t been in housing court a day, [laughs] I think, before I was on the phone with him, and he said, Jim, I’m going to need a little help. He said, I’ve got a staff that’s very loyal, but hadn’t the foggiest notion what the hell to do with the houses that they go to look at. He said, I need you to go with them to look at these houses where there are issues, and court action required, so that they at least have the data that’s important to get this done. So I started doing that for Ray, and I was doing a lot of that for Ray. And then Ray was responsible for 24 houses for a woman that he had known in the Near West Side neighborhoods. She owned 24 houses, was too old to take care of it, and Ray was taking over helping her with this stuff. And he said, I’m just going to give you the list. You just go to these homes and try to help her come up with an idea about what she can do to put these houses together. So I did that, and she was able to start making. Well, what she needed to make sense of about was to unload a few of those houses. She didn’t need to keep all those houses. So that’s one other thing I helped her with. But then Ray was. We would get together to chat about this stuff, and he said, I noticed you’ve been on Morning Exchange. He said, can you get me on the Morning Exchange? I said, no, but I’ve been doing TV work for one of the other channels and at dinner time, and I said, that’s, I think, a more interesting market for you. So Ray and I started doing little five-minute segments on all kinds of topics, which gave him exposure for the housing. And so we became TV partners. And I had just seen him two or three days before he died in one of these houses. And then I hear, late, because I don’t get the paper, and I, you know, it was probably two weeks later I hear he dropped dead. And I was just crushed. I was just crushed. This town can’t function with that, a Ray. Another story on the Detroit Shoreway area. The director there, and I’ve forgotten his name now, said, Jim, we’d like you to figure out how we can connect more meaningfully to the housing issues in the community. We know when there are crisis, things happen. But what about the average older person who’s got a house? They keep it together, but it’s, you know, they just need a boost. What can we do about that? And I said, well, first we need to find someone who can knock on the doors. I knock on their doors. So we found a nun, full costume, who became the door knocker. And I’d go with her at dinner time each evening, I mean, two evenings a week, and she’d bang on the door. So we were in, and then we’d talk to people about their house and what’s happening with their house, and we’d hear this story. But the most important thing that happened in that was not the house. It’s what elderly people knew about the neighborhood. It was amazing what the elderly people knew about the neighborhood. There’s a young man lives in that house. He drinks all the time, and he’s a real problem. But I think he could be helped, but somebody needs to help him, or here’s a person who does this kind of work, and it’s really neat. And, you know, so we got the names of places where we could go to do this. Well, we had just gotten it underway and we were getting this wonderful feedback. And the staff at the Detroit Shoreway were getting wonderful feedback when the current councilman for that area decided that he was going to close the program, close it down, because he thought that I was campaigning against him and that he was trying to build, I was trying to build a political base that was going to affect him. Can you imagine any small mind like that? It was. It was just mind boggling, but it killed the program. I mean, we had been going for most of a summer and had been on many of the streets. It’s something I wanted to do. It’s how I got into green building.

Bali White [01:10:00] Oh, yes, how you got into green building.

