The fading blue wall is covered in Ira Terrell’s love letters.
Dozens are stuck there. He looks at his homage and smiles. “I love the Peachtree,” he says, pointing to one of the “letters” — the runners bibs he has collected over the years.
Once a homeless alcoholic, the 64-year-old has a different kind of appreciation for the world’s largest 10K race.
He has used the race, and running in general, as a way to regain control of his life.
Terrell plans to take part in this year’s The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race, on the Fourth of July, then hang yet another number on the wall.
“It reminds me of people I knew last year, that aren’t with me this year,” he said. “They’ve gone on.”
He’s still here, he said, because he grew tired of living on the streets.
Running has helped him prolong a life regained. Something else — the Open Door Community — gave him a reason to live.
Terrell grew up in Reynolds in Middle Georgia. His father was a farmer: hogs, chickens, sugar cane. His father didn’t drink. Didn’t smoke. He worked.
“Just an ordinary man,” Terrell said.
His mother kept the house, looking after six daughters and Ira, the baby of the family.
Terrell dropped out of school and worked in the fields. He took his first drink — corn liquor, made by his uncle — when he was 21. He thought it was the thing to do.
“My dad should have knocked it out of my hand,” he said. Instead, his father just looked at him and shook his head.
Terrell later decided to leave home. He was on his way to Trenton, N.J., to move in with a sister when he stopped to see some cousins in Atlanta.
He never left the city, living with the family for a dozen years. He eventually moved out and got a job with H.J. Russell & Company as a maintenance man. After about 10 years of employment — the years are hazy — he was caught drinking on the job and was fired. “I’m kind of glad they caught me,” he said.
He worked in a labor pool for a couple of years. They asked him to continue working as supervisor in California, but he didn’t want to leave the city.
However, he couldn’t find work. Eighteen months later, his money ran out.
He moved to the streets, living wherever he could find shelter: abandoned cars, under bridges, in abandoned buildings. He spent a year and a half as one of the forgotten, scraping up money for gin and beer. He would eat breakfast at what he calls a “grits line” near Grady Memorial Hospital.
If you arrived early to help unload supplies, there was a chance those who were making breakfast would offer a place to sleep indoors for one night, with the possibility of a shower. But you couldn’t drink. So Terrell never really considered it.
Thirty years of drinking was too strong of an anchor to cut loose.
One night, while sleeping on cold concrete in the back of a building near the state Capitol, Terrell decided “he wasn’t going to be around much longer” if he continued. He marched through the dark to the grits line and waited on the truck to show up with the supplies. He helped bring in the food.
He finally learned the name of the shelter that had been feeding him and 300 others for many mornings: Open Door Community, a residential organization that seeks to help the homeless, the sick and downtrodden.
“It saved my life,” he said.
The Open Door Community home is a few blocks from Piedmont Park, where more than 50,000 will gather on the Fourth of July to celebrate one of Atlanta’s annual traditions: completing the Peachtree Road Race. Terrell spent his first night there in 1991. “That bed felt so good,” he said.
He woke up the next morning and one of the helpers asked him if he was ready to return to the streets. “I said ‘No, I’m here,’’’ he said. “I’ve been here ever since.”
But he couldn’t stop drinking, hiding his habit from the other residents. One day, sitting at the dinner table, another resident asked him if had been drinking.
“I couldn’t lie to him,” Terrell said.
Open Door arranged for daily visits to an outpatient treatment facility.
Five years of therapy weren’t enough. He still had “the taste.”
He got on his bed one cold winter night, on his knees, and prayed for God to take the taste from him. It didn’t leave.
He kept praying, every night for a month. At 3 a.m. one day he woke in a cold sweat. “Like a bucket of water,” he said.
He hasn’t had another drink since. It was 1999. “It felt so good,” he said. “The Lord took the taste from me.”
His mind mostly clear Terrell found himself with a lot of free time.
When his chores were done at Open Door — each resident participates in one of several activities each day to help the house run smoothly or to aid in their humanitarian efforts — Terrell would go walking on Freedom Parkway for an hour each day. Joan DeWitt, a volunteer at Open Door, would pass him each day as she jogged.
“I would see her huffing and puffing,” he said. “I didn’t know why she was doing that.”
Never an athlete but wanting a challenge, Terrell figured he would try running. Showing his inexperience, he grabbed a cigarette, lit it and took off. His screaming lungs forced him to stop.
“I said, ‘Ira, you’ve got to do one of two things: either quit smoking or running,’” he said.
He decided he wanted to run.
He met with DeWitt, who began telling him how he needed to train if he wanted to run with her. Terrell didn’t like being told what to do. He decided that the next morning he would tell DeWitt where she could put her advice.
Instead, when they met the next day, he said, “Joan, let’s go.”
The teaching was simple: Run from this telephone pole to the next. Telephone poles became half-miles. Half-miles became miles. Soon, after he made the 30 gallons of coffee every morning that Open Door would take to the homeless, he was calling DeWitt. “Let’s go running,” he would say.
She would often still be asleep, but would get up and they would meet and go run. Soon, Terrell was outrunning DeWitt.
A few months sober, Terrell ran his first Peachtree in 1999. Terrell doesn’t remember his time, but he loved the feeling. He entered more races, with dozens of medals hanging off the closet door in his room.
“It’s really helped me,” he said. “Like when I have problems thinking about anything that’s worrying me.”
In a week, another love letter will go up on the blue wall at his room at the Open Door Community, in the place that gave him his life back from the sport that is helping him live that life.
He will never leave his home.
“I’ll be here until they put me down,” he said.
He hopes to keep running the Peachtree.
“That’s my heart,” he said.
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About Open Door
To learn more about Open Door Community, go to www.opendoorcommunity.org. If you would like to help the Open Door Community, contact Sarah Humphrey at odcvolunteer@bellsouth.net or 770-246-7618.
