A red ''Spiritual Warrior" T-shirt waving flaglike in a booth near a Downtown farmers market caught Bobbie Kay Jeffreys' attention on Tuesday.
Jeffreys, head cashier at an investment firm, took a closer look at that design and another bearing the message ''Power of Prayer" before she bought a plaque with the ''Warrior's Prayer" from Kevin McCall of
Prairie Township.
Some folks might find the messenger as influential as the message on the T-shirts McCall sells on Tuesdays and Fridays at the Lynn and Pearl Alley Markets, where others sell purple peppers, pulled
pork and potted plants. The market, a collaboration among the Capital Crossroads Special Improvement District, the Economic and Community Development Institute and the Pearl Alley Growers' Association, opened in May and
will run through October.
McCall, 38, a Youngstown native, has been selling T-shirts this summer as part of his Brothers Ministry in Christ business. In the fall, he'll switch to sweatshirts, which also
will advance the notion of ''spiritual warrior," a combatant for God against evil.
The spiritual hasn't always been uppermost in McCall's mind, even when the warrior part was active in the Homeboys, the gang he
had been part of in his formative years on the north side of Youngstown.
Rumbling with crosstown gang members and selling drugs put him on a path contrary to the Christian teachings his grandparents and mother tried
to instill, he said.
He had brushes with the law but somehow managed to avoid arrest. Eventually, he realized the wrongness of his old ways and decided to go straight.
McCall started to reconnect with the church,
but the religious message firmly sank in about five years ago, he said recently at his home.
McCall's desire to stay involved in the life of his daughter, Chanel, after his separation from her mother, motivated him
to get his life in order, he said.
That meant relocating from Youngstown — he initially stayed at the Downtown YMCA — and taking whatever temporary work was available.
''It was a gut check," McCall said.
The work ethic that his grandmother Gertrude Morgan had preached served him well, enabling him to find steady employment, move into permanent housing and gain new perspectives on life.
''When you've got to share a
shower and a bathroom with complete strangers, you learn not to take things for granted," McCall said. ''When I got my own place, I appreciated the former borders. I learned not to judge others as quickly."
Muscular and barrel-chested, McCall works in the receiving department at Wal-Mart in Grove City. He has taken a leave of absence from a lift operator trainer's position at Genco so could run his market stand near the
southwest corner of Lynn and Pearl, just behind the Rhodes Tower.
McCall has received financial literacy training and business counseling the past 18 months through several programs of Franklin County and the
Economic & Community Development Institute, a nonprofit program that spun off from Jewish Family Services last year.
An African friend with whom McCall used to work and pray had told him about the institute,
which arranges financing and secures private and public matching grants for microenterprises, small businesses that are capitalized at less than $35,000 and have the potential to create three to five jobs.
In
McCall's case, he's putting up $1,000 of his own to receive $1,000 each from the city and federal government, said David W. Lippy, the institute's chief executive officer.
Initially, the program was restricted to
refugees, said Tracey Tenwalde, the institute's program coordinator for individual development accounts.
McCall became one of the first African-Americans to join the program once the enrollment was expanded.
McCall's conservative approach in spending his grant allocation impresses her, Tenwalde said.
''It's kind of refreshing he's not just splurging his grant money; he's acting like it's coming out of his own pocket," she said.
McCall splits his time between central Ohio and Youngstown, where he hopes to
expand his business and to encourage young blacks in his old neighborhood; he graduated from Rayen High School in 1984. He expects to be a mentor when the entrepreneurial program expands to Mahoning County.
McCall
maintains religious ties in Youngstown but is more active at the First Church of God on the East Side, which had helped him through its entrepreneurship program.
McCall feels his street-tested past provides the
credibility he needs to relate to young people who might be faced with similar challenges. He hopes he can spare them some of the headaches that typically accompany bad choices.
McCall hopes to show them some of the
ways he balances body, mind and spirit; he is a weightlifter, chess player and spiritual warrior.
Read Kevin's Notes...
