Alan Jennings looked down at his cellphone as the number for Bethlehem developer Lou Pektor lit up.
Pektor was planning to build 50 upscale town homes on seven acres in Bethlehem Township, right after evicting people living in 43 mobile homes on his land. Jennings, the longtime executive director of the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, was taking up their fight.
Rehearsing in his head how he’d lay into Pektor for tossing out a bunch of poor people without any means to move, Jennings was coiled and ready to strike as he hit the button to accept Pektor’s call.
“Hello Lou, I was hoping you’d call,” Jennings spit out. “I wanted to talk about what you’re doing to those people in [Peaceful Meadows mobile home park].”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Pektor said. “I was thinking about putting up $5,000 per household to help them move. What do you think?”
As he hung up, Jennings cracked a faint smile over winning this battle for the underdog, and yet he was strangely unsatisfied and a little stunned. This win just came too easily.
“I have to admit,” he said. “He sort of ruined my fun. I get my kicks out of picking fights with people.”
That’s because for the past 35 years, Jennings has been happiest when he’s fighting mad. Whether it’s extracting money from wealthy corporations to sprinkle into the inner cities, running the Lehigh Valley’s busiest homeless shelters and food pantries, cracking down on predatory lenders or leading a rally in Washington to raise the minimum wage, Jennings has chosen to do it the only way he knows: ferociously.
In leading CACLV, he’s built a $20 million-a-year army whose sole mission is to battle for the people least equipped to defend themselves against poverty and discrimination.
More recently, he’s tried to steer at least some of the gains from Allentown’s $1 billion makeover into the struggling neighborhoods around the new downtown arena district.
But these days, the 57-year-old Jennings is engaged in a new fight, and it’s one he knows he’ll ultimately lose. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease nine years ago, and while he remains the region’s loudest voice for the homeless, jobless and underprivileged, he worries the degenerative disease has taken some of the snap from his jab and power from his punch.
Perhaps more sobering, the man who has believed since grade school that he was born to save the world is coming to terms with the idea he’s not invincible, and will someday earlier than he’d expected — he’s hoping it’s still years away — turn his legacy over to someone else.
Anyone other than Jennings at the helm would bring culture shock to those who have come to rely on his sometimes abrasive methods to bring about social justice. That includes not only the impoverished people CACLV helps, but power brokers and community leaders.
Where would Allentown be, Mayor Ed Pawlowski asks, without the Sixth Street family shelter or the Second Harvest Food Bank or the Seventh Street neighborhood project or the CACLV business development program? All were started by Jennings. And all are examples of what Jennings has built in cities and towns across the Valley.
“No one is more passionate about changing the lives of the Valley’s needy and disadvantaged, and no one has had the impact that Alan has,” Pawlowski said. “We don’t agree on everything, but we’re lucky to have him. Every community needs an Alan Jennings.”
Still winning
The rigidity in his left hand seemed harmless. Jennings, then 48, dismissed it as the result of his 60-hour work weeks and the stress of believing he was losing the war on poverty and discrimination.
His doctor suggested he could be suffering from depression and recommended a specialist.
“I’m not depressed, I’m just pissed because the world is so [messed] up,” Jennings recalled telling his doctor.
Ultimately, a neurologist told him he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, a progressive nervous system disorder that has no cure. Characterized by tremors, slurred speech and stiffness, it can challenge people’s balance and give them an unusual gait. All of those things play on Jennings’ admitted insecurities while he’s sparring with enemies or trying to influence new allies.
In reality, nine years into his illness, the symptoms are not easily seen on Jennings’ 6-1, 215-pound frame. His colleagues all say he still possesses boundless energy. But as he talks, Jennings is certain people are noticing his bobbing head. Or that his speech is more halting than it used to be, or that he’s just not remembering details the way he once did.
He takes medicine to combat those symptoms, but he’s convinced it doesn’t mask them. Mostly, it’s in his head, making him question himself in a way that the gladiator side of him wouldn’t allow before.
“I’m not quite at my fighting weight,” Jennings said, his voice trailing before he regroups. “But I’m still winning most of the fights.”
‘Born to save the world’
Alan L. Jennings was raised in Wescosville by Mark and Pauline Jennings in the kind of tree-lined middle-class subdivision the inner city advocate has spent decades avoiding.
