James Robertson
James Roberts, who the media dubbed "the walking man," is living life, and life is pretty good.
Bill Laitner of the Detroit Free Press caught up with him.
He's moved to the burbs. He no longer walks that ridiculous walk to get to work. He has a 20 minute commute in his new red Ford Taurus. He watches sports on a 60-inch screen TV. And he's ditched the folks who were hounding him for money, Laitner writes.
Ahhh, what a difference the generosity of strangers can make.
In the days after his sudden fame, walking man James Robertson moved twice in three weeks so that he could elude those hounding him for money — ultimately filing a personal protection order against his landlady, who was also his ex-girlfriend.
Detroit police helped move Robertson after his two windfalls — the $360,000 in tax-free gifts donated by total strangers on three GoFundMe pages, and a $35,000 metallic-red Taurus given to him by a local dealer. Authorities weren't taking any chances after an 86-year-old lottery winner was found dead in a vacant Detroit house last month, six weeks after family members said he'd won $20,000.
Now settling in at a new apartment in Troy, Robertson is modestly rich. He was venerated for walking 21 miles a day, to and from an hourly job where he'd had a decade of perfect attendance. After the Free Press told his story, Robertson vaulted from obscurity to being the standard bearer for Detroit's mass transit woes, the need for auto coverage
reform, the income gap and the "living wage."
He's moved from the Woodward/Grand Boulevard area. "I may have been born there, but God knows I don't belong there anymore," he says.
