Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
The only clues are an old “TV Repair” sign and the chatter seeping through the boarded-up wall. I knock, tentatively, on the plywood and enter Love the Lou’s morning staff meeting.
After thanking an intern for “jumping right in, even cleaning up blood on the sidewalk,” founder Lucas Rouggly says junior high kids from Southern Illinois are coming today to volunteer. “Figure out how you are going to lead them,” he tells a quiet, broad-shouldered young man named Carlandis Sampa, who looks startled: “Me? What about Antonio?”
“He’s your wingman, so maybe practice on Conway.”
Sampa gathers himself. “I know what I’ll do.”
“But maybe practice,” Rouggly says firmly. He’s throwing every opportunity at these kids to develop leadership skills. He wants their help next year with the younger kids.
This all started six years ago as an impulse. A young pastor, Rouggly didn’t want to preach from afar about the brokenness of the city. So he, his wife, and their four kids moved into a century-old house on Enright Avenue.
A country boy from Jackson, Missouri, he paid a student’s attention to his new neighborhood, especially its kids: “Parents in the county are busy taking their kids everywhere, but kids in the city are just wandering around looking for something to do. They get kicked out during the summer, because if they stay home they’ll eat all the food. And if you’re a kid wandering around North City, bad stuff is going to find you.”
So he set up a youth program. And when he asked his first group what they wanted to pray for, one boy said, “I want to live till I’m 21.” The others nodded hard. Rouggly blinked, realized that they meant it, and scaled back his goals: “Nobody dies, nobody goes to jail, we finish the program.”
Since then, he’s heard a lot of “f—k yous” from kids who automatically resist authority. “In the movies, kids like this are diamonds in the rough just waiting to be discovered,” he told me a few weeks earlier, the first time we met. “A lot of our kids, their older brothers are either dead or in jail. The kid who just wanted to live to 21 had been living in his mom’s car for a year.”
“Their whole minds get stuck,” added Lenny Barber, the youth program manager. “People will come in and say, ‘You have to get them thinking five years down the road.’ We’re trying to get them to think five hours down the road.”
“And not blow the money on hot Cheetos,” Rouggly inserted. “What you would think is everyday thinking doesn’t register. But once they do get it, they are some of the most mature—I’m not saying they’re not still boneheaded, but they can do anything, because they have overcome so much.”
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Now, at the staff meeting, he announces that a boy who was living in chaos, quick to fight and earning F’s at Vashon High School, has brought up his grades enough to get accepted into a Boys Hope Girls Hope program. He’ll live in a small boardinghouse in Richmond Heights, with total support and tutoring and structure, while he attends Maplewood Richmond Heights High School.
“He was talking about it,” Sampa volunteers. “He was so excited, he was ready to leave already.”
Rouggly and a financial planner from his church will meet with the owner of Pimped Out Pickles (Volcano, Peppermint, Hot Sweet Garlic…) later this morning. “The North Side is doing two things right,” Rouggly announces. “Architecture and pickles.”
Deep down, he kind of expected some other church members to join him. He waited, waited some more, and then spun the disappointment: He has an entire flock of talented, resourceful people willing to do just about anything else to help. Upstairs, a church member is fixing an air conditioner in the low-rent apartments they’re rehabbing for refugees, runaways, anybody who needs a place to stay.
Pimped Out Pickles may open a sandwich shop on the main floor—and replace liquor stores and gas stations as a community gathering spot. “We’re talking pickles, but there’s so much more,” he says. His version of community development is “creating spaces where love drives out fear, takes light and just shoves out darkness.”
Meanwhile, Carlandis Sampa is sprawled on a sagging couch, waiting for the junior high kids. He plans to “just show them this neighborhood, talk about the differences between this and where they live. There’s more crime, more violence, more murder. They say to keep it PG-13, but I don’t see how you can.”
When I tell Sampa that Rouggly praised his public speaking to a previous group, he ducks his head: “I was nervous. I don’t know where this came from. You can ask Lenny—I was quiet at first.”
A natural at football, he’s gotten letters from several universities, but he’s realized that’s not an end game. He’s planning a career in video game design, with a trade learned on the side—tinting car windows, probably—so he has something to fall back on.
“Which kid was it who just wanted to live to 21?” I ask Rouggly as I leave.
He grins. “That was Carlandis.”
