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| Sean Hall, Vendor of the Week. Photo by J.P. Gritton |
Something probably looks a little familiar about Sean Hall’s face.
About two months ago, Real Change interviewed one of its longest-selling vendors. He’s a gray-bearded, friendly-looking guy who has sold with such unfailing good nature that when his van burned a couple years ago, a local business raised enough money to buy him another. His name? Mike Hall.
“I was just making conversation with him,” remembers the younger Hall. “I was asking him about selling the paper, you know?”
Sean turned to the man, said that he looked kind of familiar, and got the response to end all responses.
“I should look familiar,” said Mike Hall, “I’m your father.”
In late summer of last year, Hall and his girlfriend came to Seattle from Grays Harbor County, wanting a change and a decent-paying job. And Hall had both for a while, plus an alright place to stay. But a couple of Hall’s “friends,” who’d been crashing at his house, wound up cozying up to Hall’s landlord — and bumping him and his girlfriend off the lease.
Hall wound up in a tent in a Seattle park, jobless, discouraged, and very wet. Having no fixed address made getting a job next to impossible, and a two-year-old charge for a nonviolent misdemeanor didn’t help, either.
“People don’t get that it’s hard to find work. It’s not that [I’m] lazy or don’t want to work. I’m a good worker,” says Hall.
So Hall tried his hand at Real Change, where, among other things, he reconnected with his old man.
“It was like it was fate,” says Hall, who recently met his grandpa for the first time.
“I appreciate the people that support Real Change and buy my papers. They really do help a lot,” says Hall.
You can find him at Third and Pine, where he sells almost as many papers as his dad.
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