THE HOME HE LEFT BEHIND

MITCH SNYDER, HIS EX-WIFE AND HIS SONS, RECALLING AND EARLIER LIFE

NEW YORK -- NEW YORK -- Before all the fasts, before "60 Minutes," before the made-for-TV movie, before the confrontations with the White House, before he became a nationally acclaimed advocate for the homeless, Mitch Snyder had a very different life with Ellen, Ricky and Dean.

It was a life in which he married young, fathered two children, lived in a small Brighton Beach apartment, sold washing machines and was once honored as the Maytag "man of the month." It was also a life in which he bounced from job to job, couldn't pay the rent, became increasingly withdrawn, passed bad checks, did a stretch in prison and finally, one day, walked out.

When Mitch Snyder abandoned Brooklyn for Washington on that autumn day in 1972, he left behind a young wife and two small boys who were forced to live on welfare checks and food stamps. For the next 13 years, as he grew increasingly prominent in the nation's capital, Snyder had no contact with his former family.

Ellen Daly, a candid and chatty housewife who is now remarried, recalled her marriage to Snyder in a long, emotionally charged interview in the neatly appointed living room of her Sheepshead Bay apartment.

"We had no money," Daly says. "He was ashamed, he was angry, he was upset with himself, he hated his life. We were in debt, we owed rent, we kept getting evicted. We kept taking money from my father . . . He just felt he was caught in a web and he had to get out."

Although she makes no effort to hide the pain that Snyder caused her, Daly is remarkably free of bitterness toward her former husband. They reestablished contact 2 1/2 years ago after she saw him on television, and Snyder now stays in occasional touch with Ricky, 23, and Dean, 20. Ellen Daly, at 44, has finally made her peace with the man she calls Mitchell.

"I said to him on the phone, 'Mitchell, forgive yourself. I forgave you a long time ago.' He said no -- that's his punishment to himself. He said, 'Till the day I die, I'll never forgive myself.' "

It all seems so long ago, these faded black-and-white snapshots spread on her coffee table: Mitch, a gangly Flatbush teen-ager with a slicked-down pompadour, Ellen in a towering beehive hairdo. But in a 1985 letter written shortly after they reestablished contact, Snyder showed he had not forgotten:

"I meant it when I said I'm sorry for all the pain I've caused you and the boys. I swear to you that I truly wish it had been otherwise. I beg your pardon. I love all of you. Mitch."

Mitch Snyder is sipping tea in the third-floor lounge of a cavernous concrete building on Second Street NW. He is enormously proud of this building. With nothing more than a determination to starve himself to achieve his goals, Snyder, 44, wrested the decaying structure from reluctant federal officials and helped transform it into a brightly painted shelter for 1,000 homeless people.

Dressed in his trademark Army surplus jacket, faded jeans and work boots, Snyder cradles his newest accessory, a walkie-talkie, which crackles now and then with messages from other members of the Community for Creative Non-Violence. He takes no salary, wears donated clothing, eats discarded food, drives an old Chevy. He sleeps on a mattress on the floor of a sparsely furnished room down the hall.

A courageous, risk-taking hero to some, an infuriating, headline-hungry zealot to others, Snyder has become a symbol, a constant reminder of those who sleep in alleys and on heating grates. He has spent nearly two years of his life not eating for various causes, slept on the streets for two winters and been arrested more times than he can remember.

These exploits have made Snyder a media star, a status he says he doesn't particularly enjoy. As the homeless issue has become more fashionable, one catches glimpses of Snyder at a glitzy fundraiser at Dominique's, taping a show with Geraldo Rivera or rubbing shoulders at a fund-raising gala with Valerie Harper, Eunice Shriver, Jack Valenti and members of Congress.

For the first dozen years of controversy and celebrity, Snyder says he tried, sometimes without success, to block out all thoughts of his ex-wife and two sons in Brooklyn.

