The man was probably in his 50s, but his lined face and matted hair made him look older. He was standing in a small plaza across from Columbus Hospital in Lincoln Park one recent weekday afternoon. The hat he wore read, “I’m not completely worthless. I can always serve as a bad example.”
The weather was cold enough that the small cement drinking fountain in the middle of the plaza had been turned off for the season. Locust and hickory leaves filled the basin.
“That’s not a bum,” said Oldershaw. “That’s one of our parishioners.” Oldershaw refused to evict Northcutt, whom he knew only as Jim, although he did convince Northcutt to slide his baskets underneath the pew.
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Northcutt’s home consisted of the bench he sat on and his baskets, which held old newspapers, magazines, two German prayer books, a notebook, and two plastic bottles–one to hold water and a second into which he urinated. In the winter Oldershaw would leave the west door to Saint Clement’s open, but otherwise Northcutt lived exclusively on his corner bench.
Northcutt asked for neither food nor money. If someone offered him money he spurned it, though Kathy Burke, a Saint Clement’s parishioner who took an interest in Jim, says that if you left him something to eat he would consume it. Mostly, she says, Northcutt combed Dumpsters for food.
On the night of July 15, 1986, someone set fire to Northcutt’s bench. When the neighbors found him in the morning, Northcutt was sitting on the remains of the bench and his carts were gone. Northcutt’s arm and shoulder were seared, though not severely. The police took him to the hospital, but not before he, weeping, told Burke, “They don’t want me around anymore. I’m going to have to go away.”
Brainy and motivated, Jim skipped straight from sixth grade to high school at Covington Latin School, a Catholic facility for bright youngsters. Following high school Jim went to the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, with majors in philosophy and economics. He also developed a proficiency in French and Greek.
