On a dirt road in Pembroke Township, Ill., in the rusted trailer she calls home, 67-year-old Tamar Banks uses bricks and old tires to hold the roof on, heats with oil lamps and can’t even afford electricity. Her bathroom is a hole in the ground in the backyard. Accustomed to living alone, Banks, whose only source of income is her monthly $532 Social Security check, is at first suspicious when a slight man in wire-rim glasses, accompanied by three volunteers, pulls his truck into her dirt driveway. But when she realizes he has come to deliver a large box filled with blankets, food, toothpaste and shampoo, her demeanor softens. “Nobody has tried to help me before,” she tells her benefactor, Chicago businessman Sal Dimiceli. “I thank you all very much.”
Incredibly, the plight of Tamar Banks is hardly a rarity among the 3,300 residents of Pembroke Township, 65 miles south and a world away from Chicago. The single small commercial district within the township, originally settled in the 1950s by former farmworkers who had migrated from the South, has now all but disappeared. The 4-Way Deli is the only store in the town, which has no supermarket, bank or restaurant. For those things, townspeople, many of whom are poor, black and without cars, must take the one available daily bus to Kankakee, which is 20 miles to the west. There is no natural-gas line in Pembroke Township; residents heat their homes with bottled gas, coal or firewood. Some still do not have running water and carry it in buckets drawn from wells or pumped by hand. And in the Pembroke Elementary School District, nearly all 742 children qualify for free daily breakfast and lunch. “On windy, snowy days, when all the other schools in the area are closed, I try to keep mine open,” says superintendent Billy Mitchell, 58. “I’ll never forget the day I closed them and a little girl walked to school and said, ‘Dr. Mitchell, if you’re closed, what am I going to eat?’” In short, says Genova Singleton, 47, a township trustee, “poverty is a fact of life here in Pembroke Township. This is a forgotten land.”
Forgotten, that is, save for the kindnesses of one man - Sal Dimiceli. Over the past 11 years he has donated $1.5 million in goods, services and cash to the people of Pembroke Township, where this year alone he has delivered 175,000 lbs. Of food, 35,000 disposable diapers, 25,000 rolls of toilet paper, 8,000 tubes of toothpaste, 7,500 pairs of shoes and 400 coats. In addition he has spent some $156,000 on home repairs and nearly $21,000 for residents’ overdue heating and electricity bills.
This explosion of generosity was inspired one day in the fall of 1989 when Dimiceli happened to take a shortcut on the way home to Chicago from a business trip. Driving past the desolate cluster of shotgun shacks and dilapidated mobile homes at the heart of Pembroke Township, he wondered why they were all abandoned. “Then,” he recalls, “I saw a pair of eyes peering back at me, and I realized there were people living inside.” Stunned, Dimiceli returned the next day and asked a local Baptist minister how many of the people needed help. The pastor’s reply: “All of them.”
That day, back in the suburban home that he shares now with his wife, Corinne, 40, and their four children, Dimiceli decided to help. Says Corinne: “Sal always had a big heart. This was something he had to do. He couldn’t turn his back on those people.” At first he and some friends made occasional visits to Pembroke with trucks full of gifts and supplies. Soon “word spread like wildfire that we were in town,” says Dimiceli. “We would drive through and people would be standing outside their houses waiting for us to come.” By 1989 Dimiceli founded the nonprofit organization, The Time Is Now. “I was so upset seeing children and the elderly freezing and going hungry,” he explains, “That I said, ‘The time is now to do something.’”
Still, Dimiceli’s arrival aroused some suspicion. “When Sal first came out here, people wanted to know why this white man was so interested in us,” says Laura Ann Harrison, 60, a lifelong resident. She manages the Pembroke Food Pantry, which gives away donated food and was founded a decade ago by Dimiceli. Others are concerned that his charity, no matter how well-intentioned, might create a dependency on handouts. “He is always there when we need him,” says supporter Genova Singleton. “But as the old saying goes, ‘Catch me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.’ These people need to be taught how to fish.”
