‘I wanted to end it’

Alice Williamson was living in her SUV with her black cat, Jazz, when she hit what she said was her rock bottom last August.

Williamson, 82, grew up in the Phillipsburg area and married when she was 16. She and her husband, Clarence, worked together as tenant farmers in Warren County, New Jersey, raised seven children and retired to a rented mountainside cabin near Towanda in Bradford County.

After her husband’s death in 2001, Williamson moved around the country, first to Indiana and then to upstate New York, where she lived for a time near her daughter.

This summer, Williamson applied at Easton Housing Authority for an apartment, loaded her belongings into a U-Haul truck with her Mitsubishi on a car dolly behind and drove to Easton.

When she arrived, however, Williamson discovered she had not been granted an apartment in Easton, and with the $23,000 a year she receives from Social Security and her husband’s pension from a factory job, could not afford a place to live there.

Williamson put her things in a storage unit. She spent her days reading and listening to the radio in her car, where she also slept. Occasionally she would get a hot meal at a Chinese restaurant or a diner. She bathed and washed her hair in gas station restrooms.

“I just got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore,” Williamson said.

One day in August, she parked near the Lehigh River in a part of Easton known as The Flats. She was crying and thinking about driving into the river, she said.

“I wanted to end it, but I couldn’t do it because of my cat. I would not kill my cat,” she said.

A woman who Williamson doesn’t know, but calls her guardian angel, parked behind her and tapped on the window. Williamson explained her situation. The woman then made a call to the regional human services hotline, 2-1-1.

That connected Williamson with New Bethany Ministries in Bethlehem, where she and Jazz now have a room. New Bethany provides secure, dormitory-style rooms in a building with shared bathrooms and a communal kitchen. It has similar buildings in Allentown and Coplay.

To qualify, a person must have at least $600 a month in income, pay $350 in rent and pass a background check. Residents receive breakfast and lunch five days a week and although the program is meant as a bridge to permanent housing, there’s no limit to how long a person can stay, New Bethany housing coordinator Lori Nagy said.

New Bethany had a place for Cross, too.

Two weeks after Cross told Biehl and Burns that he was going to the movies with a friend and didn’t return, he reflected on his decision.

“I made a huge mistake,” Cross said of his decision to leave their home. “I went into a fit of depression. I felt like I was sort of taking advantage of two remarkably good people.”

He applied for the single room occupancy program. On Nov. 18, when Cross was down to his last $80 — enough for one more night at a cut-rate motel — Nagy called to tell him his application was approved.

The agency’s building in Coplay had a ground-floor room that would be available in a few weeks. Until then, Cross would become Williamson’s neighbor in Bethlehem and she, his mentor in the program. “She’s taken me under her wing,” he said.

Cross said he’s thankful to Biehl and Burns and wants to stay in touch with them, but he’s also happy to be paying his own rent again.

“I like to feel I’m not living on someone else’s dime,” he said.