He remembers his father as a bank credit officer who was handsome, charismatic and embarrassingly alcoholic. His mother, Pauline, an introverted Hess’s Patio hostess, tried her best to keep her son’s wild expectations in check by explaining why titles like class president or team captain weren’t in his future.
Among his most vivid memories was crouching behind home plate as a Little League catcher during the first inning of a game to hear the umpire chirp over his shoulder.
“Oh great, there’s the drunk guy from my last game,” the ump said, nodding toward the boisterous fan in the stands.
“That’s my father, you a——,” Jennings turned and barked through his mask.
“Sorry, kid, I didn’t know,” the umpire said quietly, choosing not to eject him.
At the time, Jennings didn’t consider his father’s affection for vodka that unusual. His father was often charming and always the life of any party — a likable hell-raiser who more than balanced his wife’s reserved nature.
Yet, somehow through all that shyness, Pauline Jennings’ social conscience was being absorbed by her son at an early age.
While his third-grade classmates were dreaming of being firemen or baseball players, Alan idolized Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He doesn’t even recall how it happened — just that it did.
One afternoon, as the 8-year-old stood in his parents’ bedroom staring into a full-length mirror, he was overcome.
“I know it’s sort of creepy, but I was hit by the uncanny sense that I was born to save the world,” Jennings said. “It wasn’t like God spoke to me or anything like that. It was just an overwhelming sensation. It was a lot of pressure for an 8-year-old to put on himself.”
That mission to be a do-gooder didn’t always mean Jennings would do good. At Emmaus High School, he was cited for marijuana possession, and at Dickinson College, the political science major was arrested for criminal mischief for stealing a potted Christmas tree with his friends in a college prank. Both records were expunged decades ago.
At Dickinson, Jennings realized that if he was going to save the world, he needed Denise Reynolds by his side. Reynolds had been his girlfriend since ninth grade, but she made the very adult decision for them to split after high school, arguing their relationship wouldn’t survive the more than 400 miles between Dickinson and Endicott College near Boston.
Exhibiting the kind of never-give-up attitude that’s helped make him the Valley’s most prominent windmill tilter, Jennings hitchhiked to Boston. It worked. They were married in 1980, two weeks before graduation.
With college and the task of finding a partner behind him, it was time for Jennings to get on with his life’s work.
A world in desperate need of saving awaited.
CACLV
The CACLV machine Jennings runs now barely resembles the organization that hired him out of college in 1980. He made $9,500 a year as an employment counselor who’d never had a full-time job, working for a struggling nonprofit that spent $500,000 a year, primarily to run a neighborhood center and food bank.
It got few government grants and — as Jennings remembers it — had an underwhelming impact on the community. A statewide assessment deemed the Lehigh Valley branch one of the worst-run community action committees in Pennsylvania in 1982. It was marked for shutdown unless it could find more grant money and a more efficient way to spend it. If there was any positive side to its inefficiency, it was that it prompted its director to resign, elevating a 24-year-old Jennings to second in command, under director Sandy Murphy.
Together they dismantled the nonprofit and started over. Murphy was the ever-steady administrator and Jennings the young agitator. In 1990, Murphy would move on, leaving a 31-year-old Jennings as director. By then, he’d already injected the organization’s central mission of helping the poor with a healthy dose of social activism. So, when then-Congressman Don Ritter held a campaign fundraiser at the Allentown Hilton, Jennings set up a soup line for the poor outside to call attention to the extravagance of the $150-a-plate event.
When beloved Allentown Councilwoman Emma Tropiano rejected a Latino woman’s appointment to the Housing Authority, Jennings in a Morning Call opinion piece bluntly demanded her resignation, calling her comments “racist” and an “embarrassment” to the city.
More than two decades later, CACLV has nearly 100 employees and more than 1,000 volunteers running homeless shelters, food pantries and programs that help people weatherize their homes, get job skills, buy homes or even start a business. Its budget is $20 million a year, but through what Jennings likes to call “CACLV cheap,” it gets many times that value in programs, using volunteers, donations and in-kind services that benefit nearly 100,000 Valley residents a year.