Jim LaRue [01:10:06] One of the issues that Environmental Health Watch, the organization that I helped with as we were starting our Housing Resource Center, started pressing us about how we can make buildings more healthy, how we can make them more energy efficient and healthy. And we had often talked about insulation, but the healthy part was the new dimension. And so I worked with Stu and his staff on a number of projects that were related to healthy housing, including lead. I did research on the lead problem with him, and one of the things that we discovered, and I would go to council meetings and other things to address the issue of lead in communities all over Cuyahoga county. And it was a major effort on our part to do a healthy house, but also an environmentally. An environmentally friendly house and a healthy house and an energy efficient house. And the friend that I mentioned earlier, who came from Boston to help me with the insulation problem and walls, he and his wife were. His wife was an architect. So I called them, and I said, Joe, we need to create a healthy house that we can publicize and do work with. We’ll call it a green building, which covers a variety of things. And he said, let’s do it. So we found a place in a southern area of Cleveland. I forget the name of the community. And we decided to build a house that was almost 75% energy efficient and also used no materials that would off gas to create healthy issues. And we would use heating equipment that was not pumping stuff back into the living space. And so we built the house, and some nuns who were working in that community decided they wanted a house, and so they bought the house. And it was a wonderful match. And we came up with all kinds of ideas and things that were imaginative. And so once we finished that, then I said, we got to do something on the Near West Side. And so on West 52nd Street, there was a large rectangular lot, four lots in a row on the street. I think it was West 52nd Street. I can’t remember anymore. And Joe and his wife put together another package, and we learned from the first one. And I haven’t been back to them in many, many years, but I know they’re still delivering on the health and energy part how people have treated them, I don’t know. But those houses sold in a very quick time. Well, it’s a row house. There are four houses tied together in the first, in that one, and then we did one individual home, and that really got me into green building. And that’s when a young man who had worked in, graduated from Oberlin, came to Cleveland and decided he wanted to create green buildings like he had learned at Oberlin. And he knew about me. And so the two of us worked on a program. We re did the bank, which is right near this library where we’re meeting right now. We redid the whole bank in environmentally friendly ways. And the roof, I don’t know if it still has the garden, but there was a garden on the roof which would absorb rain and then extra water would drain off. But they would plant all kinds of stuff on that roof, which reduced energy cost for all of that roof, because roofs are a major heat loss. So that’s when I got into green building and started to do workshops there for contractors, builders, homeowners, architects. And then I would consult with them on their individual projects and homes that they were doing. And one of the good fortunes is that, sadly, one of the men and his wife who came to our workshops, he died shortly after they moved into their brand new green home. And my wife died shortly after that. And my now friend had her house with a problem, and I went to help her with the problem, and we ended up in a relationship that has gone on for 18 years now. And we have built a straw bale cottage on our property that persons are free to come and live in for a weekend at no charge. And it’s all straw bale. And we came up with a way to build straw bale structures that had not been tried in this area before. Straw bale has usually been- The bales have usually been put on the outside of the structure. We learned that in this climate, unlike the Southwest they’re popular, the bales will fail when moisture wicks into them. And so a friend, an engineer who helped me with that, said, let’s put the bales on the inside. It’ll still be a straw bale house, but it’ll build a typical frame. And then our little. Our straw bale house has 250 bales on the inside. And it’s beautiful. It’s a lovely, lovely space. And that was my last project. And it, too, translates love into justice structures, because it’s still raising the question of how we could build if we wanted to. And we would make a lot of people happier if we could do that.

Bali White [01:17:42] So some of your previous, like, rehab projects, like the houses. Okay, how would you describe, like, were your efforts successful in some of these, like, homes or?

Jim LaRue [01:17:57] Physically, they were successful. Families taking care of the houses was successful, but they did not have the income to live in the houses. And that’s what I- When I took a walk around one day to look at those houses, as many as I could remember, many were empty. Empty. And one of the things that happened in one of the last houses that I rehabbed with Lutheran Housing was- Right, was a house directly behind the old St. Luke’s hospital. And I rehabbed that house. And there was a woman in the neighborhood who kept an eye on it while we were building. And we had it all done. I left it, closed it up on a Friday, and on Monday, a family was to move in. When I came early on Monday to see what had happened, everything in the entire house had been removed. All the heating equipment, all the plumbing, all of the water devices. Everything was taken. And the lady who was watching the houses could not have not known that that was happening. And so I think that what happened in some of our Lutheran Housing houses is that when they became vacant for financial reasons, they were broken into, and all of the valuable material in them was ripped off. That’s my take. And the apartment building, that was a joy for me. A 13 suiter turned into a seven suiter. And we did some wonderful things in that building. And it was gone. It was totally gone. And that was a sad, sad day. And so it reminded me that love can be translated into justice structures, but injustice still prevails in some ways. And it really hurt to know that that happened. But there are a lot of other things that we did that I’m sure that the new vocational school has a program that’s getting things done, that there’s a lot of good stuff that’s been happening. And so I’m not totally discouraged, but you can’t win them all, I guess.

Bali White [01:20:42] Your introduction to comparative religion in Tri-C. I mean, those are courses that are still taught today. Comparative religion. I think that was really important also.

Jim LaRue [01:20:53] Yeah. And the way we- And the way we taught it was, as a Monday, was a lecture. I usually did the lectures, and then the other two days a week, students had to go and interview a religion other than their own and bring that information back. And then they reported out what they are learning in their contact with other religious communities. The whole idea was to generate appreciation, and it’s another form of love and justice. Every religion has its right to be but they need to be respecting one another, and that’s what was happening on the campus, and we were just trying to encourage that in the community. Although I got a call one day from a Rabbi who said, I can’t take any more of these students coming to talk to me. [laughs] He said, I just can’t, Jim. I know it’s good and it’s wonderful, but I just can’t take it anymore.

Bali White [01:22:00] Well, that’s good that the students were getting out.

Jim LaRue [01:22:03] Oh, yeah.

Bali White [01:22:04] You know, getting, talking to people different from their own religious background, which is very important.

