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TRAVERSE CITY RECORD-EAGLE NOVEMBER 24, 2005
Locals offers Katrina family shelter from the storm
BY VINCENT HANCOCK
Special to the Record-Eagle
“Sire, the night is darker now, and the wind blows stronger,
Fails my heart, I know not how; I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, my good page, tread now in them boldly,
You shall find the winter’s rage freeze your blood less coldly.”
In the old carol “Good King Wenceslas,” a royal aide laments to the King that the fierce weather is too difficult to bear. Yet Wenceslas urges him to push ahead and follow his lead, so that they might deliver food and fuel to a man in dire straits. Far from his throne, the King has little wealth to spread, but still he succeeds in helping a fellow human meet basic needs.
This year, a Traverse City neighborhood is settling down for the season with an entire family that sought refuge from severe weather. Amy Jones and her fiance Andy Alcala fled north after Hurricane Katrina flooded their New Orleans home. With their young son, Ridge, and the family’s Great Dane in tow, the couple needed immediate shelter. It had to be long-term, since Amy was due to give birth to a second child in a matter of weeks.
After learning of the hurricane’s destruction, longtime Fife Lake residents Bob and Stephanie Reamer, like many, asked themselves how they might best help. They found they possessed, again, the Silver Lake-area house they owned decades earlier. As former occupants and the owners of the family business, VeriTech Appraisal, the Reamers knew the house’s value. But the house sat vacant while it was on the market. Suddenly, the Reamers both realized what they could offer.
“We both said, ‘I can’t believe you thought of that,’” Bob Reamer recalled. “We decided that we would carry the mortgage for a year. ”If a Gulf Coast family could pay the utilities, a home —free of charge — was waiting. Jones and Alcala, meanwhile, struggled to decide where to settle with their few possessions. “We had what we could fit in our vehicles,” Jones said.
Her maternity schedule washed away when her employer’s medical office was flooded and re-opened too far away. Alcala, only a few semesters shy of his degree in business management, had to abandon his plans when the college flooded. With the encouragement of Jones’s father, living in Kingsley, the couple came to northern Michigan. Yet state agencies couldn’t find an apartment that accepted pets, let alone a large dog. One agency representative remembered a local offer, however. “She said, ‘I know someone who may be able to help you, and he has dogs, too,” Jones recalled. Within days, the two couples met and the Reamers quickly invited Jones and Alcala to stay at the house.
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