By: Joe Capozzi
THE CLOCK IS ticking on Jack The Bike Man.
“Jack The Bike Man,’’ as Samuel H. Hairston III is known around West Palm Beach, says he is doing just fine these days, at least as fine as anyone who’s “a young 81” can be doing.
But Jack The Bike Man, the self-named charity he started nearly a quarter century ago, is pedaling toward an uncertain future, which would seem unusual considering how his nonprofit purchased a permanent home only two years ago.
The problem, though, is that the new home, an old Cheney Bros. warehouse at 426 Claremore Drive on the edge of the city’s Flamingo Park neighborhood, is sitting empty because it needs about $5 million in renovations.
Neither “Jack the Bike Man'' the person nor Jack the Bike Man the charity has the money. And on top of that, the landlord of JTBM’s current temporary location, a smaller building next door at 420 Claremore Drive, wants the bike charity out by the end of the year.
If JTBM can’t raise enough money in the coming months to pay for minimal renovations, which would allow the charity to partially move into its new 21,000-square-foot home, Hairston hesitates to guess where it might be a year from now.
“We will be homeless again,’’ he said, referring to the nomadic endurance of his popular charity over the past 24 years, with seven moves along an 8-mile stretch of U.S. 1.
