1983 | Series got action to ease plight of homeless
Jimmy Korf was the face of "Chicago's New Homeless" -- the title of a 1983 Sun-Times series by reporter Dirk Johnson that exposed a shortage of city-sponsored shelters and the dehumanizing treatment of people in some shelters.
Johnson found Korf wandering aimlessly along Lake Shore Drive, his skin black with grime, his hair crawling with bugs. "I lost my way," he whispered to Johnson. "I was going to the mission. But I lost my way."
Korf didn't know his own age. He didn't know the day or the month. He was, as Johnson reported, one of the deeply mentally ill men and women who made up perhaps a third of Chicago's 20,000 homeless drifters.
Johnson took Korf to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where Korf was admitted to the hospital's emergency housing unit for for former psychiatric patients.
As a result of Johnson's series, the city significantly expanded the number of beds in shelters for the homeless, and policies were instituted to protect against mistreatment of people using shelters.
Poignantly, Johnson's reporting led to the reunion of Jimmy Korf and his long-lost father, a successful architect. The father, who for years had been searching for his son, found the young man through the Sun-Times.
He took a sabbatical from his architecture work to rent a home for several months in the quiet of the Wisconsin north woods, so father and son could become reacquainted and the young man could get the therapy he needed.