This is the first part of a guest post by Brian C.  Brian lives and works as an English Teacher in Amman, Jordan.  He blogs from there regularly, recording his thoughts on language, culture, and life in general  at Pilgrim without a Shrine.  Check back later this week for part two.

If you haven’t heard of Ted Williams the “golden-voiced” homeless man from Columbus, OH then it is most likely that you haven’t paid attention to the Internet much this past week. A week ago this man was just like any other person in America struggling with homelessness – holding a sign near a major intersection hoping for some spare change. The only thing that separated Ted Williams from the rest was his God-given voice, a rich baritone radio announcer’s voice. That and a video of him that went viral last Monday making him, for better or worse America’s most famous homeless guy.

Originally posted by Columbus Dispatch videographer Doral Chenoweth to their own website, the video was reposted to YouTube and had over 13 million hits by Thursday, January 6th. By that time Ted had been interviewed on a nationally syndicated radio talk show, flown to NY for interviews with NBC and CBS and landed a job as the official spokesperson of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. He also received hundreds of other job offers from the likes of the Cleveland Cavaliers, MSNBC, and even reportedly Oprah .

Not a bad week for a homeless guy.

Thanks to viral video and social networking sites the story grabbed my attention, even 6,000 miles on the other side of the world. I found the story intriguing, not just because of the number of hits it had received, but also because I’ve had 4 years experience working closely with people struggling with homelessness. Based on that experience a few things in Ted William’s story caught my attention.

He was at rock bottom.

It wasn’t the obvious fact that he was panhandling that made me think this. Nor was it the make-shift tent that he was living out of just off the highway. The real clue to me that Ted Williams was at rock bottom was the fact that he had no legal form of identification. This caused problems for him when NBC tried to fly him to New York for an interview with Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira on The Today Show.

When people are first homeless their official IDs (driver’s license, social security card, birth certificate, etc.) are like lifelines. It is a connection to who they were before they were homeless. But as time wears on IDs expire or are sometimes lost as people move from place to place. Once a homeless person loses their ID or lets it lapse it becomes very difficult to get it back. For most people its just a matter of showing up at the right office with some other form of identification and a couple of pieces of mail. But if all of your identification is lost (as sometimes happens) and you have no residential mailing address it becomes more difficult.
While folks are newly homeless I found that they doggedly made sure they renewed their IDs and kept track of things like Social Security cards – without them it would be impossible to be employed (officially and gainfully). But as people lose hope, and interview after interview fails to produce results, keeping track of IDs can lose its importance. When you hit rock bottom and don’t really expect that any official sort of employment is ever going to come your way you don’t worry about having an official ID.

I think the same was true of Ted Williams. He had hit rock bottom. He was holding a cardboard sign at the end of an exit ramp. He was hoping for a few bucks, but I don’t think he was expecting to find official employment. However, when faced with the challenge of getting to New York City in time for the Today Show interview Ted reported that he was able to jump through all of the hoops necessary to get his ID:

i had to get an i.d., the i.d. situation, yes, ma’am we had to go all the way downtown and get a proof of residency. i had to go to a couple homeless shelters to get that filled out. and then i had to get a court injunction to prove who i was, you know, date of birth and all, ’cause i didn’t have any i.d. or nothing.

No wonder Ted’s story went viral. In the span of a few days he went from being almost as destitute as one can be in America to being flown by one of the biggest media outlets in the world to the Big Apple to be interviewed by two of the world’s most famous broadcasters. Absolutely incredible.