Did he make it to his daughter on Xmas?
Can he find $27 for a bus ticket?
![Joseph Hill wearing a black hat and looking at the camera: On Christmas Eve, Fox decided to go to Union Station and panhandle, which he said he’d always refused to do.]({"default":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BBYjF2U.img?h=0&w=720&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=f&l=f&x=1566&y=1164"})
PostOn Christmas Eve, Fox decided to go to Union Station and panhandle, which he said he’d always refused to do.Just after sunrise Christmas morning, the people searching for Robert Fox began to arrive at Franklin Square in downtown Washington. They had read a story in The Washington Post about his holiday wish — to spend Dec. 25 with his daughter in Virginia — and they wanted to help him get there.
Fox, 70, had been homeless for nearly a year, but the man believed that his daughter, who, as far as he knew lived just outside Fredericksburg, would take him in, feed him a good meal, give him a warm bed. But Fox was broke, having long since run out of the $531 he receives each month from Social Security. He had a cellphone but couldn’t afford to pay for service and, with less than 48 hours left before Christmas, he’d spent his last 62 cents on a Newport cigarette. In his mind, though, all he needed was enough money to buy a $27 bus ticket south. The rest, he hoped, would work itself out.
At least 20 people came looking for him at the park, said Patrick Hill, who has lived on the streets of the nation’s capital for years. He, too, had tried to help Fox in the preceding days, recommending places and people who could help him reunite with his daughter.
“He was sincere and genuine about what he wanted,” Hill said. “He didn’t ask me for nothing else. He didn’t want a drink. He didn’t want a smoke.”
In a city with 6,500 homeless people, that sincerity also resonated with thousands of Post readers. But when the altruists couldn’t find Fox, Hill said, they passed out money and gift cards to other homeless people who’d packed into Franklin Square — an unofficial refuge for those with nowhere to go — on Christmas morning. One of them gave Hill a cellphone. Someone else handed him $50.
Scott Talan, an assistant professor at American University, was among more than 100 people from Indonesia to Hawaii who emailed a Post reporter, also offering to help Fox reach his daughter.
“This wasn’t a plane to another state or out of the country,” Talan said. “It was a bus trip to Virginia.”
The apparent simplicity of Fox’s need, Talan explained, moved him to act, and he suspected the same notion prompted many others to do the same: “How can this be and how can I help?”
For Fox, though, it was never as simple as a bus ticket. He understood that his vision of the ideal Christmas was something of a fantasy. By his recollection, he hadn’t spoken to his daughter in four years and hadn’t seen her in five or six. He figured she’d be angry when she heard from him because they hadn’t spoken in so long, but he also felt certain that she would forgive. Still, he didn’t have her phone number or the number of a sister who he thought would have it. On Christmas Eve, he planned to go to the Union Station bus terminal where he would try to sell a new coat or a blanket or, if that failed, beg strangers for money. The idea unraveled when, by that night, he still hadn’t reached his sister or daughter. Instead, he spent Christmas in Washington with one of his sons, who has a different mother from his daughter in Virginia.
The Post tried to contact his daughter in Virginia but found no one in public records who went by her name. Fox suggested she might have taken her husband’s last name, but he didn’t know what it was. He couldn’t recall her address but, he thought, would recognize her house by sight. On Thursday, a Post reporter called and texted both his sister and his son. Neither responded.
Earlier in the week, Fox was frank about his struggles with drug abuse and the law. He’d been arrested a number of times through the decades and, he said, once spent a year in prison on a cocaine conviction. He hadn’t always been there for his five kids, but he said he loved them.
Since his teens, Fox said, he’d found a way to earn a living — in construction, painting, home repair — but an eviction about four years ago unmoored him. He bounced from one friend or family member’s place to another, he said, but eventually, no one could afford to let him stay long-term, leaving him homeless.
With Christmas approaching, Fox imagined that at his daughter’s place, he could start a new life. Her home wasn’t far from where he grew up, he said. He had childhood friends down there, people he could lean on. Even at his age, he was strong enough to repair cars or renovate houses. He would find work, earn a living again.