But for now, at least, Dimiceli believes he is doing what has to be done. “I’m trying to get to the point where these people can take care of things themselves,” he says. One hopeful sign is a state plan to build an $80 million women’s prison nearby, which would bring 900 jobs and a natural-gas pipeline. “But it’s just not happening fast enough. And there is only so much one person can do.”
Still, for many Pembroke residents, that one person has transformed their lives. Until the summer, Eugene and Hazel Thomas lived in a $65-a month cinder-block hovel with stagnant water gurgling in the bathtub, no sink and a kitchen whose cabinets had been used by previous tenants for firewood. “It was just a hole-in-the-wall,” says Hazel, 72 and wheelchairbound. “But it was all we could afford.” Today the couple live in a new three-bedroom modular home with carpeting, heat and a kitchen stocked with pots and pans, dishes and silverware - one of six new houses Dimiceli has built for a total of $456,000. “When we moved in here this summer I thought it was Christmas in July,” says Eugene Thomas, 90. “Sal is Santa Claus in disguise.”
In a ramshackle home across town, Mary Rogers, 74 - arthritic and barely able to walk - cares for three great-grandchildren all under 3. The kitchen sink has collapsed, the water heater is broken, and filthy water in the bathtub can’t drain. But on a recent afternoon Dimiceli arrived with blankets and cash, promising to make repairs. “I appreciate it real much,” Rogers tells him. “You’re a fine man.”
Two weeks earlier, making his annual visit to the Lorenzo Smith Elementary School, Dimiceli distributed $40,000 in toys, clothing and shoes to students who flocked around him in the school gym. “When my children got off the bus from school today, there was a glow on their faces,” says Jacquie Sneed, 39, mother of Joya, 6, and Ira, 5. “My son said, ‘Look, Mommy, I got a football.’ And my daughter said, ‘I got stationery. I’m going to practice my sentence dictation.’”
For his part, says Dimiceli, “I wish I had a thousand arms to hold them. It’s hard to describe what I’m feeling in a situation like that.” Which seems understandable in light of his own painful past. Salvatore J. Dimiceli was one of four children born on Chicago’s West Side to Theresa Dimiceli, a beautician, and her husband, Joseph, a tool-and-die maker and chronic gambler. Bitter arguments would ensue when Sal’s father arrived home after another losing night at the track. “My mother would ask how they were going to buy food and pay the bills,” he says. “I was just a little boy, but I realized that the paycheck was somehow magic.”
In 1960 the family left Chicago and spent a nomadic decade moving from one place to another while Joseph, only intermittently employed, squandered thousand of dollars of the family’s savings. At 12, Sal took his first job, as a dishwasher, followed by work in a laundry room and gas station. At 15, he was forced by family debts to quit the high school cross country team in Roselle, Ill. “I loved to run. It was in my blood,” says Dimiceli. “But I had to go to work to pay the electric bill or buy food. The coaches asked me why I quit. But I never told them. I never told anyone.”
Years later, after dropping out of suburban Chicago’s College of DuPage to help support the family, Dimiceli had a series of jobs - unloading trucks, shoveling concrete and working at rock concerts. At age 29, he took a job as a sales rep with Gerard and Associates, a manufacturer rep for custom computer cabinets and circuit boards. Five years later he owned the company and was, as he puts it, “finally in the position to be able to fulfill the vow I made when I was 11 years old. I said, “Lord, please give me the will to work hard to be financially successful, and I promise you I will never forget to help the needy.’”
And he has not. On a recent afternoon Dimiceli toured Pembroke’s abandoned community center, destroyed by a brush fire in 1996, and pledged $40,000 to rebuild it. Later he visited the township’s fire department, where he promised $15,000 to repair one of its fire trucks and replace the firefighters’ tattered uniforms and protective gear. And finally he stopped by the home of Eugene and Hazel Thomas, who were looking after one of their grandchildren, and gave them a quick hug before heading back to the Chicago suburbs. Later, driving home in the dark, Dimiceli reflected on his mission. “Sometimes I get frustrated because I feel I’m only scratching the surface,” he said. “Then I think about the time I gave a little boy a pillow and he started crying. I asked his mother why and she said it was because he was so happy. He had never had a pillow before. It’s things like that that keep me going.”