"I had to get out of there," he says. "I was just trapped under responsibilities and obligations that weren't me, that I didn't want to deal with, and that I incurred primarily because I married before I had any understanding of who I was. I was 20. It was an incredibly stupid thing to do . . .

"I just literally woke up one day in a cold sweat and realized it was crazy. I was not going to spend the rest of my life doing what I was doing. That was not what I was supposed to be. I didn't know who I was, but I knew who I wasn't."

He is not trying to "excuse ways in which I was irresponsible back then," Snyder hastens to add. He simply found himself "unable to be a husband and father in the traditional sense.

"I probably feel the weight of this building, and the people in it, more than my children when they were growing up and I was at home," he says.

Snyder does not have to be asked about the parallel with his own childhood. His father, Robert Snyder, left his wife for another woman when Mitch was 9, severing all ties to his family and leaving them in financial distress.

"I grew up swearing never, ever to do to my kids what my father had done to me," Snyder says. "Because that wasn't a good thing to do to a kid, to leave him without a father." Yet somehow, he says, "I did exactly what was done to me."

The Life That Fell Apart Ellen Kleiman met Mitchell Darryl Snyder at night school in the fall of 1961. He was wearing a black shirt, black pants, black shoes and a black raincoat. He had dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School and was making a short-lived attempt to get his diploma; she had graduated from Lincoln High and was hoping to become a nurse. They were 18.

"He was very quiet," Daly says. "He was very sad. Something was hurting him." Although she was quite shy around boys, something attracted her: "I was the type that would bring home all the hurt animals, and all the hurt people."

Snyder asked her to have coffee, she agreed, and they began to date. They saw "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and "Moon River" became their song. But movies were rare because Snyder never had any money; Ellen always paid his way. More often than not, they would share a hot dog and a walk on the Brighton Beach boardwalk.

One day, Snyder asked Ellen to accompany him to Union Square in Manhattan. After a long subway ride, they reached a park filled with drunks and assorted bohemian characters.

"All of a sudden he would get up and start to talk," Daly recalls. "It was more or less about communism and politics and all that . . . He began to like it. I guess all the things he wanted to say, that were inside of him, he could do it there . . . He would draw crowds. He was always able to draw crowds."

Afterward, they would go to Horn and Hardart and sit for hours with one tea bag and a cup of hot water. Snyder would approach others in the automat and ask if they could afford to buy a cup of coffee. Inevitably, Daly says, "I would have to pay for coffee for the other people."

As the relationship grew, Ellen began to learn about Snyder's background and why he incessantly played Al Jolson records. Snyder's father had been a child radio star who sang with Jolson and Eddie Cantor, sometimes working at burlesque houses. Even after Robert Snyder became a businessman, the family still counted show business figures among their friends.

Ellen also learned how deeply Snyder was shaken when his father ran off to Chicago. "He was hurt that his father didn't care enough to get in touch, to want to see him," Daly says. "He was hurt and he was angry."

Life had become a daily struggle for Mitch and his mother. "I remember the absence of my father very clearly," Snyder says. "My father made a lot of money, but got real testy about sending enough along."

Beatrice Snyder went to work as a nurse, and Mitch began breaking into parking meters. He kept getting caught. At 16 he was sent to an Upstate reform school for bright but antisocial youngsters.

Ellen's world was very different. While Mitch's parents were nonpracticing Jews -- his father, in fact, had been strongly antireligious -- she had a strict Jewish upbringing. While he lived in a dark and dingy Flatbush apartment, her mother kept the family's Neptune Avenue house bright and cheery. Her father, a Polish immigrant who made dresses by machine, was strongly opposed to the relationship.

"My father wanted better for me," Daly says.

Nevertheless, on Oct. 13, 1963, Mitch and Ellen were married by a rabbi in a small temple on Brighton 13th Street. All of Ellen's close relatives were there; Mitch had only his mother and his older sister Roberta.

From the first days of the marriage, Daly says, "I was the typical housewife. I would have his dinner ready. It's just how I'm raised. Women's lib would kill me."

