Shattered by the Recession, He Rebounded with Community Support

BY KATE MACDONALD

Dale Vangrevenhof

There is a saying that you never truly know what you have until you lose it.

What Dale Vangrevenhof had was a job. What he lost was much more.

An auto mechanic, he was with Whittaker-Lincoln Mercury in Inver Grove Heights for 13 years — “from the day they opened their doors until the day they closed them.” But he lost that job a year ago due to the recession, triggering a cascade of calamities that nearly cost Vangrevenhof his life.

His story shows how vulnerable a person can be in an economic downturn – but also how resilient the human spirit and the value of strong social supports.

Vagrevenhof wasn’t surprised when his dealership shuttered the day before Thanksgiving last year. He had seen business dry up because when new car sales dropped in the recession, repairs plummeted too.

The first shoe to drop, after the loss of his job, was a depression that the job loss brought on. Then, along with depression came drinking.  His steady job had held that lifelong problem at bay, but now it came back full force. Now jobless and drinking again, an arrest for driving under the influence followed soon after.

No Income

He spent 20 days in jail on the DUI charge. and then his driver’s license was revoked, which triggered another problem – with no license he couldn’t apply for an auto mechanic job, because he wasn’t insurable and thus couldn’t drive.

Then, unable to find work, came the inevitable: he couldn’t pay his bills.

“You can’t pay anything if you don’t have anything,” he said.

The car that he couldn’t even drive was repossessed in December, and foreclosure proceedings started on his house in February. The Rice County sheriff gave him six months to pay the $200,000 dollars to keep his house, but with no income, that was impossible.

Then the bad times got even worse. At one point immobilized with depression, he was hospitalized and diagnosed with bi-polar disorder.

Treatment was expensive, and here yet another bit of bad luck kicked in. Because he’d lost his job at a time when he was healthy and had a job, he didn’t qualify for Medicaid or state aid to help him pay his medical bills.

The Turnaround

This is when he hit bottom, Vangrevenhof said.

“Imagine the worst depression, then times 20 more, because that’s where I was at,” he said. And it was just then that he reached the turning point that got him on the road to recovery in more ways than one.

What turned things around, he says, was that a medical plan – Allina Partner Health Insurance — finally accepted him. Although it didn’t pay for his medications, it did help substantially by paying for doctor visits.

As a result, Vangrevenhof was able to enroll in an inpatient treatment program at United Hospital in St. Paul. It was there, he said, that for the first time he got “the tools to figure things out and the medicine to stabilize everything.”

Finally getting physically healthy, Vangrevenhof began to see alternatives to his economic ailments as well.

When he was released from the clinic, he did some research and found he could qualify for state aid to retrain himself in new job skills. Using state unemployment aid, and with the help of the Work Force Center of Faribault, he landed two years of college tuition, equivalent to about $10,000 dollars.

Practical Support

He enrolled at the Dakota County Technical College in Rosemount, where he could build on his mechanic’s skills by training in bio-medical equipment production.

Vangrevenhof also found especially critical support at the VFW in Northfield.

Having served in Germany in the 1980s, he signed up as a fulltime member of the VFW’s Color Guard. The network of friends and VFW colleagues helped nurture him through his toughest times with both emotional and practical support, such as helping him buy the books he needed for his first semester of school.

His house is still set to be seized in July, but the eviction date has been pushed back several times, and Vangrevenhof is hoping that he can get a new place before the final foreclosure deadline arrives.

This Thanksgiving marked the passage of an incredibly rough year. But oddly enough, Vangrevenhof says he is thankful for the experience in many ways.

He’s learned, he said, “to try the best I can, to move forward and not let the past get me down any more.”

To contact the author: mcdonalk@carleton.edu

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