By JULIE MINDA
SAN DIEGO — Decades ago, it would have appeared that the blue-eyed, black boy with the blond Afro in New Bedford, Mass., was poised for anything but success. Abandoned by his mother, not knowing who his father was and being raised by a cruel and abusive foster family, Steve Klakowicz spent his childhood longing for a different life.
Steve Pemberton
Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr./© CHA
Who would have thought that this discarded child would rise to become an expert in corporate diversity and a sought-after speaker on resilience and the resonance of small acts of profound compassion?
Now using his late father's last name (having first learned about the man after his death) rather than his mother's name as he did as a child, Steve Pemberton told attendees at his June 12 keynote address at the Catholic Health Assembly that he owes his success in no small part to caring people he's met throughout his life.
Pemberton called these kind souls "menders" and he urged his audience to fill that role for the broken. He said, "Menders offer new beginnings to others ... They bend the arc of people's lives. When there's no chance in the world for someone, menders go to work offering that person a chance."
Pemberton said when he was a toddler in his mother's care, she would drop him off with friends and sitters. Sometimes she would come back right away, but other times she would disappear for days. Her alcoholism made it difficult for her to mother him. A babysitter who witnessed the child sobbing because of separation anxiety wrote in a diary at the time, "This little boy doesn't have a chance in the world." When Pemberton wrote a memoir of his journey from abandonment in childhood to success in adulthood, he called it A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home. A movie he co-produced, A Chance in the World, was released recently.
After child protective services removed Pemberton from his mother's custody, he said he endured horrendous verbal and physical abuse during what he called "an 11-year sentence" with a foster family. Pemberton said even in that bleak period, "joy came to me in a powerful way …. starting in elementary school, there were these powerful moments — when I could see a different life than the one I was in."
Books were his escape. A neighbor, one of his menders, regularly dropped off boxes of her children's used books at his foster home. As a grown man exploring his own history, Pemberton asked the woman what had motivated her acts of kindness. She replied that her mother had taught her to "give from where you are."
A spelling champ, Pemberton basked in the affirmation of a judge at his elementary school spelling bee. She looked at him with a mother's pride. The woman was employed in Upward Bound, a college preparation program working with low-income students, and Pemberton was lucky enough to find his way to the program and have her as a mentor during his high school years.
When he was a senior in high school, Pemberton enlisted a social worker's help to escape his abusive foster family. After hours of fruitless phone calls seeking a family able to take Pemberton in, the social worker asked Pemberton if he knew anyone who might open their home to him.
Pemberton remembered a man who did some work with Upward Bound whom he'd once overheard praising him as the kind of son he'd want to have. The social worker called the man's office and found him at his desk on a weekend, not a normal practice for this bachelor professor. The professor agreed to let Pemberton move in with him. He gave Pemberton advice and encouragement, and he guided the young man through college admission and scholarship applications. Pemberton was accepted to Boston College, his first choice.
In a public forum with Pemberton years later, the professor was asked what prompted him to say yes when the social worker called. He said he felt God was telling him to trust and say yes.
Pemberton told the audience that he was determined to build a life he could be proud of. Now a married father of three, he's achieved career success. He's mindful though that his greatest accomplishments could be those that are unheralded — the occasions when he himself has acted as a mender.