John Koenig

On his way to work an 8-hour shift at UW-Eau Claire’s Hilltop Center, a 14-year-old boy stopped at a convenience store to pick up a cup of coffee, like he had done so many times before. However, this day would be different. When the young man handed the store clerk a food stamp to pay for the beverage, he was met with a refusal.

It was at this moment in particular, senior Justin Otto said, that he faced bitterness toward his family’s situation.

“I was shaken up for weeks after that,” Otto said. “I could just see a lot of resentment.”

Otto, a social work major, said it was the experiences he faced growing up poor that will guide him throughout his future career.

According to census statistics in 1995, when Otto was 11 years old, 14.9 percent of people living in the United States received government assistance. Of that population, 26.2 percent were under the age of 18.

“We grew up on welfare checks and food stamps . it was a hard environment,” Otto said. “I know I will go into (social work) with a lot of experience backing it up.”

Growing up
Otto started working when he was 14 years old. He said he and his older brother would take whatever food they could from Hilltop home to their parents and siblings, who lived on the north side of Eau Claire. Yet, he said he and his siblings never felt deprived because of the generosity people in Eau Claire showed them.

Despite growing up in less-than-ideal circumstances, Otto said he knew he wanted to attend college.

“I’ve always been a huge reader,” he said, “and I wanted to develop my mind.”

However, Otto’s road to college wasn’t necessarily a smooth one.

When he was 15 years old, Otto’s parents divorced, an event that would affect the rest of his high school career.

“We were a very close family, none of us saw it coming,” Otto said.

“Before the split happened I was doing really well in school, but after the split … I was just so shaken up psychologically that I had to change my surroundings,” he said. “I started failing tests and I couldn’t sleep at night. I just went through a lot at that time.”

After the divorce, Otto made the decision to move to Richmond, Va., with his mother. The combination of his parent’s divorce and trying to fit in at a new school, with a more difficult curriculum, took its toll on the high school sophomore.

English and math especially were difficult at the new school, and Otto said his classmates ostracized him for not being able to keep up.

“Since I couldn’t keep up in class I got teased and picked on a lot,” he said. “Being the outsider . I would skip class for an hour or two and just read books.”

He found solace in poetry during that time; however, he said he knew Richmond was not the place for him after about four months of living there.

Otto said he made another big decision that would change the course of his life: the choice to drop out of high school and run away from home.

Otto said he realized at the time that he may not graduate from high school, but felt so excluded in Richmond that he had to get away in order to be happy.

“My priorities were different then,” Otto said. “I didn’t really think about my future. There was a point when I thought I wouldn’t go back to school.”

On the move
After a two-day Amtrak ride from Richmond to Washington to Chicago to Madison, where Otto’s father and brother were living at the time, the senior said he felt relief to be away from Virginia. He took with him drawings, notebooks, some clothes and a cat.

When Otto moved to Richmond, his dad and brother had left Eau Claire for Madison, where there were more job opportunities at the time. His brother, working as a cook, and father lived with friends they knew there.

Otto, then 16, decided to move in with his brother and father, where he was immersed in a culture much different than that he was used to. He said after living in a strict suburban setting, the move felt like a much-needed release.

“When I first moved to Madison, I lived in a party house with a bunch of ravers . so imagine that, a 16 year old surrounded by cocaine use,” he said. Although, he added, he stayed away from “the hard drugs.”

While in Madison, Otto registered at East High School but was unable to attend due to finances. Instead, he said, he filled his days with partying and drinking with the considerably older people he was living with, including drug users and strippers.

“I’d wake up at three in the afternoon, have a few beers and go out; they were crazy times,” he said. “I was a pretty big drinker when I was 16 and 17 … it used to be my favorite thing.”

Homecoming
After spending a few months in Madison and growing tired of the lifestyle, Otto said he resolved to go back to high school. He was able to graduate with the class he had left through hard work, including taking summer classes. However, in order to re-enter school, Otto, then homeless, first had to find a place to live.

After spending the summer moving from friend’s house to friend’s house, Dale Gable, the mother of one of his middle school friends and a grant manager in the foreign language department at Eau Claire, agreed to let him live with her family.

After securing a residence, Otto was able to register and attend Memorial High School, where he met both his now-roommate, Eau Claire freshman Rachel Rindo, and his best friend, Eau Claire senior Sarah Ivory. Otto credits Ivory with motivating him to turn his life around and graduate high school.

“Her family was very supportive, and she gave me a lot of hope for the future,” he said. “I worked through a lot of my psychological difficulties, and she helped me get clean and sober.”

Gable said Otto’s transformation from when he arrived at her house to when he graduated from high school was amazing to watch.
“He’s always been the same Justin,” she said. “He has very well developed self-discipline and focus … I think of him sometimes as someone that has become seasoned at a very young age, because he had to be independent.”

Rindo said her roommate’s compassion for others is his most admirable trait.

“He’s an incredibly charismatic person,” she said. “He’s definitely a caretaker.”

Applying life experience
Otto plans to graduate in May with a degree in social work. During his four years at Eau Claire, he has participated in poetry readings, writing a regular column in The Flip Side and has done stand-up comedy for charity. He currently works at the YMCA and is an intern at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northwestern Wisconsin.

Despite a somewhat difficult past, Rindo said her roommate maintains a sense of humor that allows him to relate well with children.
“I’ve seen him,” she said, “he does the robot for (kids), and it’s hilarious.”

Otto said the mark he hopes to leave on the world is one of equality for all people, be it equality of opportunity to recieve an education or equality in the form of justice.

“Growing up on assistance, you deal with a lot of social workers who don’t really care about their jobs,” he said. “I think that there’s so much inequality in this country, and that domestic issues are largely ignored.”

Additionally, Gable said Otto’s reflective nature and ability to take a self-directed path are traits she marvels at.

“I just want to be me,” Otto said. “I don’t like really ordinary things in general, I like being on the fringe sometimes.”