Despite the satisfaction of helping all those people, it is the losses that stay with Jennings. On June 5, two girls, ages 3 and 5, from a homeless family that CACLV placed in transitional housing fell from an open fourth-floor window of an Allentown apartment building. The fall killed Tamara Arnette and critically injured her older sister, Tiana.
“This is the kind of tragedy you never want to see happen,” Jennings said hours after the accident, “especially in a situation where the person is in your care. All you can do is drop to your knees and beg God for mercy.”
Jennings has spent much of the past three years rebuilding downtown Allentown. As an original member of the Allentown Neighborhood Improvement Zone Development Authority, he’s helped — with a giant assist from generous state tax incentives — guide $1 billion in new office, retail and apartment development in a downtown that had been declining for more than three decades.
That he’s worked closely with rich developers such as J.B. Reilly to do it has brought him criticism, even from some of his usual followers. When Allentown threatened eminent domain on struggling downtown businesses in the path of the proposed hockey arena, Jennings didn’t help them fight to block the arena project. Instead, he lobbied for them to get the best deal they could as they moved their businesses elsewhere.
For that, political blogger Bernie O’Hare gave Jennings a new title: “Cheerleader of the Rich.”
“I think he’s helping these rich people so they’ll contribute to CACLV,” O’Hare said. “I respect and admire Alan, but he’s dead wrong on the NIZ.”
The $180 million PPL Center at Seventh and Hamilton streets would be the catalyst to downtown renewal, attracting new businesses and creating hundreds of jobs within walking distance of depressed neighborhoods where the unemployment rate was more than 20 percent. So, yes, his ANIZDA project review committee welcomes developers wearing suits that cost enough to feed one of his food bank families for months.
That pragmatism is something Jennings has learned from years of crashing into immovable windmills.
“It was a depressed downtown littered by vacant storefronts,” Jennings said. “You need a thriving marketplace to have a thriving community. The NIZ has re-energized the marketplace, created new jobs and rebuilt the tax base. The community will be better for it.”
Jennings admits some of the neighborhood-building he’d hoped would come in downtown Allentown has failed. His plans for a community benefits contract that would siphon tax money from the NIZ for neighborhood programs got no support, and his call for a $12 minimum wage in the NIZ fell flat.
“Let’s face it, I’ve been at this a long time and the world is still really screwed up,” Jennings said. “I’ve failed a lot.”
Fine line
Along the way, Jennings has collected a long list of allies and critics. Sometimes, they’re one and the same. Mike Gausling is a Bethlehem venture capitalist who became an instant millionaire after merging his medical startup company to form the publicly traded OraSure Technologies in 2004. Days after the merger, Jennings was at his doorstep.
“This guy I didn’t know shows up with all these ideas about how I should be spending my money,” Gausling said. “I was insulted. I gave nothing.”
Yet, in the coming years Gausling came to respect Jennings’ passion. He’s now treasurer of a CACLV board of directors that includes both CEOs and food bank users. And yes, Jennings did eventually get Gausling to part with a considerable chunk of his wealth.
“We couldn’t be more philosophically different. I’m a Republican capitalist and he’s a Democrat activist,” Gausling said. “But I’ve never seen anyone so dedicated to helping the needy. I’m proud to call him a friend.”
And that perhaps is Jennings’ greatest talent — walking a fine line that allows him to condemn the rich for oppressing minorities and the poor, while convincing them that it’s to their benefit to give to his causes. A pit bull in a suit, Jennings is far more likely to be found in the office of a bank president than in a soup line ladling beef broth. Every year he persuades private corporations to invest millions in the community in exchange for government programs that offer tax credits, grants or low-interest loans.
“He’s got this teach-a-man-to-fish philosophy that I can respect,” Gausling said. “He doesn’t just take from the rich to give to the poor. He makes the money work for the community.”
That’s why Jennings admits he doesn’t really like running CACLV’s homeless shelters and food pantries.
“It’s needed and no one else will do it, but I have a lot more fun building the community by helping people get jobs, buy homes and seize economic opportunity,” Jennings said. “I’m not interested in helping the winners move out of the ghetto. I want to turn the ghetto into a neighborhood where people want to stay.”
