Sixty years ago, there were no playgrounds, no picnic benches, no hiking trails, and no campsites where I grew up. Back then, the only sounds filling the air were the bulldozers tearing through tin-roofed sheds—structures that had been homes to hundreds of us. I was a boy standing in the dust when they leveled what everyone called the “Hollis Warner Duck,” though to me it was just home.
I grew up in one of those converted duck sheds. Ours couldn’t have been more than a hundred square feet, with thin walls that did nothing to keep out the cold. We had no running water, no heat, no toilet—not inside, anyway. My Grandmother kept a little pot for nights too dark or too freezing to run to the shared outhouse. During winters, the wind sliced through the cracks in the boards, and my Grandmother would wrap me in blankets stitched from old shirts. She always whispered the same thing: “We came here for better. Better will come.”
Most of the families around us were Black and, like us, had come up from the South chasing the promise of a better life. But what we found were low wages and living conditions so poor that journalists once called us “the forgotten people.” I didn’t understand what that meant then. All I knew was that the adults stuck together, shared what little they had, and looked after each other’s children.
When the bulldozers finally came in 1964, I had already moved on with my Grandmother as we had already moved on to better pastures.
As the years passed, I became an entrepreneur and businessman. I wanted to give children of the next coming generations and adults alike the kind of inspiration and belief that had been given to me. I wanted to be the voice telling them, “Better will come.” Thus Loft Riches was created and inspired from the trials and tribulations of my childhood growing up back at that duck farm.
"All I knew was that the adults stuck together, shared what little they had, and looked after each other's children."