Families find holiday comfort

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Dec. 24, 2001 | 9:56 a.m.

At least two Las Vegas families don't take having a roof over their heads for granted this Christmas.

They were both homeless for months and only recently found a place to bed down their children and put up their Christmas trees.

But the Travises and the Scholzes have more than that in common.

They both came to Las Vegas in the past year from other states, in search of opportunity.

They both depend on hard-working men who haven't found enough work to pay for an apartment.

They both have seen some hard luck and been told no by enough offices to fill several file folders, going through what many of Las Vegas' estimated 10,000 homeless people face on a daily basis.

Take Ernie Scholze and his 12-year-old daughter, Allyshia.

The single father arrived in Las Vegas in February. He left a job as assistant manager at a motel in Studio City, Calif., when a Las Vegas man who stayed at the motel offered him what seemed to be a better opportunity working in construction and restoration here.

"I thought the job would pay better and hoped to find a better school for my daughter, who was having trouble in Los Angeles," Scholze said.

But the job only lasted until May. Scholze found a night shift position at a Las Vegas print shop.

"They said they'd have work at least through December," he said.

But then Sept. 11 hit. On Sept. 14 he was told not to come back to work the next day.

"This is when things started to spin out of control. I would get two days of work here and there. The print shop called me back for occasional shifts.

"I wanted to keep my daughter in school, but it became harder when I had to be out looking for work and couldn't pick her up in the afternoon."

As the end of Scholze's lease at an apartment on Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway came up on Oct. 1, he went to the county Department of Social Services in search of temporary rental assistance.

Scholze found that the assistance would take at least three weeks to arrive.

"By this time, I was sweating bullets. Plus, I was working nights again and hardly seeing my daughter."

On Oct. 5 the apartment manager said Scholze would have to pay the month's $520 rent or leave the apartment.

"I told him the only thing between me and the streets was the wall of his office. But he insisted."

Scholze began calling the homeless shelters in Las Vegas, but couldn't find a place that would take him and his daughter together, since most emergency shelters assist single men, single women or women with children.

The two spent the next two months sleeping in motels or on couches in the apartments of families who had children in school with his daughter. Scholze put their belongings in storage.

"People I barely knew cared for my pets -- including cats and parakeets."

At one point, Allyshia missed two weeks of school.

On Dec. 11 he was told he would have to leave behind the last of a series of couches by the following Sunday.

By this time he had come across Linda Lera-Randle El, a homeless advocate who runs a program called Straight from the Streets.

"He called me and the first thing I had to do was calm him down," Lera-Randle El said. "Then we organized his needs -- food, because he had about $2 in his pocket, and then a place to stay."

"I called around but really there's only Interfaith Hospitality Network for single fathers with nearly teenaged daughters. And by now it was the weekend, so I could only leave a message.

"I decided the only option was to go to the media."

On Dec. 16 the Scholzes appeared on Channel 3 news in a segment titled, "Nowhere to go."

By the next day, not only had Scholze received more than a dozen leads on jobs, but a viewer in East Las Vegas gave him what he said was the greatest Christmas gift of all -- family.

Paula Byrd saw the news the night before.

"When I saw Ernie's face, I said, 'He looks just like my grandfather.'

"Then it clicked. The guy who was about to get tossed onto the street was a cousin of mine I hadn't seen since I was 4 -- and had been looking for for years."

Scholze's parents were killed in a car crash in the Mojave Desert when he was 10, and he and his brother Jimmy were split up and sent to live with a series of different relatives -- creating long-term gaps in communication between different members of the family.

Last Monday the cousins were reunited, and the Scholzes are now spending Christmas and the foreseeable future with family.

"This has all been a bit overwhelming for me," said Scholze, seated in his cousin's kitchen.

"Before it was all problems, and now I don't know how to sort through all these offers of help.

"But now I'm just thankful that my child has been given a change of life, a family and a real Christmas."

The Travises

The Travises have endured their own odyssey.

Dennis, Patsy, and their 6-year-old son, Elvis, came to Las Vegas from Baton Rouge, La., in April.

Dennis had worked most recently in a riverboat casino in Baton Rouge. Before that, he was a merchant marine. But a fellow worker at the casino said he could get more work for better pay in Las Vegas, so the Travises packed up a U-Haul and headed west, with a stop in California planned.

In Baker, Calif., their bad luck began when their truck broke down. They hitchhiked to Las Vegas.

When they arrived, they checked in at a Budget Suites hotel, and Dennis began looking for work.

"I applied at casinos, went to day labor places. But there was hardly anything," he said.

Within three weeks, their money ran out, and seven months in the streets and at homeless shelters began.

They stayed in the Salvation Army shelter for a week. Patsy and Elvis stayed in the Shade Tree Shelter for a month, while Dennis slept on the streets. When Patsy reached the 30-day limit at Shade Tree, the family slept on the streets together. They were able to spend a week at the Rescue Mission, although they were separated. A woman Patsy met offered to put them up for a few weeks at an apartment she had rented.

They tried to enter the MASH Village shelter, but Patsy's wallet, which held her son's birth certificate, had been stolen, and she needed it to register.

During this period, Dennis worked odd jobs.

"I did anything I could find, moving bricks, whatever."

Patsy, who says she suffers from depression, applied for Social Security benefits for mental disability, though she had been turned down twice before.

"I figured it didn't hurt to try again in Las Vegas, even though they had turned me down in Baton Rouge."

Meanwhile, the family was able to obtain food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, from the state -- a total of $554 a month.

They also got onto the waiting list for temporary housing with the Las Vegas Housing Authority.

By November they had saved up enough money to move into a trailer park on Washington Avenue, not far from where they had been homeless for months.

By December Patsy was receiving Social Security benefits for $545, but the state benefits were suspended at the same time.

"At least the doctors here listened to me, so I could explain what my problem was," she said.

Now the couple's main concern is getting together the $125 they need to connect a propane tank to their trailer, to cook and heat up their two and a half rooms.

They also want to draw out their son more, who they say was very quiet and scared during the months they slept on the streets.

"But really, this year it's like Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one," said Patsy.

"We could have given up, but with our son to think of, we just had to keep fighting."