Uptown StreetWise vendor's struggle for better life dashed by violence

As a woman fond of conversation, she found peddling newspapers to be lonely work. Standing along restaurant row on Randolph Street or outside an Uptown Starbucks, she felt discouraged when people passed her — an outgoing, red-haired, middle-aged woman — and wouldn't even make eye contact.
But Gearheart loved the community of StreetWise, the Chicago newspaper that helps the hard-up make a little money.
For the past few years, in the paper's third-floor office in an old Uptown building, she found companionship, a place to show off her grandkids, talk about politics, play Candy Crush and work on her writing.
"She came after she got out of the penitentiary," said A. Allen, a vendor. "I was the same way. She couldn't find work. Neither could I. But you can sell newspapers."
It was Friday morning in the StreetWise office, and the writers' group, where Gearhart had found so much solace, was in session, without her.
On Wednesday afternoon, on a nearby Sheridan Road sidewalk, Gearhart was shot to death.
Someone in a passing vehicle fired repeatedly, hitting and wounding a man, hitting and killing Gearhart. Police say both victims appeared to be unintended targets.
At the age of 57, Gearhart seemed to have outrun the worst times in her life. She had survived addiction to drugs and made it out of prison — two stints for felony retail theft — with her optimism intact.
At StreetWise she met like-minded vendors who enjoyed her big laugh and blunt opinions.
"She was an older woman, but she didn't act it," said John Hicks, 42. "She was very energetic, made you laugh. And she was a tough woman, very tough. She wouldn't let nobody run over her."
Tough, he said, but also generous.
In recent months, knowing Hicks hasn't had steady housing, Gearhart would invite him to her studio to shower, always supplying him with the luxury of a clean towel.
StreetWise vendors are encouraged to focus on the future more than on the past, so Gearhart's newspaper friends don't have a full portrait of her life. What they know comes largely from what she wrote.
She appears to have had eight children, the offspring of several men of various ethnicities.
"From these children," she once wrote, "I have six grandsons and one granddaughter. While they are of many races, they all have one Granny, Me! Yesterday we were at the zoo and one of my grandsons asked me why he looks so different from me. He said, 'Why are our colors so different?' My answer was that God makes us all different and God never makes a mistake."
In another essay, she wrote about recovering from drugs.
"It's an up and down issue," she wrote. "It's harder some days than others."
Above all, she wrote, she wanted to become "a proper member of society instead of a career criminal."
Gearhart talked of growing up in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, but her voice carried a Southern inflection and she apparently had family in Mississippi. She once told another vendor that white people in Mississippi called her names for spending so much time with black people.
"Even though she was white," said A. Allen, her fellow vendor, "a lot of people here considered her to be black because she had the attitude. She knew how to relate and socialize."
But she was white, German-Irish by heritage. Some of the black vendors urged her to try selling her papers in black neighborhoods, telling her she'd have more luck there, just as they had more luck in white neighborhoods.
Gearhart preferred staying close to home, in the racially mixed, gentrifying, and often volatile North Side neighborhood of Uptown.
Since her release from prison about four years ago, she had moved around, but early this year she took a new apartment. Shortly before that, she was helping set up for the StreetWise holiday free-shopping market, where vendors get to pick from donated goods.
She spotted a set of elegant china.
"She saw these dishes and almost lost her breath," said Julie Youngquist, executive director of StreetWise. "They were so classy."
She took them home.
"She was not quite happy-go-lucky," said Suzanne Hanney, editor of StreetWise, "but she was making an effort to be consciously happy. I remember her saying to me once, 'I just want to be a grandmother.' She just wanted a happy, secure life."
Penny Gearhart seemed to be getting closer to that life, and then she walked along a city sidewalk on a summer afternoon and became another number in the Chicago violence count, another victim of the killers she once lamented in an essay.
"My prayer and fervent plea," she wrote, "is for the young men of the community to take stock of themselves and see how precious life is. The killing must stop."