Name, story for Chestnut Hill's man of the street

There once was a man, a very strange man, who became a familiar part of the background in Chestnut Hill. For years - how many had it been? - he was seen walking up and down Germantown Avenue. Tall and terribly thin, with a single dreadlock, thick as a small tree trunk, hanging down to his knees, the man rarely made eye contact and almost never exchanged words.

Each day, he made his way purposefully along the familiar route, inspecting trash cans, then returning to wherever he had come from.

Rich McIlhenny, a real estate agent in the area, had seen the man, who seemed gentle but unapproachable. Like most people, McIlhenny assumed he was homeless, although he had heard rumors that some kind person was giving him shelter.

The truth, McIlhenny discovered, would turn out to be both sweeter and sadder. And last week, he revealed it in the Chestnut Hill Local.

Chestnut Hill is a pintucked neighborhood, neat and clean with pansies blooming in window boxes. The commercial zone along "the Avenue" sometimes feels like an open-air Cheers, where nearly everyone knows one another's name.

Frank at the camera store doles out Milk-Bones to his customers' dogs. John at the cheese shop offers a taste of wine to (over-21) patrons on the weekend. Georgia at the artsy clothing store knows her clientele's taste, and often, their personal sagas.

The tall, strange man clearly didn't belong.

Although the most inscrutable, the man wasn't the town's only outlier. Another ragged fellow, gnomish with a blond mane and beard, hung out outside Starbucks until his recent hospitalization. He would talk to folks, introducing himself as Laddie.

But the tall man had always remained nameless. He came to be known as One Dread, or Uni-Dread.

Then, last summer, he disappeared.

In the busy collage of days, weeks and months, a background character - even one as distinctive as a man bowed like a fishing pole with a 20-pound dreadlock on the hook - can get lost without anyone noticing.

It was in September that friends asked McIlhenny to help an old woman sell her home. The property - a 1925 stone carriage house with beamed ceilings and arched doorways - had been part of the estate of the founder of the Clark Thread Co. Its occupant, Marguerite Sinkovics, an 87-year-old widow, was facing foreclosure.

"The Prince of Wales once danced in the ballroom of one of the other houses in the estate," McIlhenny said. Despite the building's condition, the dirty carpets, rusty appliances, and the reek of cat urine in the stairs leading to two apartments, ghosts of the old grandeur still remained.

The first time he met Sinkovics, she said the house was worth at least $1 million. He told her he would try to get her the best price possible, but urged her to be realistic.

"She told me her son, who lived in one of the apartments, had just died," he said.

In the course of the conversation, McIlhenny realized that the son was One Dread, but he didn't want to pry. Mostly, he listened. "Over the next nine months, she told me bits and pieces of the story."

Sinkovics and her first husband were from Budapest, Hungary. "I had all those big plans as a young girl," she recalled in her living room Tuesday. She had dreamed of a grand wedding and an artist's career and a happy family, and although some dreams materialized, looking back, her past was crosshatched with pain.

Her only child, Jules, born March 5, 1946, was a bright boy with blond curls. "I would write poems for him and he would memorize them."

Opening a box of mementos, she pulled out photographs of the boy at 3, at 10, after the family moved to the United States, and as a teenager. She has only one of him in his 50s, a grizzled, haunted man. In his later years, he refused to be photographed.

Beneath the photos, she found a yellowed newspaper article. Under the headline "Glamorous New Citizen," it shows a picture of her after her naturalization ceremony in 1963 being congratulated by the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the executive vice president of Strawbridge & Clothier. Sinkovics had designed a line of office furniture for Standard Pressed Steel Co.

Jules inherited her artistic talent, she said, showing his oil paintings of a Madonna, a landscape, a young, frightened girl in a frilly dress.

She wonders if the trauma Jules suffered triggered his psychosis. When he was a baby, she said, soldiers broke into the house and arrested her husband, charging him with spying. He was taken to a work camp.

The following year, when she was ill, she said, Jules went to live with a Dr. Csatary, and later adopted his last name. In the 1950s, she married her second husband, a structural engineer, Geza Sinkovics, and moved to Elkins Park. For a while, the family thrived. Jules quickly learned English and adapted.

"He had friends," she said. "They would go sledding in the Poconos."

But after a girlfriend was killed in a car accident, Jules started to withdraw. He did not participate in any clubs or sports, and in his yearbook, El Delator, he is listed among those not photographed.