Snyder's father died after they were married, and he flew to Chicago, uninvited, for the funeral. Within a year of their wedding day, Ellen was pregnant. After Ricky was born in March 1965, the couple separated for the first time.

Snyder "was frightened of being a father," says Daly, who moved back to her parents' house.

They reunited a few months later, and Dean was born in 1967. But Snyder was still having trouble adapting to a 9-to-5 existence. He sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners and Maytag washers, worked as a job counselor on Madison Avenue, even tried construction work. "When he first would start any of these jobs, he went gung-ho," Daly says. "He could sell anything, because he had that gift of gab . . . But then he would get discontented. He would get bored." And he would quit.

Snyder says he grew to hate each job because "I was doing it strictly for money," a concept he now likens to prostitution.

Snyder's erratic job record meant that Ellen's father had to pay some of their bills, sometimes even the $170 rent on their Seacoast Towers apartment. Although Snyder was not especially political at the time, Daly says, he became depressed after Robert F. Kennedy was murdered.

"He got deeper into himself," Daly says. "He was withdrawing from the children. He wanted to be left alone a lot. He'd watch TV or go to sleep . . . Sometimes he would stay away a day or two, he would roam the streets. I was worried, I was upset, I was going crazy . . .

"My father kept saying, 'End it already,' and I kept trying to save it, because I still loved the man. I took the guilt on myself, which we Jewish people are known to do. I felt if I could have been of more help to him, if I was more intellectual . . . "

As their finances deteriorated along with their marriage, Snyder passed a few bad checks. "It was really very simple to do," he says. "To be honest, in working in the business world, I learned that everyone is essentially ripping everyone else off . . . The laws simply make it possible for them to rip people off without going to jail."

In 1969, Snyder informed his wife he was leaving. "I just said, 'Listen, I can't do this anymore.' She said, 'What do you mean, you can't do this anymore? We've got two kids. It's a little bit late . . . ' She didn't understand. It hurt her very deeply."

After hitting the road, Snyder says, "I just kind of bounced around. Very Jack Kerouac, I suppose, looking for myself."

The following year, Snyder went to California to pursue an illegal fast-money scheme. He hooked up with a shady character who had helped him pass bad checks in Brooklyn. Days later, police arrested the pair in Las Vegas in a car that had been reported stolen. They also found some forged IDs. Snyder says his associate had rented the car and that he does not believe it was stolen.

Nevertheless, Snyder was charged with auto theft. Ellen's father paid the bail. After a few months back in New York, he was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. He was later transferred from California to the federal prison in Danbury, Conn.

Ellen visited her husband there every other week, and they talked of reconciling when he got out. She says Snyder promised to "stick to the job, be a real husband and father." Snyder says he doesn't recall making such promises, but hoped they could salvage their marriage.

Soon afterward, Daly says, "The love letters I was getting were becoming political letters. All of a sudden he was talking about the war and what the government was doing to our people."

Mitch Snyder had met the Berrigan brothers.

The Awakening Daniel and Philip Berrigan, at Danbury for destroying draft board records, were the leaders of a group of prisoners who had refused to fight in Vietnam. The two priests took Snyder under their wing, teaching him about radical Christianity, the Bible and nonviolent protest. "They saw the void in him, and they were there to fill it," Daly says.

That summer, Ellen received a call from prison authorities; her husband was fasting to protest the use of "tiger cages" in Vietnam. She was stunned. What about his chances for parole, his promises to her?

Snyder's fast ended 33 days later in a Missouri hospital. He fasted twice more before the authorities, who had offered him early parole, agreed to return him to his friends at Danbury.

The fast had infused him with "a sense of power," Snyder says. Feeling "supercharged," he returned to Danbury and organized other inmates in a work stoppage.

Ellen, meanwhile, was struggling to rear the boys herself. She was living on welfare and handouts from her father. Nathan Kleiman, who had worked since he was 11, was horrified.

