More than 200 people gathered for a memorial in a downtown Portland church Thursday afternoon for a man whose life was mystery.
His name was Barry Sutton.
If the name means nothing to you – and given the way he chose to live, why should it? – study the photo displayed at the memorial, the one featuring a man with long hair and a beard, both unkempt, wearing ill-fitting and dirty clothes that looked like they came from a dumpster.
Maybe you recognize him now – or think maybe you do.
He wasn’t who you thought he was.
Not that he was easy to pin down. Portlanders who encountered Sutton always walked away with more questions than answers, left with something akin to holding a random piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
Sutton, who lived on the streets for nearly 50 years, died in late September. He was 73.
When word of his death spread through the community, all those puzzle pieces held by strangers came together to reveal a complicated man who, with his passing, continued to surprise people.
You’re kidding? they said.
Really?
Barry?
At his memorial guests were ask to fill out a timeline on when they first met Barry Sutton.Tom Hallman Jr.
To make sense of it all, organizers of Sutton’s “Celebration of Life” at First Unitarian Church set out a long piece of brown paper on a table with a timeline of his life. They asked people to use a colored pen to put down on that timeline the answer to a simple yet profound question: When did you meet Barry?
Now that he’s gone, it can be easy to romanticize and create a myth out of Sutton, a man who lived a hardscrabble life. Even so, he might have been the most unusual man in the city.
The homeless man who used orange peels as deodorant – and was friends with a famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
The homeless man who knew which cardboard boxes provided the best insulation for sleeping outside in the cold – and had frequent, cogent conversations on homeless issues with local politicians and a high-ranking federal official based in the nation’s capital.
His hard-luck life story, forever full of gaps, has elements of a Charles Dickens tale, the protagonist who had the short end of the stick and had to fend for himself.
That’s the bad.
The good?
Well, that became apparent to most who knew him only after he died.
***
Sutton’s parents and his older brother are long gone. His only living relative is an 83-year-old cousin who last spoke to Sutton more than 60 years ago.
“He had epilepsy and many seizures that couldn’t be brought under control,” said that cousin, Linda Stief, who lives in Lake Oswego. “He’d hit his head, and he had many concussions.”
Stief said Sutton’s father was an alcoholic. Sutton’s mother died when he was a boy.
“A cousin on the other side of the family had three girls,” Stief said. “They wanted him to come live with their family.”
Details have been lost to time, but Stief said her parents told her that state child-welfare officials insisted that Sutton’s father get custody. Father and son moved from Portland to Pendleton, where Sutton attended high school.
“I believe his father loved him, but alcohol proved stronger than love,” she said. “When his father died, Barry was made a ward of the state.”
No one is sure how or why Sutton moved from Pendleton back to Portland. Stief said her parents told her that Sutton had been diagnosed with mental illness and could be paranoid. Stief never learned if her cousin had been treated.
“He was secretive about his life and wanted nothing to do with the family,” she said. “My parents tried to have him come live with them, and that didn’t work. My mother would invite him for dinner. He’d come, then get up and just walk away. We never knew where he lived.
“He just kept falling through the cracks,” she said. “He was not a drunk. He was not an addict. He was just mentally ill, and the mental illness consumed him.”
Sam Sirkin, an energy-efficiency consultant, met Sutton decades ago when Sutton showed up one day at Havurah Shalom, a Northwest Portland synagogue where Sirkin is a lay leader.
“You could tell in an instant he was living on the street,” said Sirkin. “He didn’t want to be housed. For some reason he couldn’t deal with it.”
Sutton began showing up regularly.
“He’d eat and participate,” said Sirkin. “Always raising his hand to ask questions. There were so many times the rabbi would have to tell Barry it wasn’t time for questions.”
Sirkin discovered Sutton knew synagogue member Nick Fish, a Portland city commissioner who died in 2020.
“I’m watching the two of them talking and went over, surprised that they knew each other,” said Sirkin. “Nick said Barry came to his office every week to talk about city issues.”
Sutton regularly visited houses of worship throughout the city – Catholic, Unitarian, Methodist, Lutheran, Quaker, Buddhist, the Peace House, several synagogues. The Thursday memorial featured prayers and reflections from Quakers, mainline churches and Zen and Buddhist temples.
Sutton loved reading and doing research. He’d visit libraries around Portland, surfing the Internet and arguing with librarians when they told him there was a time limit for using the computer. A man who knew Sutton from a Northeast Portland library branch said he was “intelligent, well read and a handful.”
Paul Immanuel Owens, a musician who met Sutton at the Portland Saturday Market, said Sutton had a “powerful sense of what he thought was right and what was wrong.
“It could lead to outbursts,” said Owens. “Barry was secretive. I gathered that at some point in his life he may have been confined someplace where he didn’t have all his freedom.”
Sutton moved around the city on his bike, on foot and on the bus, carrying a backpack or plastic bags full of books and belongings.
“He could engage people in a conversation about so many different things,” said Owens. “He was consumed with doing good things for society. In so many ways he was an adult who was also like a child.
“In so many ways,” Owens said, “he lived in obscurity and yet he touched a lot of lives.”
Years ago, Ann Oliva was running homeless programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., when her phone rang, the caller ID noting it was from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I don’t get calls from MIT,” she said. “I picked it up and it was Noam Chomsky’s office. He’s a famous professor and written many books. I’d never had contact with him.”
A woman on the other end of the line said the renowned linguistics expert and political activist had been having ongoing telephone calls with a Portland man about homeless issues. Chomsky had sent this man prepaid telephone cards, and the woman in the professor’s office wanted to know if she could give the man Oliva’s telephone number.
That man – Sutton – soon called Oliva.
“Barry and I ended up having regular phone calls over the years on homeless issues under my purview,” she said. “I never did learn how he ended up talking with Noam Chomsky.”
Oliva, now CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, had not recently spoken with Sutton, but she frequently thought of him.
“He was incredibly smart and compelling,” she said. “I could see why Chomsky talked with Barry. It was so helpful for me to get perspective from a person experiencing homelessness.”
Late last year, Sutton suffered a stroke. He died September 24 at Hopewell House, an end-of-life residence in Southwest Portland.
Sam Sirkin, from Havurah Shalom, said the synagogue arranged to have his body taken to Holman’s Funeral Home, and it raised money to have his body cremated.
“In order to be cremated, we had to find a family member,” said Sirkin. “Good luck with that. Not just this community, but all the communities where Barry was known. No one knew much about Barry.”
Officials at the funeral home began extensive research and eventually found Sutton’s cousin, Linda Stief.
“There’s a sadness I never got to see him,” Stief said. “I’m learning so many things about him. It makes me happy that he had so many people who cared about him.”
Those who cared about Barry Sutton would have to wait until he drifted into their lives, and they knew he would drift away again, traveling with ghosts and demons from the past.
No longer.
His cremains will be buried at the Havurah Shalom Cemetery.
A wandering man now at rest.
— Tom Hallman Jr
503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr
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