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A success story from the street By JASON BOTCHFORD -- Toronto Sun Second Cup co-founder Frank O'Dea calls the homeless problem "the craziest disease in the world." He should know, he once was inflicted. For months in the 1970s -- he's unsure how many -- O'Dea was homeless on the streets of Toronto, boozing nearly every day and staying in shelters and flop houses for 50 cents a night in the Shuter-Parliament Sts. area. No amount of help or government programs could save him, because he refused to be saved and spent his days begging for enough money to buy a bottle of wine. "Any person with an addiction or a serious problem doesn't think he has a problem and doesn't think he needs help," O'Dea says. "I didn't think I needed help until the day before I got off the street." O'Dea, 58, said he changed because his only alternative was death.

Second cup co-founder Frank O'Dea spent several months homeless on the streets of Toronto. (Mark O'Neill, Sun File Photo)

"All the money in the world is not going to help people if they don't want to be helped," O'Dea said. "The government needs to have a safety net but that net can't be lined with luxuries. There have to be limitations to what people are provided with, serious limitations. I got out because I just couldn't live in that flop house anymore." After O'Dea "got out," he had a series of jobs before opening a coffee shop with Tom Culligan at the Scarborough Town Centre. In that spot the pair formed the Second Cup franchise, which they sold in 1985, making O'Dea a wealthy man. O'Dea would not want the government to turn its back on the homeless and insists government needs to provide survival basics -- shelter, nutrition and health care. But apart from that he supports a tough love approach. "The idea is we have to have a certain amount of tough love and people have to pay the consequences of their own actions," O'Dea said.

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