Winter woes hit hardest below the poverty line

SUMNER — In his rusting 1960’s era mobile home, built back when the things really were “trailers,” Fred Webber hobbles from the table, across a sagging floor, to a recently rebuilt kitchen counter.

His slow, wavering gait, he says, apologeticaly, is the result of a botched operation to correct a curved spine, more than 50 years ago.

Once at the counter, he rustles through paperwork until he finds the form he wants.  On it, the feds say the 68-year-old can have a mere $50 of his $674 social security, because the $644 he receives in disability counts as “other income.”

That leaves Webber less than $700 to get by on for the month. 

As he heaves himself back into his chair, Webber says most of that goes to heat his home.  His disability is aggravated by decades spent in woods and behind the wheel, work his doctors advised him not to do, before finally getting him to call it quits in the ‘70s.

“Eh,” says Webber, with a shrug, “How’re you going to tell a 20-year-old kid, ‘You can’t work’?”

However, hobbled and unable to maintain his home, Webber has watched it slowly collapse around him.  The bathroom floor caved in not long ago, the front door has an inch-wide gap covered with a piece of blue painter’s tape.

“To heat this place, you might as well just open the door and build a fire on the steps,” says Webber’s neighbor, Donna Dunham.  “This place is all rotted out underneath.  The duckwork’s all open to the outside.  The heat just flies right out of here.

Dunham has tried to help Webber over the years, even giving him piles of her own split wood.  Webber can heat with oil, wood or propane, whichever is cheapest at the time.  Still, Dunham and her husband, Tim, can only do so much, she says.  They’re both on disability, too.

Meanwhile, Webber tried to get help from Community Concepts to weatherize his home. 

“They came by to look at the place,” says Webber.  “They said it’s not worth fixing, but they’d like to give me a loan for a new one.”

Webber then casts a long look sideways at his social security notice, and then rolls his eyes.

“Now, who’s going to give me a loan?”” he asks.

What Webber needs, says Dunham, is just a little help — some materials, a few hours of volunteer labor — to help seal his home from the elements.

Anyone willing to help can call Dunham at 388-2225, or on her cell phone at 577-9920.