Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

You wouldn't guess that, looking at him today. "I lived in a rooming house in Corona and hung out doing drugs. Going nowhere."

He is an immigrant who arrived here from Mexico City more than a decade ago. The land of opportunity all right, but Enriques admits he was dazzled by the bright lights and the "Colombian marching powder."

I came across the 38-year-old Enriques after marching up Fifth Avenue in the St. Patrick's Day parade. It was a day for the Irish to celebrate and the skies were bluer than Frank Sinatra's eyes, and the sun beamed benevolently on marchers and viewers alike.

Enriques wasn't marching, though. He was working for an outfit he says "saved my life." It's called Ready, Willing & Able, and is run by George and Harriet McDonald, a dynamic husband-and-wife team who married 10 years ago after meeting at a funeral in St. Agnes for April Savino, a homeless teenager who shot herself on the steps of the midtown Manhattan church.

"George gave the eulogy," says Harriet, who was a Hollywood screenwriter at the time and who had met April and wanted to adopt her and take her to live in Beverly Hills.

"I thought he was a priest," says Harriet. "What did I know? I'm Jewish, he's Catholic. I was crying and he rubbed my shoulders."

Love bloomed and the couple was married in August of 1988. Now they run one of the most successful homeless advocacy outfits in the country. On Thursday, they will graduate 90 formerly homeless men from the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, a prestigious Park Avenue church.

It is one more encouraging sign that the dreaded NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) syndrome is fading. Groups like Ready, Willing & Able, in their cheery blue uniforms, and the BIDs (Business Improvement Districts), in their red uniforms, have put a new face on the formerly dreaded homeless who keep the residential and commercial areas free of trash.

I am proud to say that I "discovered" McDonald long before he started his nonprofit work and job-skills training program. I wrote then that McDonald was a comer even though he lived in an Upper East Side room so small that, as the saying goes, you had to step into the hallway to change your clothes.

McDonald was interested in running for political office and ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice and got enough votes to think he had a political future but not enough to win the election, which went to Andrew Stein.

The homeless were, in the 1980s, a huge problem for the city. They were everywhere, holding paper cups as they begged, sleeping in the subways and harassing subway commuters by standing at the subway step entrances. Attempts to house them in the city's armories were, and are, a failure. Worse, the communities where they were sent resented their presence.

So it is somewhat of a miracle, to use an overworked word, that communities like the wealthy Upper East Side accept the once-homeless men who clean the streets outside the homes where the Masters of the Universe live.

"We have 8,000 individual sponsors," says Harriet McDonald, who has made the plight of the homeless a part of a personal crusade that is shared by her husband, the founder and president of Ready, Willing & Able. Harriet is director of development.

And here is Walter Enriques, formerly homeless, who says he earns $5.50 an hour, working an eight-hour day from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Out of that he pays $65 a week rent and is required by the group to save another $30 weekly in a savings account. "I have $1,400 in my account," he says with a smile. "It's the first time in my life I have saved money. I hope to get married in a few months and then start a family."

"Her name is Latisha," says Enriques, who says he met her working at another job weekends at a restaurant.

He says he grew up in a family in Mexico that included 12 brothers and a sister. He moved to Queens after arriving in the city and "I was so lonely that drugs and drink became my only friends."

When he leaves his work he will be given $1,000 by Ready, Willing & Able to help him get his life restarted along a drug-free path. It is a simple idea. Work will restore your self-esteem. It is not for everyone, but for those who choose it, it is a godsend.

An hour earlier, I had gotten a big hug and a "God Bless" from Frank Dowd, a former railroad cop whose job each St. Patrick's Day is to keep Cardinal John O'Connor safe as the prelate greets the marchers.

Dowd got a bum rap from the Metro North police a few years ago. They fired him and later reinstated him after realizing they had made a mistake. It was George McDonald, who had met Dowd inside the Grand Central Terminal where Dowd worked, who led the effort to restore Dowd's dignity and his reputation. I am happy to say that I was a part of that effort and I have become a good friend of the Dowd family and a visitor to their home in Far Rockaway.

George McDonald has a knack for making friends of the poor and the powerful. One close political ally is Andrew Cuomo, head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who provides grants to McDonald's visionary program.

"We are going national," says Harriet, who is nursing her flu-ridden husband the day we speak. "We're opening a place in Jersey City and we have one in Washington, D.C. We are also planning to open in Salt Lake City."