'Stepping Into a Breach'

Even before 10 p.m. when the door to the basement shelter opens, the dark figures who sit on their large bags or carry them with them pace the cold street outside the University Lutheran Church, anxious to get inside for the night. One wiry man repeatedly approaches passersby, sets down his two large sacks and says, "My name's Billy. Could you help me get home and get some dinner?" After gaining admittance to the shelter, Billy receives an offer for a subway token, but he chooses to spend the night.

While others like Billy wait outside, Stewart Guernsey moves around in the basement downstairs. His faded blue overalls drag on the ground as he pulls out mattresses from a stack in the corner, sorts through bedding and organizes a staff of volunteers. With his unassuming manner and style of dress, few would distinguish him from the frequenters of the shelter. Even fewer would guess that he is a first-year Harvard Divinity School student.

Guernsey is largely responsible for the existence of the 66 Winthrop St. Shelter, which opened last week without a city permit or compliance to many city zoning and health regulations. He sees the opening of the spot--just one block from four River Houses--as "stepping into a breach" to fill a need for shelter which the city has ignored.

The shelter is temporary, designed to provide the homeless of Harvard Square with a place to sleep indoors until the cold weather ends. It is scheduled to close on April 17. Conveniently, the city of Cambridge has decided not to take action against the shelter for 60 days, Guernsey says. He calls it "a nice compromise."

Guernsey says he saw the need for the shelter when he started working last fall as an intern for the Harvard Square Churches Meal Program--which serves needy patrons a hot meal at Christ church on Garden St. Required to do some supervised fieldwork for his ministerial program at the Divinity School, Guernsey elected to help people entering the program who needed other social services.

He accomplished this by sitting at the dinner table and talking to the people who came in. He listened to their problems, offered advice and, importantly, gave legal counsel on how their difficulties could be resolved.

An experienced lawyer who graduated from the University of Mississippi Law School in 1977, Guernsey is not registered to practice in Massachusetts but has used his legal skills to help the street people. He helped one woman get a needed pair of glasses. Another project was helping a woman receive her Social Security benefits, which she had been denied because she had refused to sign a form. The woman had been active politically in the '60s and would not sign the appropriate papers because, Guernsey says, she felt it gave Social Security, "carte blanche" to investigate her personal history. Citing the Privacy Act, Guernsey convinced the judge that she was correct and sincere.

This was not the first time that Guernsey had dealt with the intricacies of state and government bureaucracy. He spent his first two years after law school working for the State of Mississippi in a program designed to extract child support from recalcitrant fathers. Guernsey says, however, that "it turned out to become a collection agency [for the state], so I got out of it."

Guernsey then joined the North Mississippi Rural Legal Services, a law firm which was 95 percent Black, he says. "I was one of five white people in the firm." Guernsey says. They sent him to Grenada, a small, politically unstable island in the West Indies, for three years--a tenure that ended when he came to Harvard last September.

In Grenada, Guernsey was assigned to provide legal services for the Black community. This put him in the difficult position, he says, of having to earn the trust of the Blacks while facing the censure of the dominate white minority on the island. "It was the first time I had ever been alienated and ostracized by the white established community," Guernsey says.

Guernsey had always been sensitive to civil rights concerns. Dr. Martin Luther King's peace marches swept within two blocks of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. His father, who was president of the National Council of Juvenile and County Court Judges, was responsible for organizing all peace march participants under the age of 18.

His own awareness of social issues naturally extended to the present dilemma of the street people. "These people had specific needs that I had the capacity to meet," he observes.

Guernsey and Frederick Reisz, pastor of the church where the shelter is, worked together to make Guernsey's proposal of a shelter a reality. Reisz presented the idea before the church committee, which gave its permission to open the shelter Since then, the shelter has received donations of bedding, food, and time from the 40 to 60 people who have expressed interest in staffing the shelter.

"It's like Stewart is a magnet," said Constance A. Hammond, another first-year Divinity School student who has been working with Guernsey. "He's been a catalyst for a lot of activity. People were so glad they could give of their time."

In action at the shelter, Guernsey is easy-going, often talking and joking with the "clients." He treats them with respect, which they return. From the start, Guernsey involved street people in the organization of the shelter. They helped to make up its rules.

Along with his concern for the homeless, Guernsey also has a strong religious motivation. "The whole thrust of what I'm doing, not only here, is that doing it for your neighbor is doing it for God," Guernsey says.

Ralph M. Long, Jr. who sleeps at the shelter and also helps out by working with the staff members, explains Guernsey's special role this way: "Stewart is taking on something that I wouldn't take on. You take some guy doing this for 20 people, 20 different people from one night to the next, that takes something that not every man has--it takes a lot of heart. For that much respect he gives me, I give him all I can. If Stewart tells me there's a problem, I'd spend my time to fix it because he cared enough to say, 'Hey, lend me a hand."

'These people had specific needs that I had the capacity to meet'