Not all of his detractors become converts. Joe Clark, the Crocodile Rock owner who has built a residential empire that includes hundreds of apartments, has long been a target of Jennings. When Clark ignored Jennings’ claims that much of his housing was designed to take advantage of the poor, Jennings went after his credit. He admonished the banks that financed Clark’s projects and pressured them to cut off his funding.
While noting the good CACLV does, Clark sees Jennings as a self-righteous egomaniac.
“He made it his mission in life to put me out of business,” Clark said. “But guess what? I’m still here. For Alan, I’m like this stain that won’t go away.”
Even adversaries like Clark acknowledge that Jennings walks the walk. His three daughters all went to Allentown public schools, and he’s refused his wife’s pleas to move to the suburbs. So, he lives in a modest west Allentown twin with a postage-stamp yard and a driveway he shares with the rental unit next door.
While directors of other multimillion-dollar operations make double his salary, Jennings has repeatedly beat back his board’s attempts to raise his salary, because he wanted to avoid the “embarrassment” of cracking the $100,000 mark.
“Every year we fight with him to take a raise and every year he refuses,” said Olga Negron, who used CACLV food banks after moving from Puerto Rico to Bethlehem, but is now chairwoman of the CACLV board. “He’s [installed] an $11 minimum wage for all CACLV employees, but he won’t listen to us about his own pay.”
Despite his effort, an automatic 2 percent cost-of-living increase nudged his salary to $100,579 last year.
Jennings admits he has difficulty turning off the intensity, a trait Denise Jennings is keenly reminded of daily.
“It’s not easy living with someone who uses anger as motivation,” Denise said. “But his enthusiasm is contagious and he’s got such a good heart.”
He spends part of almost every night playing the two 1970s-era pinball machines in his basement. It’s a decompression technique after a stressful day, but the stark white wall behind the machine defies the effort to relax. Written in black marker is his latest high score and the date he got it. For him, it only serves as a nightly reminder that he didn’t beat it again.
Well, surely his bird-watching hobby is relaxing, right?
“Not the way Alan does it,” Denise Jennings said. “When he goes a long time without adding another bird to his life list, it really bothers him.”
Parkinson’s
Parkinson’s hasn’t changed Jennings’ approach to his mission, but he admits the disease has likely changed how long he can carry out that mission.
It’s even changed how he sees his own future. Jennings’ loftiest aspirations have always come with an admittedly morbid premonition of his own death.
For years, he believed he was destined to make the kind of heroic difference his idols Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy made. Back then, he was certain his death would come by assassination.
Then, as his 40th birthday approached and he began to realize the difference-making would be limited to his sliver of the world in the Valley, he decided his death would more likely come in a traffic accident. Probably while rushing and paying too much attention to his cellphone as he tried to squeeze too much into each day.
But since his diagnosis, he sees a very different end in his future.
“Suicide,” Jennings says matter-of-factly, forming a gun with his index finger and pointing it at his temple. “Too many people look at suicide as a bad thing. I don’t. Helping others has always been my goal in life, and if there comes a time when not only am I not helping others, but I’m the one who is a burden to others, I think suicide is a perfectly appropriate option. I don’t see that as something that should be feared. It’s just the reality of the situation.”
The death of CACLV is not an option, Jennings said. It existed before he arrived and it will continue long after. While the board in the past year has begun to talk about life after Jennings, members believe they’re years from having to choose a successor.
Their current mission is to continue to expand what Jennings has built. Ross Marcus, the former director of Northampton County Human Services, has been brought in as CACLV deputy director to help shield Jennings from 60-hour work weeks. And any management staff that’s hired now works closer with Jennings to learn his brand of combat. Maybe, Negron said, “an Alan Jennings Jr.” will rise from the ranks.
In the meantime, Jennings said he’ll keep slugging away.
“The world is still pretty screwed up,” Jennings said. “So, I’ve got a lot to do in a relatively short amount of time.”
Twitter @matthewassad21
610-820-6691
ALAN JENNINGS
* Age: 57
* Residence: Allentown
* Career: 35 years with Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, including 25 years as executive director
* Education: BA in political science at Dickinson College
* Board memberships: Allentown Neighborhood Improvement Zone Development Authority and board of directors of the Allentown Housing Authority.
* Outreach: Teaches a social entrepreneurship class at Lehigh University titled “How to change the world”
