San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Rebounded from homelessness, blossomed
She was a willowy blond surfer and gymnastics whiz, the archetype of a mid-1960s golden girl on the Florida coastline at a time when the Beach Boys saturated the radio.
Given the conventions of the day, Rita Grant figured when she graduated high school she’d be expected to marry the school jock or a businessman. But Grant was anything but conventional. She married a scuba diver who scoured the ocean for lobster and sunken treasure, lived a bohemian life on boats in Key West and raised five kids in the 1970s and ’80s on health food and a love of the water.
It was a quasi-hippie dream — until the lure of drugs and alcohol ruined it for her and her husband. They split up, Grant’s life spun out of control, and she lost custody of her children.
In the late 1990s she left Florida with a boyfriend to visit San Francisco, where the boyfriend promptly abandoned her. Addicted to heroin, she stayed in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin getting city welfare payments and attempting to go to massage therapy school.
But the drugs and the despair from losing her children and being abandoned was crushing. She hit the streets around 2000, met boyfriend Tommy Rettig, and they both wound up living on a concrete traffic island at the corner of Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue with a dozen fellow street addicts.
They called it Homeless Island. In 2003, Rettig died of a flesh-eating disease he’d gotten from using dirty needles, and Grant was headed for the same fate with infected abscesses.
But that’s when her life made a stunning turnaround.
After having lost track of Grant, her sister, Pam Johnson in Florida, read a story in The Chronicle in 2003 about Homeless Island, flew to San Francisco with one of Grant’s daughters and brought her home to heal in the Sunshine State.
A Chronicle story about the rescue inspired then-Mayor Gavin Newsom to create the Home Bound program, which to date has reunited thousands of homeless people home with loved ones or friends — and as the decades rolled by, Grant became a vibrant licensed massage therapist and health nutritionist.
When she died Jan. 24 at age 72 after a two-year battle with cancer in Winter Park, Fla., she was at peace and still marveling
that she’d survived the hell of chronic homelessness to see three grandchildren born.
Asked a few months ago whether she was afraid of dying, Grant laughed.
“Nah,” she said. “It’ll be nice if I make it to the next Mother’s Day, but I’ve had a great life now. I’ve reconnected with my kids, my sisters, my mom before she passed. And seriously, I wouldn’t mind seeing my friends in heaven. I’m leaving it up to God.”
Gov. Newsom said the woman who made such an impression on him nearly 20 years ago continues to inspire, even in death.
“During my time as mayor of San Francisco, I was touched by Rita’s courage and strength,” he said in an email to The Chronicle. “Faced with unspeakable obstacles, Rita remarkably turned her life around and inspired the City of San Francisco to enact policies to better serve individuals experiencing homelessness.
“Rita’s memory lives on and continues to inspire as we work to implement programs to assist those dealing with homelessness throughout the state. Rita reminds us that every person struggling on our streets and alleyways has a story, and that no matter how difficult the road ahead may be, there’s still hope for a better future.”
Grant was born in New York, and as a 14-year-old gymnastics star she represented New York state in the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. She was trying out
for the Olympics when she tore a knee ligament, and though she healed enough to turn backsprings and lead cheerleading squads, the Olympic dream ended.
Her family moved around then to Eau Gallie, a Florida coastal town near the surfing mecca of Cocoa Beach, and she learned to ride a board. With her honey hair and ready smile, Grant was voted homecoming queen runner-up at high school and became a fixture at the beaches — which is how she met her surfing and diving husband, Doug Grant.
Life was good in Key West after they married. Rita Grant also became a diver, Doug Grant worked treasure-hunting boats and the lobster trade, and the family grew up loving the ocean life. Then in the mid-1990s, it all dissolved through substance abuse. The children were scattered to relatives, boarding school or foster care.
“My mom was a really healthy person — was totally into health food, super healthy and fit when we were kids,” said her daughter Joy Grant, a massage therapist who still lives in the Florida Keys. But by the time Grant washed up in San Francisco after a trip West, addicted and sleeping on the concrete at Homeless Island, the healthy bent was a memory.
The name Homeless Island was coined by the people who lived on it, panhandling the busy traffic lanes, sleeping on blankets and cardboard and addicted to heroin and crack. Most
of them are now dead, succumbing to disease brought on by street life or drug overdoses. When Grant’s sister Johnson flew to San Francisco with Joy in early 2004, they went to the block but couldn’t find her. They paid one of the Islanders $5 to tell them where she was, and he pointed to Grant sitting on a bench 10 feet away — so wasted and slumped over that they didn’t recognize her.
“We’re here to help you,” Johnson said, holding her sister’s head up with her hand. “OK,” Grant said quietly after a long pause.
The first thing Johnson and Joy did was take Grant to a city medical clinic, where doctors told them Grant would have been dead in two weeks if she hadn’t gotten treatment for her abscesses, which were infected and close to her spine. Then they got her on methadone to shake the heroin, and flew her to live with Johnson in DeLand, Fla., where Johnson was an artist restoring furniture.
Within a couple of months, Grant was drug-free and healthy again. “It was just time for me to go,” she told The Chronicle in late 2004, her sister smiling at her side. “I was finally tired of the street — too much tragedy, too much loneliness, too much sorrow. But I couldn’t get cleaned up by myself. Thank God, my family didn’t give up.”
In the years that followed, she earned a massage therapy license and became a nutrition specialist working at a health food store. In 2019 she moved to Gainesville, Fla., to live with boyfriend Gregg Blanchard — and two years later she was diagnosed with brain cancer and had a seizure. Doctors gave her one year to live, but she fought off the end until last month, when she moved into hospice at the home of her oldest daughter, Faith Grant Zini, in Winter Park.
“She got 20 years back that nobody really expected her to have, given her trajectory,” Zini said. “She got to spend her most important years surrounded by family and showered with love.”
The standalone 195 Bound initiative was retired in June, and its work was folded into the city homelessness department’s Problem Solving Program. There, counselors continue its model of reuniting unhoused people with family or friends if both sides are willing to work toward stability.
Grant may have been rescued by her family, but without her grit and resolve to choose life, none of it would have succeeded.
“Rita did the work,” Johnson said. “She had to be ready to take what was offered, and she was — but getting it done was all on her. And just look how it turned out. We had lots of great times together that we would have never had if she’d stayed on the street.
“And for the rest of her life, she was a friend to everyone she met, especially the down and out. She’d stop and give food to people who were hungry, talk to them, never forgot where she’d come from. My sister had a good and kind soul with a big heart.”
In addition to Johnson, Grant is survived by four other sisters and one brother, all of Florida: Debbie Innamorato, Christine Natellie, Lynda Olsen, Valerie Boecker and Scott Raimondo; two other daughters in addition to Zini, both of Florida: Joy Grant and Penelope Grant; and three grandsons, also of Florida.
Grant was cremated, and the family will scatter her ashes in Key West and in Costa Rica, a favorite place to visit with relatives.
Donations in Grant’s name may be sent to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, 1518 K Street NW, Suite 206, Washington, DC 20005, or https:// help.endhomelessness.org/ donate.