Jim LaRue [01:22:10] Well, that’s what I did when I was at the University of Wisconsin. The chaplain there, Max Ticton was his name. He called me and he said, Jim, I got a problem. We got Fundamentalist kids who are trying to convert their Jewish students. And I said, well, I’m sorry, and let me see if I can be helpful. We have to teach Christian students to be respectful of other traditions and not be manipulative. And so I started our Housing Resource Center. I mean, not Housing Resource Center. Our community, Community of Life and Faith was made up of different religions and students of different cultures. And I would set up meetings at the center for students that were proselytizing. And not very many came, but a few did. And they came to hear from a Jewish student who was very thoughtful, could articulate their own tradition in an effective way, express appreciation for that to other students. And they get off this kick of trying to convert everybody, though there’s still plenty of folks trying to do that. But I’m afraid I failed that group.

Bali White [01:23:37] Well, in retrospect, is there anything that you would have done differently?

Jim LaRue [01:23:45] Well, definitely the financial thing. I think the Cleveland Housing Network had a system that was better. They had, their staff was supported by the Enterprise Foundation, so they were not needing to raise money for staff, although they probably had some local foundation money, too. And so they owned the houses. They continued to own the houses, and the family was responsible for maintaining them and doing what was necessary. But I worked on several projects with the Cleveland Housing Network, and at one point, there were a whole group of homes in one neighborhood that were having failed foundations over the water. And I had a friend at the University of Illinois Engineering School who had come up with a terrific, simple plan for addressing moisture issues in low income housing. So I got together with him, and I came up with a plan that allowed local workers to dig down just 3 feet and out 3 feet and put rubber roofing material on the walls of the foundation and out into the bottom of the trench, and it stopped the water in the houses without having to dig the whole place It was a method that was just wonderful, and it solved the problem. And I was able to train one of the contracting groups for the network to do that work. Oh, and another thing that I haven’t talked about is work I did with Stu Greenberg and University Hospital, and not University Hospital. What’s the other hospital besides the Clinic out in the University? Metro? No, not Metro. It’s a big hospital.

Bali White [01:25:50] The Cleveland Clinic?

Jim LaRue [01:25:51] Cleveland- Not Cleveland Clinic. It’s the other one.

Bali White [01:25:56] It’s still around today?

Jim LaRue [01:25:59] Yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s huge.

Bali White [01:26:01] It’s all, UH.

Jim LaRue [01:26:02] UH. University hospital.

Bali White [01:26:05] Yes.

Jim LaRue [01:26:05] Yeah. Okay. They were starting a program to see if they could treat seniors in their homes, rather than them seniors coming to the hospital. So, um, Stu was approached about an Environmental Health Watch to see if he could help with that. So he got in touch with me, and my job was to train, was, one, evaluate the houses, and then train a worker or two to make improvements in the houses that would make it safer and healthier for people to stay in their house. So that if the doctors were coming to take care of these people, they weren’t creating more problems than they solved. So, an example, one of the first houses that we worked on was a very old woman who had respiratory problems. She was always in bed. And so I started in the basement. There was a foot of water in the basement. A foot of water in the basement. The furnace had water a foot deep in the bottom section of the furnace. Moisture pumped up in the house, mold growing all over the place. And all it would have taken was to figure out what was the moisture problem that got the basement all screwed up. And then that woman would have been safe in her own house. So that’s what we started, was a program to go to the homes of women, men, who were being treated by a University Hospital, and so that they weren’t creating an additional problem by bringing. Keeping them in the house. And it worked. It worked. Justice, justice. Justice. It’s the only way. And the people would say, oh, my house feels so good. My house feels so good. And stairs, stairwells, people falling down stairs. And I trained them to put up railings, trained them to do it in such a way that they could step down or sit on their ass and slide down the steps if they were able to do that. And the doctors were appreciative. So it was a wonderful way to get together with the doctors.

Bali White [01:28:43] That’s amazing. I mean, the work that you’ve done. You’ve done so much for the community and for the area. It’s very admirable.

Jim LaRue [01:28:50] Well, there’s always so much more to do. You look back on what you did, and it’s like pissing in the wind. [laughing]

Bali White [01:29:01] You were very involved, and I hope that through this interview, someone listens to this and perhaps thinks, maybe I, too, should get involved. I can do this type of work.

