Over the past 22 years, it's run a quarter million Montana miles, and it's wearing mighty thin.
But even that old van seems new compared to Maycumber's trailer house, built during the Nixon administration and now twice as old as his college-age daughter.
At age 55, Frank Maycumber's eyes are shot, his back bent, his lungs full of asbestos. That's why he drew disability pay from Social Security, and supplemented it with some part-time work.
But last year, Maycumber worked a bit too much, made a couple thousand more than Social Security allows. Of course, he worked those extra hours in order to keep from losing his job, and the widower needed that job so he could get his daughter off to college.
Now, though, the government wants nearly $10,000 from Maycumber. And he's been dropped from Social Security's rolls. That means he'll have to try to work full time, all the time.
But if he does, his daughter just might lose her college scholarship, which was, after all, the reason he worked those extra hours in the first place.
“I'm being crushed in a hard place,” Maycumber said. “I'm under the rock, and there's no way out. How the government thinks I could ever pay them that kind of money - I'll be living on bread crumbs. It's like I don't exist as a person.”
Frank Maycumber's life started out normal enough. Normal family, normal house, normal boyhood. He lived not far from Libby, where his uncle worked for W.R. Grace & Co.
When Maycumber was in fifth grade, that uncle brought home from Grace's mine a big box of vermiculite for young Frank to use in his science fair project. Maycumber locked himself away, pulled out his Bunsen burner and began experimenting.
Trouble was, that vermiculite was all tangled up with asbestos.
But Maycumber didn't know that. He went on about his life, finished school, went to work. He worked construction, worked on Libby Dam, worked off-shore oil rigs, even worked a hitch as a surgical tech.
And somewhere along the way, Frank Maycumber's back gave out.
“If I sit too long,” he said, “it literally freezes up and locks into place.”
Maycumber takes a while to say all that, his breathing heavy and labored thanks to his science project with that now-famous vermiculite.
In 2001, his doctor reported “very severe pleural thickening measuring up to 1 centimeter posteriorly. Multiple pleural plaques are seen along the lateral chest walls as well. This is highly consistent with asbestos-related disease.”
Last year, during his annual check-up, doctors concluded his lung capacity had declined 30 percent from the year before.
It didn't help matters that Maycumber's eyes were dimming, leaving him legally blind.
“It got harder and harder to work,” he said. “Just finding a job that could accommodate all my issues was practically impossible. I needed help.”
Help came in 1992, when the Social Security Administration ruled that Maycumber qualified for disability benefits.
“I got $500 a month,” he said, “and we could live on it. We just made do.”
They made do, he said, mostly because the man who owned the lot his trailer sat on didn't charge much for rent. That landlord eventually sold the lot, though, and the new owner upped the monthly fee.
“Social Security didn't cut it anymore,” Maycumber said. “I went in and told them I needed to get some part-time work.”
The rules were clear. Maycumber could make up to $800 a month and keep his benefits.
So he signed up for 16 hours a week at Teletech, a national call center offering over-the-phone technical support for online banking. Teletech's Kalispell office prides itself on offering options for part-timers, and it seemed a pretty good fit.
“But what they don't tell you is that even the part-timers are forced to be full-time during training,” Maycumber said, “and Social Security doesn't make a distinction between training and work.”
Some of the mandatory training sessions lasted six weeks, he said.
Call center outfits are “pretty heavy hitters for people on disability,” said Ann Walker. “There's a real concentration of people at Teletech on Social Security.”
Walker works for the local Social Security office, and she's seen others in Frank Maycumber's position.
“It's very unfortunate,” she said. “But it's the reality we have to work with.”
Maycumber's reality was forced, he said, when he was told to attend full-time training.
“Frank is great to work with,” said his supervisor Robert Safford. Safford wouldn't talk about Teletech policies, or about full-time training and how it affects part-time workers; but he would say Maycumber is “a very dedicated employee who's good at his job.”
Which is why he went to the required training, “even though I was worried I could jeopardize my Social Security.”
He had to, he said. His daughter, Vanessa, had received a full ride to Wheaton College, near Chicago, in part for her straight A's and in part because she came from a low-income family.