The response from readers to his story was immediate and overwhelming. Many were angry that The Post reporter didn’t buy Fox a bus ticket, an act that would have violated ethical rules that prohibit journalists from paying subjects or becoming participants in their own stories.
Many more readers, though, just wanted to aid a man in need.
They provided their email addresses and phone numbers. They offered to send him money, to buy him new clothes, to drive him to Virginia.
“Did he make it to his daughter?” asked John Ferrell. “Where can I send a donation to cover his trip and a basic stipend?”
“How can we help him?” wrote Camilla Zieg, a 73-year-old widow from California. “Helping just one would be a gift to myself!”
“I am a Muslim woman who wants to help Mr. Fox be united with his daughter this season of blessings and great hope,” wrote a reader from Indonesia, Maria Arquisola. “Please tell me how I can help him buy his $27 ticket.”
“I spent 3 years homeless on the streets of Atlanta. Against the odds, I was able to recover and am once again stable,” one man said. “I never forgot the cold nights and the longing for family, however. Since that time, I have tried to do what I can to help.”
“I recently lost my only son who was in a similar predicament and it breaks my heart to see anyone suffer needlessly,” wrote Denise Price of Ohio.
“I have been in his position and would love to help him as much as I can,” another reader wrote. “When people see someone like him they automatically think to themselves that he must be a drug addict or he has brought this on himself. This may be true as it was in my case but that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve sympathy or a second chance.”
That’s how Talan, who created a GoFundMe on Fox’s behalf, viewed it, too. To him, whether the money reunited Fox with his daughter or helped him in some other way didn’t matter. Maybe, if he couldn’t make it to Virginia, the contributions would pay for new clothes or the service for his cellphone. Maybe, he thought, the fund could even raise enough to get Fox off the streets and into a real home
A homeless man longs to see his daughter on Christmas. Can he find $27 for a bus ticket?
(This story has updated)
Robert Fox knew where he should spend Christmas. With his daughter, who would welcome him with a hug and a kiss. He would tell her he loved her, and thank God for bringing them together. He would reminisce about happy memories over butter pecan ice cream and lemon cake with chocolate frosting. He would shave and shower and sleep in a warm bed, and when he woke up, he’d begin his new life.
What he didn’t know was how any of that could happen.
Fox, 70, imagined all this as he sat on a bench in downtown Washington’s Franklin Square, surrounded by makeshift tents patched together by people who, with Christmas less than 48 hours away, had already given up on finding a special place to spend the holiday. The temperature had climbed into the 50s, so he unbuttoned his wool coat and tipped back his full-brim camouflage hat, allowing the sunlight to cascade across the creases of his worried face.
“I’m going through some things,” he said, but what that really meant was that he’d been living on the streets of the nation’s capital for nearly a year. That’s what had brought him to Franklin Square, an unofficial refuge for the city’s homeless. The District has spent millions of dollars to reduce their numbers, and the city has been taking more families off the streets, but the number of single adults has continued to grow.
Fox acknowledged that he’s made some bad choices. He loves his five children, even if he hasn’t been around all the time. He’s struggled with drugs, off and on, he said, and been arrested a number of times through the years, once serving a year in prison on a cocaine conviction.
He had always found a way to earn a living, though, ever since he left home in Ruther Glen, Va., at age 14 to live with an aunt in the District. Back then, he worked in the basement of the Saks Fifth Avenue in Chevy Chase, Md., draping clothes he could never afford on hangers. He has since held dozens of other jobs, as a roofer and painter and construction worker. In the 1970s, he lugged bags for travelers as a skycap at Washington National Airport, where Fox said he saw celebrities including James Brown and the Pointer Sisters pass by.
For a long time, he renovated houses and worked on cars, often with his oldest son, and that was enough to fill the fridge and pay the rent.