Having destroyed any chance for parole, Snyder served his full term and was released in May 1972. When Ellen picked him up at Danbury, he "was like a stranger again," she says. "He was saying things that frightened me," insisting that they live in a communal setting.

Snyder brushed aside any talk of getting a job. "Money was evil then," Daly says. "It had no meaning to him anymore. He would say these are materialistic things. Your soul is important, your relationship to God."

Ellen made an effort to understand her husband's new life, accompanying him to antiwar gatherings, even meeting Jane Fonda. But, she says, "I felt like a dummy. The women were all in dungarees, no bras, and I would come all dressed up."

The final break came in the fall. "We sat on the couch and we both cried," Daly says. "There was no way to save the marriage. He was not here, he was not supporting me."

"She basically wanted me to be like other people, and I basically wasn't like other people," Snyder says. "If it doesn't work, I just kind of move on."

Snyder took an apartment in the East Village, working with a local advocacy group. In 1973 he moved to Washington to join CCNV, then an antiwar group. His wife filed for divorce and told Snyder it would be better for Ricky and Dean if he stopped parachuting in and out of their lives.

"I confess that made it easier for me," Snyder says. He says he provided no child support because he never earned any money. He avoided thinking about his sons, except for "late at night, when you're lying there sweating."

After the divorce, Daly says, "I just didn't hear from him. It was like he disappeared, he vanished."

One night, she says, "The dam just broke. I put the kids to bed, I put my head on my arms and I sobbed. I mean, it was terrible. Ricky came out, he was wearing those pajamas with the feet, and I'll never forget this. He put his arms around me -- he was only 6 or 7 -- and he said, 'When I get older' -- because he knew we didn't have much -- 'When I get older, I'm gonna get you the most beautiful dress, and I'm going to make you smile.' "

Daly paused for the first time in the interview. She picked up a napkin and dabbed at tears, thinking of her little boy trying to comfort her.

Fasting, Fame -- And Doubts Fasting is the ultimate confrontation tactic, not unlike threatening to jump off a building unless someone gives you what you want. It is especially effective in the hands of someone who, like Snyder, has an uncanny ability to draw media attention.

Against the advice of many friends, Snyder launched a fast during the 1984 presidential campaign, demanding that the White House turn over the decaying federal building on Second Street for use as a homeless shelter. On the 51st day of the fast -- with the election two days away, and "60 Minutes" preparing a segment on Snyder that evening -- President Reagan capitulated and agreed to turn the building into a "model" shelter.

When the $6 million renovation lagged, Snyder fasted twice more to force the White House to release funds for the shelter. Some critics were outraged. Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) called Snyder "a masochist who influences government by threatening to starve himself."

Still, the fight for the shelter made Snyder a certified folk hero. His life was dramatized in a CBS-TV movie, "Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story." It contained only a fleeting reference to his former life in New York. Martin Sheen, who played Snyder, called him a "saint."

But the saint was privately struggling with his conscience, says the woman who became his most intimate partner. Carol Fennelly, 38, who has been Snyder's companion for most of her 11 years at CCNV, says Snyder had trouble letting go of the past.

"He would wake up at night having dreams about his deserted kids," Fennelly says. "It would just prey on him."

A self-described "child of the '60s," Fennelly had left her husband in California because "he wanted bigger cars and bigger houses and I didn't." She lived at a CCNV shelter with her two children for five years, and she and Snyder became "a good working team," fasting side by side.

"I'm a good organizer, he's a real visionary," she says. "We fight and argue a lot. We're the only two people who can put up with each other."

Back in Brooklyn, Ellen Snyder was also putting her shattered life back together. In 1975 she married Tom Daly, a plumber from the Bronx, and they had a son, Tommy Jr., now 12. She got off welfare -- "the greatest day of my life," she says -- and Ricky and Dean began helping out with after-school jobs, first at neighborhood stores, then on the fishing boats at Sheepshead Bay.

