Dead end street:  Linda came and went quietly on Pacific Avenue
By DAN WHITE
Sentinel staff writer
SANTA CRUZ - Linda Anne Sipos liked to sit on a bench and watch her partner sing "I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads." C.J. Stock sang beneath the overhang of the parking lot on Church Street and Pacific Avenue, sometimes with Linda as his only audience. He'd stand there in his boots and cowboy hat, strumming a six string, his guitar case open for bills and coins. Linda was there to support him. She was 5-foot-9, with delicate features and gray-blonde hair. Though she lived hand-to-mouth and slept in the woods, she walked with grace. Lynn Robinson, a self-employed gardener, remembers talking to Linda and Stock not long ago. "I remember (Linda) standing back from (Stock) with those warm blue smiling eyes," she said. Linda died November 16, 2003. Stock woke up to find her lying still in her sleeping bag next to him, in a grove of trees near the San Lorenzo River levee. She was 52. Stock tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was too late. "If only I'd woke up sooner," he said last week, holding his guitar and weeping as he sat on an upside-down bucket on Pacific Avenue.

A better life
Born in Oakland, Linda lived in Santa Cruz and Hayward most of her life. She was a legal secretary for 25 years. She liked her work but struggled for many years with alcoholism. She met Stock while he was busking in front of a shop awning on Pacific Avenue, five and a half years ago. Linda wanted a better life for them both. When the two grew frustrated with busking on the avenue, they got their things together, loaded up a car and tried their luck in the Central Valley. It didn't work out. Soon they were back in town. Still, Linda saw homelessness as a phase that would end. "She told me, 'Well, we'll get better. It'll be OK, we can do this,'" Stock said. "But she wouldn't go into a shelter. I couldn't make her." Stock said his companion feared going into the River Street emergency shelter because staff workers would have separated the couple. He said she shied away from shelters because she thought they would have a problem with her drinking and screen her out. Homeless Community Services Director Ken Cole said the River Street Shelter allows couples to be admitted together, though men and women are housed in separate dormitories. The National Guard Armory, in DeLaveaga Park, allows couples to sleep side-by-side, he added. The armory had opened for the season Nov. 7 and was not full to capacity on the evening Linda died. Cole also said the armory admits clients with alcohol problems.

Making the best
Linda had many friends on the avenue. "Ugly Jim" Hunt, a panhandler who occupies a corner across from the downtown Metro Center, said she was gentle and accepting. "She was so classy. She could have fit in the richest neighborhood," Hunt said. "When (homeless colleague) Jimmy was around her, it immediately turned him into a perfect gentleman. She just had that effect on people." "Most people out here on the street try to use you," Hunt added. "She just accepted you for who you were." Stock said he and Linda were doing OK in recent months. He joined other buskers in September at a gala performance at the Louden Nelson Center, with Linda watching. With help from friends, Stock had managed to get long-overdue dental work and was looking forward to indoor gigs. Linda got an unemployment check for a few hundred dollars so they stayed in a motel room for a while. But they both got the stomach flu and were laid up for weeks, he said. Stock was too burned out to busk for change. The bad luck got worse. A month before Linda died, a young woman on a bike knocked her down while rolling the wrong way down Pacific Avenue. Linda's knee was hurt badly. Though she was trying to stay away from alcohol, she found herself numbing the pain with brandy. "She'd want to share a bottle with me," Stock said. Her determination to stop drinking for good led to seizures from alcohol withdrawal, Stock added. Though she was briefly under observation at Dominican Hospital, she checked herself out because she didn't want to be alone, he said. Three days before she died, she quit drinking. Her decision came too late. She and Stock had been sleeping in a eucalyptus grove above the San Lorenzo River when he woke up, knowing something was wrong. "She was in the sleeping bag next to me, still warm - that's the worst part of it," he said. Stock insisted things would have been different if the system were "more open, if it were easier to get her into shelter ... I don't ever want anyone to go through what I'm going through. Not ever." The cause of death, according to the county Coroner's Office, was "fatty metamorphosis of the liver" attributed to years of alcohol abuse. "You can only drink so much before your body stops working," said Alan Burt, at the Coroner's Office. Linda is survived by children Jason Vanderford of Alameda, Summer Vanderford of Boulder Creek and Jade Vanderford of Oakland; mother and stepfather Maxine and Jim Lewis; and former husband Randy Vanderford. None of the survivors could be reached to comment for this story.

-- Santa Cruz Sentinel, 12/14/03 --