His life started to come undone about 15 years ago, when he returned home to find his fiancee sprawled on their bed. An aneurysm had taken her life.
He still spends some nights on their couches but many more on the streets, atop sheets of cardboard. When the drivers let him, Fox prefers to ride the public buses all night, because he feels safer on them. He said he’s always refused to beg for money.
His daughter, though — he knows she would help him. That last time they talked was on a Thanksgiving, before he lost his home. He called her as he put the turkey in the oven and, as it happened, she had just done the same. They were both so happy to talk to each other, Fox said, that he cried, and she did, too.
Fox figured he should take a Greyhound bus from Union Station to Fredericksburg, where he planned to call her. She would be angry, he said, because they hadn’t talked in so long, but he was certain she would forgive him.
“I know she’s going to say, ‘Dad, I’m on my way to get you,’ ” he said. “I know it.”
The bus ticket cost only $27, but he hadn’t learned that yet. He kept all that he owned — snacks, a jug of lemonade, extra socks — in three bags, and on Monday afternoon, he spent his last 62 cents on a Newport cigarette that he smoked down to the filter.
He was a newcomer to Franklin Square, where a historic school building facing the park once served as a shelter. He had heard the homeless were taken care of there and, too, that they took care of one another.
Patrick Hill, who had lived on the streets for years, suggested Fox try the Georgetown Ministry Center or maybe a church up the street or maybe a pastor friend he knew.
Lisa Smith, homeless for more than a decade after two strokes, offered Fox her cellphone so he could call his oldest son.
“We all help each other,” Smith told him, and she meant it. This park was her home. Every piece of clothing she wore that day — the blue jeans, camo shoes, maroon cap and leather jacket with the fur-lined hoodie — had come from donors who pulled up in cars and vans every day of the week.
She worried about what would become of Franklin Square, and all of them, as the city begins a massive renovation project in the coming months. The empty Franklin School is being transformed into a reading museum called Planet Word.
Smith understood the juxtaposition — the city’s least-powerful residents had claimed a five-acre home at the center of its most powerful neighborhood, just three blocks from the White House. Every day, attorneys, lobbyists and journalists with six-figure incomes peered down at them from the surrounding office buildings or hurried past on their way to work, skirting the panhandlers, avoiding eye contact.
For Smith, though, Franklin Square is all she has.
“It’s like the outside world don’t even exist,” she said.
And what mattered most in this world, as the sun faded and the air cooled, was how to get Fox to his daughter.
Over the phone, his son had said Fox could work with him on a job in Northeast the next day, and that offered some comfort. Maybe he’d get lucky, he thought, and make enough to buy his bus ticket.
As the park’s lamps clicked on and night arrived, so, too, did the stream of altruists. A church group handed out toiletries and club sandwiches before a man dressed as Santa brought thick blankets and black backpacks, each one packed with more food and clothing.
Fox picked through the pack, hoping a gift card that could cover his ticket might be tucked in a pocket.
“I still don’t see no financing, but I ain’t giving up,” he told Hill.
Fox had collected too much stuff to ride the city bus all night, so, in two trips, he lugged all of it across the street and up the steps of the Sphinx Club at Almas Temple. He unfurled one of his new blankets, laid himself down and pulled a second one on top of him.
When he woke, just past 5 a.m. on Christmas Eve, he was no closer to Virginia than he had been the day before. Still, Fox remained hopeful.
He didn’t make it to the job with his son, but he did learn how much a bus ticket to Virginia cost and had come up with a new plan. He would go to Union Station and sell whatever he could — maybe the new coat he’d just been given, still labeled with the $100 price tag, or maybe the thick blanket or the backpack. If that didn’t work, Fox told himself, he would break his rule and, at last, beg people he didn’t know for money. Because Christmas was coming soon, and he just needed to make it to his daughter.
Update: Fox couldn’t reach his daughter by Christmas, so he spent the holiday with his son in the District. Fox’s wish to reunite with her, though, led people all over the world to offer their help. Click here to read more on what’s happened since.
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