Margaret up on stage:

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To a wildly cheering crowd, he introduced them as his childhood friends and spoke of how he couldn’t wait to run to their house to play music. At one point, he handed the microphone to Margaret to say something, but “I was crying so bad, I was too emotional, so I pushed it back.”

Moments like that make people think Margaret and John are sharing the high life with Wonder. Nothing, they say, is further from the truth.

“Stevie is hard to get hold of,” says Margaret, who hasn’t spoken to him since that night. “We told him about the house, about being robbed, and he said a bunch of times we should move into his mother’s old place. But one time when we went over there, someone was already living in it. They kind of chased us away.”

John claims his old friend gave him money (“maybe $5,000”) after the robbery eight years ago, and has given him some keyboards over the years. He shies away from asking for too much help because, as Margaret says, “John loves Stevie. He doesn’t want to say anything bad. He figures Stevie will help eventually.

Margaret is less patient. She shakes her head. “He ain’t helping us. We asked so many times.”

The two get by on monthly Social Security checks, John’s $813, Margaret $662 plus a $69 SSI supplement. This places each of them below the U.S. poverty line, the same as 21% of Detroit’s seniors.

Calls to Stevie Wonder’s representatives for this story ultimately yielded a phone call to Wonder in Los Angeles from his agent, Brett Steinberg who said Wonder expressed happiness that someone was bringing John and Margaret’s story to light, that he acknowledged their long friendship and that he had helped John in the past, but lost his number after the 2007 concert and hadn’t been able to contact him. He asked for (and was given) John and Margaret’s phone information.

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Their story just shows that when we need help, we should simply ask for it, and let the person give us definite feedback regarding whether or not they will extend that help, instead of sitting back and expecting that person to assume that we, in fact, need their help. It looks like Margaret and her brother will probably finally be getting the help from their old friend Stevie after all and hopefully they will not have to be just another statistic in Detroit city, living out the conditions that Stevie sang about in “Living For The City.

Source: Detroit Free Press