"REAL CHANGE?"

[img1]In a part of town where memories are short, Edward McClain has been selling Real Change for as long as almost anyone can recall.

"Real Change, sir? Have a nice day, sir!" he says to almost anyone who passes him at his post.

Anyone who's crossed the threshold of the Safeway at Northeast 50th Street and Brooklyn Avenue knows these words. They are McClain's two-sentence sales pitch, delivered tens of thousands of times to generations of passers-by.

Armed with this and a smile, McClain has pulled himself out of homelessness and become the most successful vendor of Real Change, a Seattle newspaper dedicated to progressive advocacy.

"I allow myself to mingle with people but not mingle at the same time," McClain said. "Usually people follow the crowd, and I work within the crowd, but I follow my own dictates."

In 1995, McClain arrived in Seattle with about $2,500 to his name. After spending $1,500 he began searching for an apartment, but landlords demanded more than a thousand dollars up front -- a situation he hadn't encountered while living in the Midwest. McClain had nowhere to go but the streets.

Friends told him about Real Change, a paper distributed by homeless vendors as a basic means of income. In 1995, Real Change vendors purchased the paper for 25 cents and sold it for a dollar. McClain scouted the city for areas with high pedestrian traffic and decided to try selling papers in front of the U-District Safeway. Business was good.

"When I first started selling they didn't keep track of how many papers you sold," McClain said. "One day I saw that I'd sold 1,300 papers in a month, and I said to myself, 'You're still homeless?' That's when I went and got an apartment."

Nine months after his first visit to the Real Change office, McClain had a roof over his head. He now resides in Lake City, and at age 63 is one of the most recognized figures in the U-District.

"Ed is consistently the top-selling vendor, and that usually means selling from 1,500 to 2,500 papers in a month," said Tim Harris, founder and executive director of Real Change. "Every so often Ed will get sick or another vendor will have a really stellar month, but four months out of five Ed is at the top of the list."

Harris came to Seattle in 1994 with the mission of founding a newspaper for the city's homeless. Real Change now provides more than 250 vendors with income and gives voice to a community that sees little representation in the mainstream media.

"A lot of people think of us as homeless paper, but that's not really accurate at all," Harris said. "We cover many progressive issues, and we're not about just letting people know what's going on in their community. We're about taking the next step and letting people know what they can do about it."

The vendors sell papers and provide more than 35 percent of Real Change's income -- the rest comes from donations and foundation grants -- and they give customers a chance to interact with homeless and low-income communities they might not otherwise have.

"Real Change, ma'am? Have a good evening, ma'am!"

McClain's greeting varies slightly with the time of day and the recipient's gender, but its essence hasn't changed since he first planted his chair in front of the Safeway. Most shoppers glance once and look away or turn him down with "sorry" or "not now, man," and a few go through an awkward little dance in front of the store, eyes quickly drifting away from the man in the chair as their hands and legs twitch nervously.

[img2]But a sizable minority give McClain the dollar and buy a copy. Purchase by purchase, these people have kept him fed and sheltered during his 11 years in the U-District.

"He has courage," said Michelle Walker, a Lake City resident who often takes time out of her commute downtown to talk to McClain. "He always has a kind word to say and he always takes time to talk whether it's for five minutes or 20 minutes. At first I would just give him a dollar or five for the paper, then I started saying a few words to him, and eventually we started having conversations."

On any given day, McClain's brief greetings will spark a few dozen conversations with passers-by, although many longtime acquaintances don't even know his name. For some Safeway-goers McClain plays the "perfect stranger," willing to hear whatever worries are on their minds.

"Everybody wants to tell somebody their problems," he said. "And they say they don't have anybody else to talk to, so they tell me. People just want someone to listen."

McClain's equipment includes a small folding chair, a backpack full of Real Change issues and snacks, a pouch full of change, and whatever coat, hat and sweater combination he feels will best protect him from the elements.

"The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is turn on the weather report," McClain said. "The last thing I do after I leave is check the weather report, because I know I'm going to be outside all day."

After a day's work, McClain takes his chair to the office inside Safeway. After 11 years spent sitting in front of the store, he's helped business there almost as much as the location has helped him.

"He doesn't work here, but he helps out a lot," said Tyree Williams, the store's security guard. "If someone's been entering and leaving the store a lot without buying anything he'll mention it, that kind of thing. He has a good sense of who's not doing right, and he's a great addition to the sidewalk."

Before coming to Seattle, McClain did a little bit of everything. Most UW students who buy from him don't realize he's gone through the lecture hall gauntlet himself. McClain gives partial credit for his success as a vendor to his political science and sociology degrees from Northern Illinois University.

After he graduated, McClain spent 20 years studying cuisine in Europe before returning to the States to work as a cook, moving between his native Chicago and Minnesota. He packed his bags for Seattle 10 years later, and the city that once wouldn't spare him a bed to sleep in is now where he feels most at home.

Today McClain's job offers perks he could never get when working in the kitchen: fresh air, cool breezes and occasional direct sunlight.

"I love being able to work outside," he said. "I'd want to be outside even if it was minus 20 degrees. I've sat through rainstorms and snowstorms out here, and I never get tired of the fresh air."

Like the weather, the social climate in the U-District is always changing. The first and second generations of street-dwellers McClain saw on the job were often involved with hard drugs, and he said battles between heroin and crack dealers were a common occurrence.

In recent years McClain has seen the appearance of youth who glamorize homelessness, and to him this change is the most puzzling -- he said he wouldn't wish homelessness on his worst enemy. Whatever spirit moves through the streets, McClain will be sitting in his chair and pitching his paper.

"There's a lot of transition here and he's one of the things that makes this feel like a neighborhood," said a Safeway employee who identified herself only as Kate. "I'll come by here with my kids and he'll always notice them and give them a candy bar or something.

There are the occasional dark clouds. The most harrowing moment of McClain's Real Change career came early in 2002, when he said a drunk young man confronted him, shouted racial slurs and threatened his life with what appeared to be a hand grenade.

"When he stood up he pulled out a hand grenade," McClain said. "Everybody in the store screamed and the security guards came out after him, and he ran into a car and got away. What worries me is that I don't know if it was a real grenade or a fake one."

And after all -- good and bad -- is said and done and the shoppers have trickled away for the night, what does McClain do?

"I go home and just chill," he said.

Reach Daily reporter Andrew Sengul at [url='mailto:andrewsengul@thedaily.washington.edu']andrewsengul@thedaily.washington.edu[/url].