Chris Gardner is a wealthy man now, but at one time, when he was the lone provider for his toddler son, he was hungry and homeless. They sometimes had a choice of finding the shelter of a seedy hotel room or eating, he said. He would choose eating.
That meant Gardner had to stay with his son in subway stations, ride trains, and sleep overnight either at the office where he was training to be a stock broker or in a locked stall of a public bathroom.
They stood in soup lines, accepted gifts of $5 from prostitutes, and managed to get a bed in a church shelter for homeless women and children.
With several changes to Gardner's best-selling memoir, The Pursuit of Happyness, to make it movie-worthy, Gardner's struggles during those few months in San Francisco were portrayed on the big screen by actor Will Smith.
On Nov. 17, Gardner will be at the Lexington Opera House as the keynote speaker for the Ball Homes Night of Hope, a fund-raiser for the Hope Center.
The Hope Center provides emergency shelter, food and clothing year-round to help the homeless: those with addiction problems and those with mental health issues, find and stay in homes. It provides addiction recovery programs for men and women, employment assistance, transitional housing, social services and a free health clinic. Each month, it provides more than 30,000 meals, 11,000 nights of lodging, health care services for 900 people, and 3,000 articles of clothing.
"The work they do is so important," Gardner said by phone recently. "We've seen the creation of the new homeless, who went to school, played by the rules, and then the world changed. The food pantries are seeing people come in who used to give food."
His talk — which will be during National Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week, Nov. 15 to 21 — will emphasize that people can be homeless without being hopeless, although, he said, he's not a "real big hope guy. I am a plan guy."
People have to be actively engaged in how their lives play out, he said. "Or you can quit, lie down and die."
I like the hope thing, though, so we agreed that hope coupled with a plan might be the best means of accomplishing goals.
Gardner's inspiration came from his mother, who managed to instill a sense of empowerment in him despite her being an abused spouse and jailed twice. "She saw to it that we didn't make the same mistakes," he said. "I still had the capacity to dream," despite being passed between relatives and foster homes as a child.
"The message I want to get across is that the cavalry is not coming," he said.
Gardner has written a second book, Start Where You Are: Life Lessons in Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, which was a New York Times best-seller last summer. It offers 44 life lessons, from his life and the lives of others, that encourage the reader to move forward.
Night of Hope also will feature Everett McCorvey, director of opera for the University of Kentucky School of Music, and a video of the Hope Center and its programs. After the event, Gardner will sign copies of his new book.
For the Hope Center, Gardner's appearance is especially noteworthy.
"This is our biggest fund-raiser," said Kim Livesay, Hope Center director of community relations. "This is the first time we've done anything like this."
Gardner was chosen because he has walked the walk, Livesay said.
"He has been a homeless person, and he believes homelessness is not the end of the story," she said.
Tickets for the event, which starts at 6:45 p.m., are $15, $25, or $50. They're available at Joseph-Beth Booksellers and at the Hope Center. Go to www.hopectr.org, call (859)252-7881 or buy them at the door.
"We have sponsors who cover the cost of the event," Livesay said, "so every penny from the sale of tickets goes to cover the programs at the Hope Center."
