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| September 2,
2002 Edition |
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Once homeless, a BC student
strivesBy JEROME
BURDI
Managing Editor
John Uske still
bears a scar and a missing tooth to remind him of times
when life was not so sweet.
Now a Brooklyn College
student with 111 credits toward a business management
degree, Uske, 44, was once homeless, living at the
Atlantic Avenue Armory homeless shelter after a bitter
divorce in 1997.
He is an urban success story. A man
who rescued himself from the gutter after a wake up call
that left him in the hospital.
Homelessness is at
an 11 percent rise this year, bringing the number up to
31,064, the highest one-year increase in New York City's
history, according to the Coalition of the Homeless'
records.
Though born and bred in Brooklyn, Uske moved
to New Jersey in 1990 (after marrying nine years
earlier) where he bought a house on a 300 by 300-foot
property with a mansion-size house in the middle adorned
with cars and a pool.
"My wife was very
materialistic. She wanted the material," he said.
He taught himself how to automate machines and
when recession hit he decided to take civil service
tests in hopes of providing a steady income for his wife
who had children on the way. He got a job at the post
office as an electronics technician.
After a
while, Uske's marriage and career began to crumble.
"The post office was a lot of anguish and mental
stress. My marriage started falling apart," he said.
"There was crazy shifts and crazy assignments all over.
I couldn't take it. I became totally despondent. I was
drinking a lot of beer and lost my job because my
attendance was so bad."
He got a divorce, which
he considers a bit of a victory because he didn't have
to pay child support after giving up his house with all
its accessories. He crashed back into New York City,
jobless and $250,000 in debt after legal
fees.
The second time bachelor stayed at the
Atlantic Avenue Armory shelter, a place to pass out
after drinking rivers of beer. This came to an end, as
did his dejection, one night. While he was lying in the
dark dorm drunk, a melee spread and Uske caught the
brunt.
"A fight broke out in my room. He [a
homeless man] said I made some noise or something. I was
just lying in my bed and he came up and smashed me with
a stick right here," said Uske pointing to a vertical
scar on his lip that led to a missing tooth. "It's too
dangerous to stay there."
His estranged aunt
came to visit him in the hospital and after seeing him
in this helpless state she helped him, taking him into
her home where he began to build his life again.
Within three months he was reconstructing
electrical machines in the Bronx at Union Standard
Machinery Company earning the moniker "Computron" from
co-workers.
"All they could see was that there
was this new guy that was walking around with a laptop
computer that he plugged into his machine project every
morning and he stayed there all day staring in to a
screen and tapping a keyboard," said Uske.
Knowing he was going to go back to school he got
a job close to home. He now works at Trans-Packers in
Brooklyn, a company that packages sugar, powders and
paper.
"He's very efficient," said the company's
president Selma Weiss. "He's very capable. He's here to
do a job and he's wonderful at it."
Uske is
setting up a Web site to place 22,615 personal documents
he has scanned at Theworldofcomputron.com. They range
from sketches he made in kindergarten to photographs of
state of the art machinery he has worked on.
As
the bell tower on campus rang sonorous sounds and Uske
recounted his life, he said, "I've learned not to give
up hope. In every bad situation, even in the worst
situations, there are good things that can come
out." |
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