He was hard to miss, crouching on the corner of Forbes and Atwood in his wide-brimmed Mexican hat, shaking his maracas, and asking passersby for money.
“Change, got any annnnnny change?” was his familiar call.
Though he had no home, he was well known by the residents of Oakland, who called that silver-haired man with the wizened face and hidden history, simply, “Sombrero Man.”
According to Oakland shopkeepers, Sombrero Man was an all-but-permanent fixture on Forbes Avenue since the late summer of 2001, and during his tenure on his street corner had developed quite a cult following. Students from the neighboring University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon were known to dress like him for Halloween, shoulders hunched and change bucket in hand, and the local independent magazine Souf Oaklin fo’ Life occasionally published stories documenting his latest antics.
But about six months ago, as strangely and suddenly as he appeared, Oakland’s most celebrated panhandler vanished. The rumors are flying, but no one is sure if Sombrero Man is in jail, if he’s found room in a homeless shelter, or if he’s finally moved on to that big fiesta in the sky.
According to five-year Oakland resident Ben Craft, Sombrero Man was hands-down the best-loved panhandler in the area, and his abrupt disappearance did not go unnoticed. Craft, 25, works at the Forbes Avenue CD Warehouse, across the street from the Eckerd pharmacy where Sombrero Man held his unofficial post.
“Everyone was infatuated with Sombrero Man,” says Craft, who attributes the man’s popularity to his colorful appearance and character. Of all the regular Oakland drifters — “There’s Tim, and Jimmy, [who is] one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet” — Craft says that Sombrero Man, with his trademark costume and nearly unintelligible slurs, was the most inherently endearing.
The Pitt News, the University of Pittsburgh’s official student newspaper, agrees. In the 2002 and 2003 editions of their annual “Best Of” issue, they named Sombrero Man as “Best Oakland Regular.” They identify his honesty as his winning feature, the thing that makes him such a successful panhandler:
“He doesn't sing or tell elaborate lies. He's never held an interesting sign or tried to bargain with you. He just sits, chants, and most of the time wears a really cool hat.”
A few miles down Forbes Avenue, at a neighboring university, more students agree with the Pitt opinion. Dave Camillus, a senior cognitive science and computer science major, belongs to Carnegie Mellon’s Sombrero Man fan base.
“I loved him from the moment I first laid eyes on him,” says Camillus. “He’s this kindly, but maybe crazy-looking guy who walks around town with a sombrero and no shame. He looks like the kind of guy you want your grandparents to be friends with.”
Camillus laments Sombrero Man’s disappearance, and speculates on the gentleman’s current location: “Maybe he just got too old to keep walking around.”
Craft, however, has other ideas. He says Sombrero Man has disappeared before, but usually only for a week or two at a time. As far as Craft can remember, this is Sombrero Man’s longest absence, leading him to believe that the peddler might be in jail or a nearby mental ward.
Haley Grassel, a junior anthropology major at the University of Pittsburgh and a customer service associate at the Forbes Avenue Eckerd, is also unsure of Sombrero Man’s whereabouts. But Grassel, 20, notes that even when he was around, “Homer” — as other peddlers called him — was a man of mystery.
She recalls occasions when he entered her store in the company of a middle-aged woman, possibly his girlfriend, possibly his daughter. More often, though, Homer would come alone, with only a battered suitcase in tow.
“You never knew what was going to be in there,” she says of his curious luggage. “A couple times, he asked to leave it here. We would think, ‘Oh, he’s just going to run out and come back for it,’ but then he’d leave it here overnight.”
Many times, Grassel says, Homer’s suitcase would be full of candy, which he would sell to passersby for 50 cents or a dollar. The word on the street is that he used to give his profits to the homeless shelter that put him up, or to his church, or to a soup kitchen.
Grassel cites recent gossip: Homer might have returned to West Virginia, his rumored home state.
“Or maybe,” she says, “he just found a new street to sit on.”
But this speculation all comes to a dead end. Representatives from the Allegheny County Jail, the Light of Life Rescue Mission, and the Peoples Oakland mental illness recovery center all recognize Sombrero Man’s description, but say they haven’t seen him lately, either. And since little is officially known about Sombrero Man’s history — his last name, his birthplace, his pre-Oakland existence — it is impossible to track him down in the City of Pittsburgh’s annals.
Perhaps the most promising lead, though, comes from one of the men closest to Sombrero Man, one of his fellow Oakland peddlers, known only as “Bill.”
Bill, 55, a blind man who sits on a boom box he has weatherproofed with a thick-layer of duct tape, says that if Homer isn’t in jail or working at a church, he’s probably gone home. Contrary to what Grassel heard, though, Bill says that Sombrero Man was born in Mississippi, not West Virginia.
“But,” he adds dismissively, “[Homer] was just a panhandler…. Me, I’m a street entertainer.”
He trails off and pushes “Play” on his boom box. When the music starts, he sings along passionately to “Amazing Grace,” his powerful voice rising proudly above the traffic before him.
While Bill is right — Sombrero Man lacked such a talent, and never sang for his audience — it is perhaps his simplicity that earned him regard and made him such a local icon. Like The Pitt News reported in 2002, “From street corners to Homecoming posters, Sombrero Man is everywhere, embodying all of the beautiful character, humor and ghetto-dom of South Oakland.”
He was a celebrity.
For now, though, this figurehead is still missing; the rumors are conflicting and inconclusive. But in his absence, his memory and spirit are as tangible as ever. For someone who had no bed to sleep in, no house of his own, it can never be said that Sombrero Man didn’t have a home.
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