Evan Leedy, a 19-year-old Detroit college student, was on Facebook
Sunday morning when he read a story about James Robertson, a
56-year-old factory worker who walks 21 miles each day to and from his
job in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
“What he walks is like me walking to work every day and I honestly
couldn’t believe that,” Leedy told ABC News. “I thought to myself, ‘What
would I do if my car broke down?,’ and I thought, ‘I have my parents
and I have money to get an Uber.’”
“This guy doesn’t have that and he didn’t quit,” Leedy said.
After reading the Detroit Free Press story on Robertson, Leedy saw in the comments that people were looking for a way to help so he started a GoFundMe page for Robertson, a complete stranger to him, within minutes of finishing the story.
“I initially set the goal for $5,000 just to get him something, bus
fares and taxi rides,” Leedy said. “I went to go get ready and an hour
later we had $2,000 donated already.
“I bumped it up to $10,000 and within four hours we had over $10,000,”
he said. “I bumped it up again and by the end of the day we had over
$30,000 and now it’s up to over $50,000.”
Leedy says he received a call from the corporate offices of Honda
offering to donate a car, and a local Chevrolet dealership, Rodgers
Chevrolet, has also already offered to give Robertson a car.
“We are in a position that we can help and we just want to pay it
forward,” Angela Osborne, a customer service specialist at Rodgers, told
ABC News. “His story really struck home.”
All the attention and donations are coming as a shock to Robertson, according to his friend and sometimes driver, Blake Pollock.
Pollock, a vice president of wealth management at UBS,
started seeing Robertson walking on his daily commute a few years ago.
When Robertson cut through the parking lot of Pollock’s office building
one day two years ago, the banker stopped him.
Pollock told ABC News he learned that Robertson walked most of his
20-plus mile commute daily, leaving his home in Detroit early each
morning to get to work at a $10.55 per hour factory job in time for his 2
p.m. to 10 p.m. shift.
Robertson then does the reverse commute on the way home, having to walk
even further because the bus lines on his route do not run at night,
according to Pollock.
“I said, ‘Next time I see you I’ll give you a ride,’” Pollock recalled.
“A few months later I saw him literally standing on top of a snow bank
and gave him a ride.”
Pollock estimates he has given Robertson close to 100 rides in the years
since, even leaving his home at night to make sure Robertson gets home
safely.
“I’m sitting in my warm house and I’m thinking this guy has five more miles to walk,” Pollock said.
Pollock has also over the years taken friends who could not believe
Robertson’s story along with him on rides to show that Robertson does
indeed make that commute daily. Most amazing to Pollock is that
Robertson, who could not be reached today by ABC News, “thinks nothing
of it.”
“He’s said, “I can’t imagine people who don’t work. I can’t imagine not
doing that,’” Pollock said. “Nothing gets him down. “If it’s rainy, if
it’s cold, he just always says, ‘Hi Mr. Blake.’”
“I get to sit in the car and have that inspiration right next to me,” he
said of Robertson, who began walking to work a decade ago when his
then-car broke down.