Jim LaRue [01:29:13] Also and get employment. I mean, when I was working on the lead issue, everyone said that it’s the lead paint. It’s the lead paint that’s killing kids. It’s the lead paint that’s killing, or it’s some lead that’s dropping off the house. It’s in the- Well, I hired a company to come- Stu and I hired a company to come and evaluate some homes in this southern area of Cleveland. And this company was excellent. And they said, we want to test the soils from the street to the house and from the street to the house. There ain’t any paint out by the street. And they said, wait until you see what happens. So they tested those lead levels in the soil between the street and the curb on a busy street was worse than the lead levels near the house. That was the problem. And kids playing in the grass on that street, they’re getting lead levels out the gazoo. And it was going to happen over and over again. And so that’s what research did. We helped learn that that was a problem. And so I could go to communities where I was trying to persuade not to do lead paint, permission, blasting paint off the houses, which I don’t know how many communities said, no, we. They’re good companies. They’re not going to be any problem. I said, the problem is not the company. The problem is what the company knows and doesn’t know about what they’re doing. So that was another one. I remember when that company called me and said the lead levels in the curb area are worse than any place else.

Bali White [01:31:15] Oh, yeah. I actually read recently that the Kentucky Gardens, which is the neighborhood community garden.

Jim LaRue [01:31:20] Yeah, sure. I know that. I’m familiar with that.

Bali White [01:31:23] This upcoming, I think, July 27th, like, a group is coming in, and they’re having the community bring in soil samples to kind of see what the lead levels are.

Jim LaRue [01:31:36] [laughs] Yeah, that’s wonderful.

Bali White [01:31:37] Yeah. It’s a free event.

Jim LaRue [01:31:38] So that’s great. Oh, yeah. That’s terrific.

Bali White [01:31:42] It’s interesting to see. [crosstalk]

Jim LaRue [01:31:43] And some will be wonderful, and some will be for shit.

Bali White [01:31:47] Oh, yeah.

Jim LaRue [01:31:48] Really? Yeah. No, and- Oh, that’s wonderful. Well, it’s taken a long time to get to that stage of openness. I built two new homes in Shaker, and Matt Burgess, who is now the biggest developer in Tremont, it was my helper on that project, and it was green. They were both green homes. And. No, and green means nothing chemically that’s going to create the problem. And those homes are still standing, thank goodness. They were both in Shaker.

Bali White [01:32:32] Amazing.

Jim LaRue [01:32:32] Yeah.

Bali White [01:32:33] Awesome. Do you have any other stories you find important that you’d like to share?

Jim LaRue [01:32:40] Well, I think I’ve shared most of them.

Bali White [01:32:42] Oh, yeah. It’s been an amazing time.

Jim LaRue [01:32:45] I think- My friend and I have built a straw bale cottage on our 31-acre woodland. And everyone who comes to see the cottage wants to talk about how we did it. And I don’t remember very many people saying they tried to build it, but they understand it now and they understand why healthy housing is important and why all of the wood that I used in. Not the framing, the framing was wood we got from a lumberyard, but all the wood I used. And I built everything on the interior. I built a loft, I built all the cabinetry and furniture, and I built it out of recycled wood so that there’s a man down in Wooster who tears down barns and houses and stacks each house and each barn in a pile, and then you go down and choose which pile you want to pick from, and then he’ll run it through, clean it up. And so all the wood in that cottage is recycled wood. And I’m pleased about that because that’s another way to save resources, and it gives character to the thing. Brand new wood you have to paint. We didn’t have to paint this wood. We just put a stain on it and not a clear stain. We didn’t have to color anything because it has its own color. Yeah. So I’m- Now my work is I built ten trails on our property, and I use the trees that have fallen to border the trails. And I’m constantly, constantly- Me and the raccoons are at war with each other. They constantly are pulling stuff into the path and screwing up the careful method that they can’t appreciate. So I do a lot of that. And it’s pretty low maintenance, actually, because it’s all woodland and every once in a while, a big tree falls, and then we cut that up for firewood.

Bali White [01:35:30] Well, I guess my last question is, what do you hope to see for future generations?