Everything was paid for, Maycumber said, except transportation. Suddenly, he had to get her to school, so he had to get that old van fixed, so he had to go to work, and that meant he had to go to the training to keep his job.
“It was her big break,” he said. “I had to make it work.”
Maycumber was allowed to make about $9,600 per year and still keep his benefits. Because of the added training, he made $11,572.
But Social Security doesn't want the difference of a couple grand. They want the entire year's payment - $8,554.70.
“That's the rule,” Wilson said. “It's not always fair, but it's what Congress gave us.”
Between Social Security and part-time work, Maycumber should have made about $18,000 last year. But he went over the limit, and pulled in about $20,000. In response, Social Security wants all its money back, which would put him at about $11,500 for the entire year - an $8,500 penalty for a $2,000 overpayment.
“I don't understand this government,” Maycumber said. “They can give a big tax break to a rich company, but they want thousands from a guy like me. How can that be right? The whole purpose of Social Security is to get people back to work, but there's only penalties if you do.”
Frank Maycumber feels a bit like Alice, down the rabbit hole and into a surreal world where everything is topsy-turvy. It's a world of rules and regulations, of paperwork and policies.
On paper, Frank Maycumber looks like a guy who ignored the rules to his own peril. And so he did. He's buried here in the rabbit hole, beneath a pile of paperwork, some telling him to work, some telling him not to, all citing the rules.
Teletech surely does what it can to accommodate part-timers. Social Security, likewise, does what it can to accommodate recipients who can work a bit, too. There are, Walker and Maycumber agree, no bad guys here. But there are, perhaps, some bad policies.
Under that pile of rules sits the real Frank Maycumber, and his flesh-and-blood reality resembles nothing captured in the rule book. And he's not alone down here. Lots more folk live in this bureaucratic twilight zone, balancing work with benefits and hoping to make it to next month.
Some, Maycumber said, simply quit work at Teletech rather than train full time. Some, Walker said, wind up in her office, looking, like Maycumber, for an exception to the rules.
“Basically,” Walker said, “you get the whole check or you get no check. It's unfortunate, because people get caught between a rock and a hard place. It's not a benevolent system.”
There's talk of revising the rules so Social Security would only penalize people the amount of overpayment, instead of the whole year's payment.
“It would be a sensible thing,” Walker said. “We've been wanting to see that for years. But it takes an act of Congress.”
Meanwhile, she said, there are other problems besides Social Security's rules. There's the employers who demand full-time training for part-time workers. And there's the recipients themselves, who quite often “pay no attention to what we tell them, and then when they get into trouble they want an exception. A huge number of the problems are created by people who pay absolutely no attention to the rules.”
Frank Maycumber wants an exception.
He can work full time for a short while, he said, but it catches up fast.
“Dad can't work full time for the long haul,” said daughter Vanessa, who is studying pre-med and psychology at Wheaton. “I saw the effects it had on him, how he was definitely more exhausted every day. He can't do it.”
But he must. He's been tossed from Social Security's rolls for breaking the rules, and so now has no choice but to bring home a full-time paycheck.
On Thursday, he reapplied for benefits, but was told that because he's working full time, he's not eligible.
“I'm eligible if I'm part time,” Maycumber said, “but I can't get Vanessa home for summer break unless I have a whole paycheck. What am I supposed to do for the months it will take to get back on Social Security? And how am I supposed to pay them back all that money?”
They are good questions without good answers.
Nor does Maycumber know how he'll pay his Medicare premiums now that Social Security has set him adrift. Medicaid could make up the difference, except he makes $9.75 per hour, and the cutoff for Medicaid is $9 per hour.
“I'd make more by making less,” Maycumber said. “But I don't want welfare. I've never had welfare. I've always lived on what I could make.”
So the only solution, he said, is one that cannot last - working full time, against both his doctor's orders and his own better judgment .
“I'll go to work full time until I just can't go anymore,” he said. That means more paycheck, but also more withholdings, more insurance premiums, more total cost.
“Working more hours is definitely going to make my total cost of living more unbearable,” Maycumber said. “And I guess I'll get a loan to pay the government what it says I owe. I don't have much collateral, but I do have a very good credit rating, because I've never used credit much. I stay away from credit, and I always pay my bills. No matter what.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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