Homeless preacher says spirit moves her
Posted on 12/05/2002 3:08:18 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Homeless preacher says spirit moves her
Argyle city officials are planning her exodus
12/05/2002
ARGYLE - It is possible, Janet Savage says, to see God in the long yellow light of a sunset, to hear his voice above the chatter of a material world, to feel his warmth on a frigid winter night, sleeping outside on a mattress that smells like an old shoe.
"This life requires a spiritual commitment," she said recently, leaning forward in a patio chair outside an abandoned bank building in Argyle, where she lives. "But my God is able. He is good. And he is well-pleased with my life."
Argyle city officials are not.
The 55-year-old street preacher must either move into a home or move along. If she doesn't, the owner of the land where she's living - a 96-year-old city patriarch - could be fined $2,000 a day.
JIM MAHONEY / DMN Janet Savage, who has lived for four years outside an abandoned bank building with the permission of its 96-year-old owner, says God "is well-pleased" with her life. |
The tab technically started last month, according to Argyle City Administrator Michael Webb, but the city has decided not to go after the money if Ms. Savage makes good on her promise to leave by Dec. 30.
Ms. Savage has lived homeless in Argyle for five years. First she slept behind the post office, and later she set up camp in an open field near a church.
When the landowner ran her off, Otha Mullens told Ms. Savage she could live alongside his bank building at the corner of FM377 and Hickory Street, two doors from the Police Department.
She has been there nearly four years, with the tacit approval of the town's police and politicians.
But earlier this year, Mr. Webb said, city officials decided it was time to clean up and enforce its zoning laws.
Code enforcement officers forced landowners to mow waist-high weeds, carry off old, rusting appliances, and in one case, clean up a manure pile. Mr. Mullens was told to evict Ms. Savage.
It is illegal for Ms. Savage to live alongside the bank, Mr. Webb said, because it is commercial property, not residential. There are no vagrancy laws in Argyle, a city of 2,500.
"She's welcome to live in Argyle," he said. "She just has to move into an appropriate home in a residential area."
Ms. Savage says she will go, not because of pressure from the city, but because it is God's will that she spare the landowner the expense and trouble of a fight with the city. What she will do and where she will go remain in question.
"It's time for me to go, God has revealed that to me," she said, "so, as always, I will be obedient."
Concern and conflict
Many people in Argyle say city officials are being too harsh.
They say the homeless woman nicknamed "Miss Argyle" symbolizes the town's charm and charitable spirit.
JIM MAHONEY / DMN Janet Savage sweeps the sidewalk next to the old Argyle State Bank building. |
Karyl Smith blames pliant politicians and new residents who are concerned about their real estate values. Argyle, she said, has become a rural destination for people commuting to Dallas and Fort Worth.
"I know it's a really, really strange situation, but Janet is good for Argyle," said Ms. Smith, who frequently invites Ms. Savage into her home to do laundry and bathe. "She's extremely intelligent, and she has nothing but good in her heart for people."
But other Argyle residents say Ms. Savage is running a game, playing pure and pious as a way to live off the generosity of others.
Nina Ray, who does nails at a beauty salon near Ms. Savage's streetside camp, dismissed the controversy with a snort of contempt.
"She's taking advantage of people, that's all there is to it," said Ms. Ray, polishing a customer's fingernails in irritated bursts. "If these good-hearted people want to help somebody, they should find a woman with two kids whose husband just left her. That's not homelessness over there, that's sorry-ness."
Ms. Savage does not panhandle or pester. She doesn't need to.
A local beauty salon cuts her hair for free and recently dyed it the color of raspberry sorbet. She eats pie, gratis, at Evelyn's Café, and every couple of weeks, someone walks up and puts money in her hand. Once, she said, a woman gave her $200.
One evening, a woman stepped out of a silver Buick, walked across the street and handed Ms. Savage a dinner salad topped with oil and ground pepper.
She and Ms. Savage held hands, bowed their heads and prayed alongside the road.
"God has provided these people to make provisions for me," Ms. Savage said later. "That's not my job. My job is to minister to broken spirits."
Residents say that when Ms. Savage first showed up in Argyle, her hair was scraggly, she had sores up and down her arms, and a ripped backpack slung over a bony shoulder. She told people God revealed to her in a dream that she would marry former Argyle television evangelist Mike Murdock and join his ministry.
But five years later, Mr. Murdock has moved his offices to Denton. Mr. Murdock did not return phone calls made to his Denton office or a North Carolina church where he was preaching recently.
And Ms. Savage has settled into what she calls a comfortable routine.
The sounds of traffic wake her each morning about 7:30 in a goose-down sleeping bag on a twin mattress. She changes clothes under layers of tarps and blankets suspended from an awning of the bank building.
Next, she feeds her mongrel gray dog (Puppy Boy) and longhaired yellow cat (Cutey), puts on makeup and earrings, and shakes vitamins into her hand - ginseng, ginkgo and herbal estrogen. She said a friend arrives about 8 most mornings with cappuccino.
She has permission from a nearby homeowner to use an outhouse toilet.
"I have everything I need right here," Ms. Savage said. "The only thing I miss is a bathtub."
Otha Mullens is almost blind and his knees are shot, but after nearly a century on this Earth, he says his sense of right and wrong is stronger than ever.
JIM MAHONEY / DMN Otha Mullens, 96, allows Janet Savage to camp on his property. |
"That woman ain't bothering nobody down there, and I ain't about to go around bothering her," said Mr. Mullens, who gave Ms. Savage permission to live alongside his bank building. "I try to live right and treat people right. ... If I get in trouble, well, I'm 96 years old; they don't scare me."
A notarized letter is on file at City Hall telling Ms. Savage to leave the land by noon Dec. 30 or face arrest for trespassing.
Police Chief William Tackett said he doesn't think it will come to that. He said Ms. Savage is smart and basically harmless. "I think she knows she's out of options."
Predictable, then ...
Relatives say the trajectory of Ms. Savage's life followed a predictable line for a studious girl raised in a small Maine town. She earned her registered nursing credential after high school and joined the Navy Nurse Corps.
At 33, she gave birth to a daughter and, soon after, moved to Florida, where she took a job at a hospital and saved money for a place of her own.
"That girl never had a bit of trouble," said her father, Bob Savage, 81, at his home in Palmetto, Fla. "She had just bought a new house, she had a good job and she seemed happy. Then she joined that church and just went off her rocker."
Argyle officials said Ms. Savage is one of as many eight women who appeared in town during the '90s with dreams of marrying Mr. Murdock.
Ms. Savage became so obsessed with Mr. Murdock, relatives say, she left her 15-year-old daughter with her sister and started following the traveling preacher from church to church across the South.
Her 1987 Plymouth broke down in Alabama. She hitchhiked to Argyle.
Ms. Savage has never held her 3-year-old grandson, but he smiles back from a picture taped to a poster board outside the old church in Argyle. She refuses to discuss her family, except to say, "They are not my focus now."
Mr. Savage said he was shocked when he visited his daughter two years ago. He said he'll never forget turning from FM377 onto Hickory Street, and parking next to his daughter's roadside shelter.
"I feel terrible about it," Mr. Savage said. "She's my daughter and she has a grandson, and she's been living like that for years. Lord, we've tried to help her, a lot of people have. I just don't know what's going to happen to her."
E-mail sfarwell@dallasnews.com
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