While the Dallas Cowboys and Buffalo Bills are playing Super Bowl XXVIII on Sunday, only casual attention will be paid to the game at 637 Kennedy St., about a mile north of the Georgia Dome.
Ronald Cullins, his wife Anna Allen and their seven children have these boxes to unpack.
“Boxes and dreams,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of belongings. Our beds are just mattresses, no frames. But whatever we have will be safe, especially the kids.”
Over at the Culver Homes, a government project where they presently reside, Ronald and Anna Allen don’t have that peace of mind. Millionaire football players who get hurt in the line of duty are listed as day-to-day for the next big game. That’s what life is like in the inner-city, day-to-day.
“We have 8-year-old twins, Andre and Andrea,” Ronald says. “They were walking to school a couple months ago when a teenager got killed, right on a street corner. Shot dead, just like that. They came running home, shaking. You always shake over there, because you always hear gunfire.”
Ronald Cullins knew the Super Bowl would be coming to his town. What he didn’t know, until another family told him, was that the NFL had committed to join with Habitat For Humanity International, a non-profit organization created to provide shelter for the working poor. He asked questions and applied for help. That’s all he wanted, help.
“I’m in special projects at the university, Georgia Tech,” he says. “What that means is I clean floors, 10 at night until morning. My wife, she’s in janitorial services at a bank. That’s about $8,000 a year, which puts food on the table. But you can’t own your own home. Where we are now, that’s not a home. This is a home. And this is ours.”
The light-blue four-bedroom house at 637 Kennedy St. is one of four to be completed by the weekend. It’s a pre-fab worth about $40,000, and Ronald is only too happy to give you the grand tour, once he sidesteps the volunteers putting the last pieces in place. He points to his back yard, where they’re still laying sod, to the kitchen and to Andrea’s room over there on the left.
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“She wanted it to be pink,” he says. “And it’s blue. But we can paint it over when we get settled. See that? The doors don’t even have doorknobs yet, but I still feel safer.”
We’ll never know how much the NFL makes by taking over entire cities for these annual extravaganzas. And the “Super Bowl XXVIII Habitat Blitz Build” is terrific public relations for a league whose retailers and licensees market mightily through image. The NFL built a youth recreation center in Los Angeles, last year’s Super site, and Atlanta will get one, too. All in the name of leaving a positive, lasting impact on communities we visit, says Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.
“But it’s true,” says Larry Arney, executive director for Habitat/Atlanta. “Ronald Cullins doesn’t just get the house. He pays a no-interest mortgage of $250 a month, and that goes to build more houses. It’s organizations like the NFL, though, that provide a starting point.”
That’s all Ronald Cullins wants. His “down payment” is “sweat equity,” or 150 hours toward building his or a neighbor’s home. He just met Ida Blackwell the other day, but even before that, he was putting a shovel to her driveway. On Sunday, between unpacking boxes, Ronald will invite Ida over to celebrate their good fortune.
“We’ll cook up some food,” he says. “Man, I’ve been through it all. Drugs, divorce, you name it. I’m a black man who can’t buy a ticket to see the Falcons. What’s a Super Bowl ticket, $175? No way. But I’ve got trees now and grass, and I’ve got a chance.
“That’ll make me do floors harder. At Georgia Tech, where the Buffalo team is practicing. We have one little TV. Andre, he’ll want to watch the Super Bowl. And I’ll tell him Sunday. He cares about football. Sunday, I can say football cares about him. After the game is over and all the fancy people leave town, I can say thanks for my trees.”