Elfriede Flanery This is Me

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1. 1. Rocky Mountain News: Columnists

   www.insidedenver.com/drmn/news - [Cached]

   Published on: 12/22/2001   Last Visited: 12/22/2001

   Elfriede Flanery was hanging a towel to dry outside her room at the dingy Colfax Avenue motel. She greeted me sweetly, hesitating a few moments before inviting me inside.
   
   Her explanation was on target. The place was a hole. Just a double bed that nearly filled the room, two 1950s-era chairs, a dresser and an old TV. On the bathroom door hung two dresses and a sweater, the only clothing -- other than what she has on -- she was allowed to retrieve.
   
   "This is the only place that would take me," Elfriede Flanery, 66, said softly. "I still do not know, to this day, exactly how they took my home."
   
   It was a large, gated, five-bedroom place in south Denver she and her late husband, Brian, purchased 35 years ago. They reared six children there.
   
   And it was shortly before Brian died three years ago that they took out the loan, a second mortgage, for the improvements and glassed-in patio and solarium that led to Elfriede Flanery's eviction and current stay in the $25-a-night motel.
   
   "Don't make me sound senile or ignorant," she pleads. She just never read the loan's fine print closely enough, she figures.
   ...
   It was two weeks ago the sheriff's deputies came with an eviction notice and 12 men in a big truck to move Elfriede Flanery out of her house.
   
   She wonders what Brian would think. "My gunnery sergeant," she calls him. He was a Marine lifer, served 45 years in the corps, both active and in the reserve. He was 53 and retired from active duty only three months when he was recalled in 1991 to serve in the Persian Gulf War.
   
   He married her two weeks after they met in 1957 in Bamberg, Germany, where he served in the Marine Corps band. They moved into the South Ash Street house in 1960.
   
   She tried to refinance it a year ago, when the first notice arrived. It couldn't be done, not with the $60,000 lien on it. She begged a judge. There was little he could do.
   
   The lienholder "wouldn't budge," she said. "They said if I paid them $260,000 I could stay. I think they just wanted my house."
   
   The men in the truck put all of her belongings in the back yard, where they still sit. "When you live somewhere 34 years, it's hard knowing what to grab when you've got only a couple hours to get out," Elfriede Flanery said.
   
   Her children are in no financial position to take her in or help finance a new place, she says. She's tried to find an apartment. They all want two months' rent and a big security deposit, none of which she has.
   
   A nurse for 17 years at Swedish Medical Center, she is trying to find work. Veterans Affairs, too, is seeking somewhere for her to live, she says. "It takes time with the government."
   
   Instead, it gave her the $25-a-night vouchers.
   
   "My gunnery sergeant would always say, right before he died, 'I hope you'll be OK, that nothing will happen.' "
   
   She turns a slow, full circle in the tiny room, her arms extended, palms up.
   
   "Now look," Elfriede Flanery says, bringing her hands below her chin as if praying, softly clapping them once and looking away.
   
   Bill Johnson's column appears Saturday, Wednesday and Friday. wkjohnson1@msn.com or (303) 892-2763.
   
   December 22, 2001
   
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