After graduating from Cheltenham High School in 1966, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, although he never finished his second semester. He was beginning to show signs of mental illness, Sinkovics said: "He heard the voices of the soldiers who took his father away."

Jules worked with a gardener on an industrialist's estate for a while, until one day he was found pulling out azalea bushes and setting them on fire. His mother tried to get him help, seeing doctors and going to hospitals. "The first time we had to commit him, he wanted to jump out of a moving car. . . . We put him in the hospital at Belmont," she said. "He never forgave me."

For years, Jules was treated as an outpatient at various mental health centers. "I gave him his medication, but I don't know if he swallowed it," she said.

As her son's world closed in around him, he pushed her away. In his 40s, he allowed her to trim his beard and cut his hair; later, he refused. "He put his hair into a ponytail. Then the ponytail became this long braid."

The braid tangled into a massive dreadlock, a metaphor for his mental state. Eventually, the hair tipped his head and hurt his spine.

Every morning, he awoke at 7 and got ready to leave, as if preparing for work. She would pack him sandwiches, usually Italian hoagies, and a large container of Coca-Cola. "In the summer, I was always afraid he'd get heatstroke," she said. In winter, she worried he'd freeze.

"I felt so awful the way he looked. I would wash and iron his clothes, then find them thrown on the floor." Once, she bought him a $400 leather coat "so people would know he had something good," but "in a week, it disappeared."

Telling her story, Sinkovics, wearing venom-red lipstick, large 1980s bifocals and a black pantsuit, strove to maintain her dignity. She broke down frequently, describing what his life, their lives, had become. She told McIlhenny that her second husband invested unwisely and lost most of their savings. Then he suffered a series of strokes and she had to quit her job to take care of him and Jules.

The couple refinanced their house several times. The house deteriorated and interest and penalties mounted. Geza died five years ago. She was left to care for Jules alone.

"I never knew where he went" on his daily walks, she said. "I tried to follow him in the car a few times, but as soon as he saw me, he disappeared." Every night, though, he would return at dinnertime. He would go up to his room, shut the door, watch TV and smoke cigarettes. She would bring up a tray with his food. "When he was done, he would rinse the dishes and put them back on the tray."

And even though she could not recall how many years had passed since he'd spoken to her or let her in his room, he always helped her carry groceries from the car into the kitchen. "He was a good boy. He was always polite."

And as far as she knew, in remarkably good health.

On June 12 last year, she returned from grocery shopping. "I parked in the driveway and honked the horn as usual."

He didn't answer, so she got out of the car, climbed the stairs to his room, and knocked. When he didn't respond, she opened the door.

"I saw him lying in bed in an overcoat. I went over and shook him. 'Jules, come and help me.' His head fell to the side. I took his hand. His hand was so cold. That coldness," she said, crying. "I'll never forget that."

She called 911. An ambulance took Jules away. An autopsy revealed he had died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

McIlhenny spent months negotiating with the banks for a more rational price. Moved by Sinkovics' predicament, he would stop by frequently. Sinkovics spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with him. He took her out for Mother's Day.

"Rich has been so good to me in these very hard times," she said. "He and his wife have been wonderful friends."

Ruddy-faced and good-natured, McIlhenny loves to write and has had several articles published in the Local. When he learned about Jules, he pitched the story to Len Lear, the paper's arts and culture editor. But Sinkovics was reluctant, so McIlhenny let it go. In early June, as the first anniversary of her son's death approached, he brought it up again.

"I thought it would be nice to change his legacy. To let people know he was a person."

The article ran Wednesday. By the next morning, e-mails were flying into both McIlhenny's and the paper's in-boxes. The response, Lear said, was one of the biggest he had seen in his 15 years at the paper.

McIlhenny is thinking of writing a book about Sinkovics. In the meantime, he is trying to help her cope. Last week, he took her out to lunch with a grief counselor, who reassured her that she had saved her son from a lonely death on the streets.

Last Sunday, he found a buyer for the house, and so now he's looking for an affordable assisted-living home where Sinkovics can finally find some peace.

"I used to think if I sold the house, I could put Jules in assisted care. And now, here I'm the one who needs it," she said. "It's spooky to live here alone, but it's even more spooky to leave."

She thinks of the place as Shangri-la, where no one ages. Then when they leave, they get old and die.

"A friend told me that mothers of mentally ill children have a special place in heaven," she laughed. "Maybe they'll have a little bench for me."