Faces of Stamford: Sidney Elmore, Recovered

Drugs, Prayer & August 28, 1988

Sidney Elmore wakes up every morning before his 7 a.m. shift at Stop & Shop and prays. 25 years ago, you might have found him on the street, coming down from whatever drug he'd recently consumed and looking to score his next fix, but these days, he prays. 

Elmore goes in to Stop & Shop and works his four-hour shift until 11 a.m., then heads home for a nap prior to his 4 p.m. shift at The Pacific House Shelter for the Homeless. He does this five days a week. Every weekend, he heads to his third job at the Viewpoint Recovery Program on Richmond Hill Avenue as a monitor. 

Elmore calls his job at Stop & Shop a "miracle," and seeing how far he's come in his 62 years, it seems appropriate. His other two jobs, Elmore just sees as giving back a little hope to men who wear the shoes in which he used to find himself. Viewpoint gave Elmore his feet back on the ground, Pacific House gave him a roof over his head. 

"August 28, 1988. That was the day I walked into that treatment program," Elmore said. "I've been working there ever since. I've been working at the shelter for 17 years. That was it for me. I want to say I ended up [excessively drinking and using drugs] because of my wife's death, but that'd just be looking for excuses. I was drinking and drugging well before then."

Death & the KKK

Elmore's wife, Debra, died when she was 26 years old, a drowning accident in a South Carolina lake near where Elmore grew up. His life is full of tragedy, and yet everything has meaning to him, a journey he's traveled to arrive at here he is today. 

Growing up in Charleston in the 1940s, he remembers his father hiding his mother and their eight children sometimes under beds, sometimes in the closet where she would huddle them under her skirt, as the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on their front lawn. 

"She'd hide us and there was no way they could get to us," Elmore recalled in a matter-of-fact way. "My parents had eight of us. My father couldn't read or write his name, but he earned 23 acres of farming land through sharecropping."

One of Elmore's brother's died, and while he doesn't mention why, he approaches the topic again in a very straight-forward, factual way. He laments it as a simple piece of information that ties into his own story—and his own son's death, without self-pity, but with acceptance and subdued strength. 

"My brother died, one out of eight," Elmore said. "I had two boys and I couldn't take care of them both."

Sons

Elmore had two boys with his wife: Dwann, who was 7 years old when Debra died, and Vamond, who was 2 at the time. Dwann passed away four years ago in prison from health complications—complications which Elmore said arose from his son being given the wrong medicine after falling ill. He doesn't necessarily look to place blame on the prison, but feels like the way Dwann died was unfair at least in the method of his death. 

"He was 39 years old, he'd been in the Marines. And he was just like me," Elmore said. "I had been working to try and reestablish a relationship with them. They blamed me for a lot of the ways their lives turned out. I had been working on trying to get them back into my life and his death took me for a real loop. 

"I had to go to AA meetings a couple times a month after that," he continued. "It was the closest thing I had to a relapse. There was a lot of anger. If I found out he'd been shot, I think that would've been easier to handle, even. Guys living like that, bad stuff happens sometimes. He was living fast like I had, but I feel like he got cheated."

Peace of Mind

After working through his recovery program, Elmore got a job at Macy's. It was a requirement for potential employees to have completed six months of the program, and when he had, he couldn't believe anyone would give him a job, let alone a department store. 

"I'd had quite a few good jobs, jobs working alongside college graduates. But I couldn't keep one for long, and even my family gave up on me. I gave up on myself," he said. "Now here was this guy who was going to give me a job, even with my record of stealing and being a thief and everything for 30 years so I could support my habit, and he gave me a job because I was honest about my past. God does bestow miracles."

Elmore's previous life includes three instances of overdosing, being shot and being stabbed, once causing an infection in the wound that brought him to within 24 hours of dying. He didn't notice because the cocaine numbed the pain. Now, he has a three-bedroom apartment, essential, he said, so he could have a room for each of his boys. He'd lived in Stamford for 15 years, but moved back to Norwalk seven years ago to be closer to the family he has in the area, including two sisters. Family is what is important to Elmore these days. Family and giving back. 

"It took me a long time to get any of that trust back," he said. "And working at the shelter has been a tremendous blessing. There's a lot of gratitude in these guys, and it's something I can relate to. I'm 62 and healthy considering everything I've done, and if I ever think about not doing something I'm supposed to be doing, I think about how I could easily be in that position again. I don't have to be out on the streets no more. I realized I can go to work and then come home."

That consideration gives Elmore drive. 

"I wanted to die before," he said. "But that's the easy way out. I thought there were people that were meant to go to heaven and I was just one of the ones meant to go to hell. Now I want to live. And I want to spent the rest of my little life working for God and doing the right thing. It's been a great journey. I've gotten peace-of-mind. You can't put a price on that."