The following article appeared on the front page of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel's February 18, 1999, edition.

WITHOUT SUPPORT HOMELESS
PAPER FACES FINAL EDITION

By ROBERT GEORGE
Staff Writer

MIAMI - The couple had revived one magazine, founded another and
published a newspaper. She had been a drunk and a junkie once. So had he,
plus he had actually lived on the streets.

So it seemed to Frank Kaiser and his wife, Carolyn Blair, both now sober
and the owners of a successful Miami ad agency, that they were the
perfect team to start yet another publication, a so-called street
newspaper for South Florida. Homeless people writing about homeless
problems and then selling their own product on street corners so they
could earn some money, maybe enough to start paying their own rent.

"We already had the know-how," Blair said earlier this week from the
living room of her high-rise apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay in Miami.
"It was just a matter of figuring out the format."

But they have discovered it was also a matter of figuring out the
politics of helping the homeless in South Florida. Snubbed, hassled and
exhausted,

Kaiser, 63, and Blair, 58, finally have their newspaper - StreetSmarts
was due to publish its second edition by week's end. The first edition
came out in December.

But they no longer have any money. They've cashed in their IRAs, drawn
down their savings account and the second issue of StreetSmarts might be
the last.

For two years, they have been writing business plans, filling out
120-page grant applications, and making presentation after presentation
to agency after agency. But Kaiser and Blair say they've been rebuffed by
other homeless groups anxious to limit the already fierce competition for
government grants and harassed by police who don't want raggedy newspaper
peddlers on every street corner.

"They think we're going to go away," Blair said, as her husband laid out
the last few pages of the latest edition. Both were barefoot beneath
their faded jeans.

Street papers in northern cities such as Chicago and New York where they
started appearing about a decade ago now have circulations topping
100,000 copies a month. Some vendors make more than $500 a week.

Even up North, however, the papers are criticized for promoting
panhandling under the guise of selling newspapers, and, citing safety
concerns, police in Pembroke Pines, Davie, Cooper City and Miramar have
been moving StreetSmarts off the street.

"It's a hazard to have people walking in between several lines of traffic
while motorists are trying to watch the light," said Capt. Marvin Stoner,
spokesman for the Cooper City Police Department.

Blair and Kaiser say they've been trying for weeks to figure out why the
police are telling their vendors they can't sell on the same street
corners where other vendors are hawking mainstream papers. No one, they
say, returns their calls, a problem they've also had with the very
agencies they thought would support them.

-The Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust hands out $19 million each year to
fund more than 60 shelters, soup kitchens and job training programs. None
of that money is going to StreetSmarts.

The paper is just one of dozens of causes that sought funding from
Director Hilda Fernandez last year. She said she told Kaiser and Blair
the same thing she tells all the rest: They have to go through an
approval process that takes up to a year and includes convincing members
of the trust's board that there is a need for what they do.

"If their expectation was they were going to walk into my office and I
was going to write them a check, well, not that I'm a bureaucrat, but we
have a process to go through," she said.

Fernandez said she supports the idea behind StreetSmarts. Vendors are
trained, told to stay sober and be polite on the job, given a badge and
then handed a stack of $1 papers. The first 20 copies cost them nothing.
Anything after that is 30 cents apiece.

Selling StreetSmarts helped John Zeller earn some money for the -first
time in months. Zeller, 53, has been sleeping on a bench in a Miami train
station ever since getting sick and losing his job a year ago.

Over the past month, he has made $60 a week selling copies of
StreetSmarts outside the city library a couple of hours a week. The money
went for food and clothes, but it -also bought him a bit of the old
self-respect he felt when he was a wage-earner holding down a steady job
as a researcher for a law firm.

Blair and Kaiser have other early success stories, from the man who made
$88 in one day selling along the waterfront, to the sisters who are
saving their earnings to get an apartment.

Such testimonials, however, have yet to sway any of the county's homeless
advocates. Fernandez has never fully explained the funding process,
Kaiser said, noting the members of other homeless agencies have even
refused to shake their hands and take their business cards.

But when it comes to publishing, he and his wife are professionals, and
they worked hard to get that way.

They met in 1979 at an Alcoholic's Anonymous meeting in Illinois. Kaiser
was a down-and-out ad man whose drinking had already cost him two wives
and one business

Around the same time, Blair was burning through her third marriage. She
had four kids. She was behind on her rent. Most days she was drunk. On
the rest she was high on pot, or cocaine, or heroin.

When they first met, they both still had the shakes and their coffee cups
would quietly vibrate in their hands as they talked to each other. But
they stayed sober, got jobs and, after Kaiser's mother died leaving him a
small inheritance, they moved to Orlando to buy a construction trade
magazine.

They sold that a few years later, moved to Key West and started a
community newspaper. From there it was a real estate magazine and finally
Kaiser Communications, and the multimillion-dollar clients such as
Allstate Insurance, Bacardi Rum and Gulf Oil.

Two years ago on a trip to England, they bought a copy of The Big Issue,
London's version of the street papers cropping up across America and
Europe. Their biggest account had just been bought out by a competitor
and they decided that rather than go after more business, they had found
at last a way to do good while doing what they loved.

They pumped $200,000 to get the newspaper started.

They never intended to get rich off the paper, they say. Rather, they
started it because they never forgot their past. But, with no money, no
support, they say they may soon have to go back to work writing ads just
to keep from becoming homeless themselves.