EARLEVILLE - Bobby Gordon, a wise-cracking New Yorker with the girth of two linebackers, is old-school. He holds three simple truths: Love God, your country and your family.
So it was, in a way, Gordon's pride that five years ago led him, his wife and his daughter through a seven-month trip living in the family's Ford Escort, a borrowed cabin in the woods and, finally, Clairvaux Farm homeless shelter in Earleville.
Macular degeneration slowly deteriorated Gordon's vision so that by five years ago, the former Baltimore-based retail buyer could no longer see the suppliers' lists on which his job depended.
While his employer found tasks for him to do, Gordon grew frustrated.
"They were good to me, but they couldn't make me see anymore. So I said: `Thanks, but I don't need no welfare,'" said Gordon, 58. And so he left.
But Gordon couldn't see, so he couldn't work. And the debt spiraled. "We were robbing Peter to pay Paul," Gordon said. The family lost its apartment.
"I never thought we'd be like that," he said, a beefy hand rubbing his brow.
The safety net that finally caught Gordon, caught him for good. Through word of mouth, he found his way to Clairvaux Farm, a faith-based shelter tucked deep in the heart of Cecil County on a 20-acre farm, near the Bohemia River.
He started as a resident, but he and his family still live there, by choice, and said they do not intend to leave. Gordon now works there as a program coordinator for the unemployed chef, the deli worker, the young girl with a black eye and toddler, and the others who, like Gordon, never thought they would be homeless and found themselves at Clairvaux's door.
This month, the women with children who make up Clairvaux's 17 residents moved into the farm's new residence hall. They moved from the farm's original plantation-style house with sloping floors and slanted walls into a 4,000-square-foot, air-conditioned building. The ranch-style hall, built by 500 volunteers for about $120,000, will hold as many as 35 people. It can also be converted into quarters for single fathers with children, a segment of the population with increasing shelter needs. None of the county's four other shelters provides such lodging.
In 1981, when Carl Mazza, an ordained Presbyterian minister, founded Meeting Ground, the umbrella organization that runs Clairvaux, he thought he was offering a solution to a "temporary social crisis."
