Seeking serenity in a wasteland

Column

Lester Cypher found serenity and purpose in his life about the time many men born in the same era responded to having neither by embarking on legendary midlife rebellions.

While these peers sought fulfillment in sporty cars, racy women and trendy investments, Cypher's satisfaction came from old pickup trucks, an uncommonly patient wife and storing up, as the good book says, treasure in heaven.

Cypher has lived in this contented fashion most of the last quarter century, as he tells it, since God arrived entirely out of the blue, over a telephone line. He thought he was taking a call about the services offered by his pest control company, and the next thing he knew, he and a woman from Tarpon Springs were talking about Jesus.

One unexpected thing led to another and suddenly he was weeping, confessing and, as surely as if he'd come to the altar at a summer tent revival, Lester Cypher was getting himself saved.

In this, Cypher was not entirely unlike Paul — the improbable convert who wound up writing all those letters to first century Christians — minus the wrestling with a divine spirit. Perhaps Jesus didn't see the point. Up until the phone call with the woman from Tarpon Springs, Cypher didn't deny Jesus or persecute his followers. In fact, he didn't think much about him one way or the other.

Hilda — Mrs. Cypher — did. Think about Jesus, that is. And that may have helped her through the first 30 years of their marriage, when Lester pounded too many beers and earned his living in ways that couldn't have made her proud.

"I was a slumlord," he says flatly. Waving a hand around an office four strides in one direction and less than six in the other, he says, "I'd put a partition down the middle of a space no bigger than this and put two families in here."

It was enough sometimes to make Hilda rue her choice of attire for the day they met. "She wore that red dress," Cypher says, "and that was it."

He was a 19-year-old Marine whose father had been happy to sign him over to the military. "He thought it might take some of the wise-guy out of me." She was from Brooklyn, and a lady. He moved fast. She hopped aboard, and hung on for the ride.

Nearly 56 years later, Cypher concedes he married above himself. "That woman," he says, "deserves a medal."

Some folks would say the same of Cypher, but only those who have known him since 1985 when, having twice gone bust in the slumlord business on Long Island, N.Y., he and Hilda moved to New Port Richey to start fresh. How fresh, Cypher couldn't have guessed.

He figured he'd strike it rich killing other people's bugs, knowing the conditions in Florida were such that the supply side would always have the upper hand. Then, entirely without warning, Cypher was in the business of being saved.

That's how Cypher got into the line of feeding people.

* * * * *Through Volunteer Way, the ministry he operates, unpaid, out of cramped offices and a makeshift warehouse on Congress Street, Cypher and his team — a few salaried staffers, a squad of volunteers — serve some 4,000 families 50-pound boxes of food each week. They ferry food supplies to elderly shut-ins, funnel grocery items to food banks throughout Central Florida, and even provide showers and laundry facilities to the homeless in Moon Lake.

If the work is fulfilling, Cypher is, at last, ill at ease. His vexation appears to have begun with a piece of donated property where he means to situate an overdue expansion providing abundant storage space and offices with breathing room.

The site, just up the street, was an idled dump once operated by J.D. Parker & Sons, the venerable garbage haulers. Cypher knew the company — the Parkers emptied Volunteer Way Dumpsters for free — and the land's history. Nonetheless, when the family responded to a news article in autumn 2008 about the charity's need to expand by offering the property — nearly 7 acres — Cypher did not hesitate.

He wishes he knew then what he knows now. Who doesn't? In less than a year, with real estate in a full meltdown, Cypher says ruefully, "We could have just gone out and bought a building." Instead, the donated site exploded the prohibition against inspecting the mouths of gift horses.

Alas, when borings probing the depth of the underlying garbage proved faulty — instead of a manageable 21/2 feet, refuse ran 6 feet deep and more — Cypher's plan lost its wheels.

Before the steel building (stacked now behind a padlocked chain-link fence) could be erected, the garbage had to be dug out and hauled away, replaced by fresh fill.

* * * * *You imagine the chat with the dump truck fleet owner going something like this.

Cypher: How much is this going to cost?

Fleet owner: How much do you have in your checking account?

Cypher: About 200 grand, I guess.

Fleet owner: Well, this is your lucky day!

All that Cypher had scrimped together through community block grants, fundraisers and outright donations fed a parade of trucks taking the bad stuff out and bringing the good stuff in. Now, instead of a completed construction project, Volunteer Way has a two-tiered rectangle of sand and gravel sprouting weeds representing a six-figure wasteland.

A couple of weeks ago, Cypher issued a blast email that departed dramatically from his typical missives which are, like St. Paul's, generally upbeat, encouraging and instructive. In this one, Cypher complained of "burnout."

"I was always good at earning money," Cypher says. He's less good at asking people for it. Some folks have the knack. It turns Cypher's stomach. Nonetheless, inside 48 hours, here came another Volunteer Way broadcast. Never mind, he said. He would be all right; the ministry would be all right.

"God placed this on my heart that I have to do it," he says. Given that, he counsels himself, "Who are you to have a pity party? You think it's going to help anything if you go cry in the corner?"

And it's just about this moment you figure out the source of Lester Cypher's vexation isn't just the gol-durned acreage from an earlier hell. It's the money-eating property and it's the apartment houses the lender took back and it's the night the repo man backed up the tow truck to his daughter's shiny new Pontiac Grand Am — right there in the driveway while they were having dinner — and it was knowing, as a kid born to a family that "didn't have nothing" growing up on Long Island Sound, that sometimes dinner (and breakfast!) depended on how well you fished, crabbed or shoveled bivalves.

It was all of that, and all the other times he felt powerless to change the fix he'd gotten himself into. It was being 75 and thinking the "15 good years I have left in me" might not be sufficient. It was enduring, as does every committed minister — ordained or lay — this hard truth: "If one-one thousandth of what people said they were going to give us was given," he says, "our walls and roof would be lined with gold."

And it is accepting, in the next breath, how things stand. "But I don't worry about that," he says. "I really don't. This is not a business. It's a ministry."

Lester Cypher has managed his corner of God's work for 25 years, and, for the most part, it satisfies him. In the rare moment he rages against the conditions that thwart achieving more of the Almighty's tasks, he regrets — did you catch that? — his selfishness.

A guy like that, who keeps a calendar on the wall with Ronald Reagan aboard a horse and has reminders of Jesus everywhere else, believes in angels and other heroes who gallop to the rescue. What would be great is if a swarm of one or the other swooped in from nowhere, like some fateful telephone call, to help Lester Cypher match his sense of accomplishment to his God-blessed sense of contentment.

After all, the man is too darn old to survive a midlife crisis.