Jim LaRue [01:35:38] [laughs] Well, I think that if our generation, my generation did anything, it raised the issues. Clearly, the issues are clear. There are financial issues, there are structural issues, there are all kinds of issues, but the issues are not new. The issues are clear. We need to be more imaginative. We needed to be more imaginative about how we dealt with the finances so that we lost our structures, not because they failed as a building, but because we failed economically. And so rehabbing and building is important, a financial issue. Everything else depends on a solid financial issue, and that is not having the money to do it. It’s having people with the income sufficient to live in the structures. And when you’re trying to do housing for low, moderate income people, that becomes a problem. You’ve got to find a way to finance their participation. The Network did it by virtue of the grant money that they got from the Enterprise foundation, which helped to cover the cost of salaries for staff so that they could maintain and keep the buildings and so they could hire me to come and teach people to support it and deal with it in an effective way. As I think about the book that was written by the, the Derelict Paradise, there are always going to be a number of people who are not going to have the money, and there’s not going to be enough money publicly to do the thing, though. What was the- Oh, yeah, now you asked the question. Let me see if I can find- Oh, here it is. I came across an article, Colorado wants to give tenants money for paying rent. That’s the way we solve the problem. If we can teach people to take care of their house and make the that a condition for their living in the structure, then if we can realize that we need justice, requires that people have a place to live. That’s a given. And not everybody is going to be able to have a great job, and not everybody is going to have the sufficient income. So we have to come up- This may be one way. Colorado wants to give tenants money and paying rent, that’s big and it’s expensive, but I think if people can get their rent paid or helped, we have to incentivize why keeping the house together is important. We have to incentivize that. And I was into rehabbing it, and I always thought that rehabbing the house was the incentive. Well, sorry, it didn’t get it all done. We need to incentivize people wanting to be in their house. They may be mentally ill, they may be emotionally stressed, they may be out of work temporarily, and we need to find a way to create housing that takes those things into consideration. I’ve been in the homes and looked at housing for people who are mentally ill and they’re no less required to have good housing as anybody else. But we may need to create housing that is more supportive to make that happen and not get people into housing that they’re not going to be able to support or afford. We have to create structures to address their condition. And so you take the conditions straight up. I went to a home one time where there was all kinds of problems. And the woman came to the door and she said, this was a Black family. And she said, my son is mentally ill. He’s not to be trusted with strangers. But I need to have you look at some of the issues that are going on. And so I stepped in the door and the son came toward me and he was big, not fat, tough, big. And I was not certain that I wanted to go another step further. And he softened. He softened. I don’t know what I did for him, but he softened and he backed away and let me come in the house. And the woman was just thrilled. But we do have to learn to take some risks and not to be dumb. I wasn’t standing out there on there until I was satisfied that I wasn’t going to get creamed by this dude. But once I was satisfied that he was opening the door, I was able to go in the door and be with that family. But. And so there’s always risk in this game. Always risk in this game. There’s risk crawling around in a crawl space and all of a sudden there’s a rat over there and there’s another thing over here and there’s something else over there or an attic that’s got the same kind of creatures. And I think we need to- Lutheran Housing now has a program that rehabs housing in an effective way, I think because they are addressing the persons and coming up with the work that is done. So if the person already has a way to support themselves, they can keep the house because the house is now manageable. So I just think there’s some ways to do that. And we have to be careful not to just throw money at stuff for the sake of throwing money. We need to be thoughtful about who’s in the house, what can they afford? What are the possibilities, what can we, who are a resource afford? And how do we evaluate what we have done? And that’s what I did that day when I went walking out, looking at the housing that I had rehabbed and finding so many of them empty. There was one house that I rehabbed. It was the first. I rehabbed a house. That was the first national public television rehab on television. It was called Home Again. And it was a house on East 93rd Street. And when I drove that day to look at the houses, it is totally trashed. Totally trashed. And I took a house that was trashed. And that was the power of that program and got tremendous reviews about the thing. And it showed. Until the new program that does the rehab of housing is done, I mean, they now have tremendous crews. I was embarrassed that there’s a video out there of what I did with that house because these guys doing the houses now are so much more skilled and knowledgeable than I ever was. But that, you know, when I saw that house that I had rehabbed for the television series that went on for two or three years on national public television.

Bali White [01:44:32] I think you set the precedent of how someone should be rehabbing a house. These contractors probably can look to you as inspiration, as someone who really was a grassroots thing.

Jim LaRue [01:44:46] Yeah, it was grassroots. And the kids that I worked with, I had most of the young people working for me because that’s all I could afford, other than the contractor, the plumber, the electrician, the heating guy. I would assign a kid to work watching. The heating guy would assign a kid to watch working the plumber, putting in the plumbing system so that they were learning what they could maybe do and decide that they’d like to do it.

Bali White [01:45:19] And without a doubt, you probably changed their lives for the better.

Jim LaRue [01:45:21] Some of their lives. A few. But it was the one kid that was watching the house for the TV program who, the day it was over, he went through the house and picked up every one of my tools that he could pick up and was out the back door with my check that I had just paid him for the last period of time. And I called the bank, and he’d already been there and cashed his check and was done. So that was my reward for that particular day. But the family that moved in, I guess, was a very decent family, but something happened along the way.

Bali White [01:46:04] Oh, wow. Well, I think we’re gonna close up this interview. Thank you very much for your time and just effort in being here and participating in this oral history project. I’m Bali White, here with Jim LaRue on July 2, 2024. We’re gonna finish up this interview. Thank you very much.

Jim LaRue [01:46:27] Thank you.

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