Daly became dimly aware that Snyder was an advocate for the homeless, but she knew nothing of his celebrity status until she and her kids saw a rebroadcast of the "60 Minutes" piece in the spring of 1985.

"It was unbelievable," Daly says. "I sat there staring at a man I didn't know anymore -- the long hair, the jacket, the stooped shoulders. Dean was fascinated, like his father's a movie star. But Ricky was very quiet. He just stared. He was staring at his own face . . . There was a lot of hurt in his eyes."

Reunion Soon afterward, relatives sent Daly clippings showing that Snyder was to receive $150,000 for the upcoming CBS movie. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. Ricky was in college in Chicago, Dean wanted to start college and Tom was "breaking his behind" at his plumbing job. And Snyder hadn't given her a cent.

Ellen debated whether to call him. Tom Daly was opposed; other relatives egged her on. Finally, she dialed CCNV's number and told Snyder she was calling for the sake of the boys.

"As soon as I mentioned the picture and the money, all hell broke out," Daly says. "He said to me, 'You haven't called me in all these years, you didn't let me see the boys, and you're calling because I have money now, and you want money? This money's for the shelter, it's not my money.' He came off so cold and so horrible."

As Daly tearfully tried to explain, Snyder "started to cry like a baby. He said, 'I'm sorry, forgive me, forgive me. So many times I dreamed you'd call . . . So many times I wanted to call and I was frightened and I couldn't do it.' "

Snyder says he realized that Ellen was using the money as an excuse to reestablish contact. In any event, they spoke for an hour and a half. Snyder agreed to send the boys a few hundred dollars from his speaking engagements. He asked tentatively about seeing them.

That summer, Snyder and Carol Fennelly went to Brooklyn to see Ellen and Dean. The visit went well. They came back a month later to see Ricky, who had been away at school.

At first, Ricky Snyder says, seeing his natural father was "very bizarre."

"I've never hated Mitch or felt I had to forgive him for what he did," Ricky says. "He did what he had to do . . . He chose a life style that was not very conducive to providing child support."

Ricky says he vaguely remembers his father leaving home, "but even in the years before then, he wasn't there a lot. The only pain I ever felt was because of my mom."

Now he considers Mitch "a friend," Ricky says, "someone who I think is a good role model for certain things -- that if you feel something is right and you're committed to it, not to compromise your beliefs."

Ricky, an analyst for a Chicago research center, says the reunion also "told me a lot about myself. I'm not sure what I want to do with my life at this point."

His father urged both boys to drop out of school, and Ricky was once tempted to take his advice. "Ricky called me up one night in the middle of the night," Snyder says, "and was going through this crisis and wanted to know if he could come to Washington and work {at the shelter} . Ellen got very upset about that. Here she lets me back into their lives and I'm disrupting them."

Still, he is pleased to have some relationship with his sons after so many years. Ricky and Dean have visited the CCNV shelter several times, helping serve Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless or meeting Hollywood stars and having their picture taken with their famous father.

In Brooklyn, Ellen Daly follows her ex-husband's exploits with a mixture of pride and amazement, trying to reconcile his relentless compassion for the downtrodden with what happened between them.

"I was married to him, I lived with him, I slept with him, I had children by him, and yet there's parts of him I really don't know," she says. "He always told me he could love an abstract. It's hard for him to love on a one-to-one basis, I guess because he feels you can be rejected, like his father rejected him."

Snyder, finishing his tea, makes little effort to soften Daly's portrait of him as a driven, unhappy man, saying only that God has chosen him for this work.

"I don't consider myself a good person," he says. "I tend to be very impatient, I tend to be very short, I tend to make heavy demands on people. I don't have time or energy to give much one-on-one, and so I'm very hard on people around me. I take much more than I give. I give to people in the shelter, I give to people on the streets, I give to people who are suffering, but that's got little to do with people who are around me. They pay the price."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.