Though Chicago’s affluent Gold Coast was just a few miles away, Lou Parks grew up in a radically different world. He lived in one of Chicago’s toughest South Side neighborhoods, in the decaying Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest public-housing projects in the country and one of the most dangerous. Peril lurked around every corner and in the darkened stairwells that led to the 11th-floor apartment he shared with his grandparents, Prather and Lucille Parks. Rival gangs kept a murderous grip on the neighborhood, and he watched more than one of his peers make a choice that, realistically, would end in either death or imprisonment. Despite the low odds for survival outside prison bars, the lure was great.

“It’s hard to stay out of gangs when you don’t have anything,” said the 30-year-old Parks, now of Des Moines. “They are the people who have money and power.

“I saw a lot of my friends who wanted to get out of gangs, and the way out of gangs is death.”

Lucille Parks was having none of that for her grandson, whom she took in as a young boy to provide him a stable home while his father, a career Army man, and his mother traveled from one military base to another. Parks’ grandmother wasn’t afraid to “instill Southern Baptist fear” in him, and he dutifully left the streets at 5 p.m. when the street lights came on and retreated to the safety of the apartment, where values of respect for all people, faith and self-respect were preached daily. Lucille helped him choose his friends, allowed him to drive the car only to take her to church or to run errands, and admonished him not to set his goals too low. She required him to get a summer job, and doled out his paycheck in change and small bills, saving the bulk of the money earned for a college education that few people in the South Side neighborhood even thought about attaining.

It’s not surprising, then, that the clothing store he recently opened in the Drake Neighborhood is named in his grandmother’s honor. Lucille’s Big City Fashions, located at 1171 25th St., brings urban lines of clothing to Greater Des Moines.

“I praise her name,” Parks said. “I owe her my life.”

Prather and Lucille Parks raised nine children in the shadows of the multistory monstrosities bedeviled by gang violence. “To have nine kids in that environment and to have all of them go out and get jobs and be successful was a rare thing,” he said.

A ticket out

Backed up by a support system denied many of his peers, Parks was luckier than most kids growing up in the projects.

He played basketball and was good at it, his ticket out of the multigenerational poverty of the projects. His athletic talent helped earn him a spot in the Simeon High School, some 60 blocks away. At Simeon, he was the team’s No. 1 point guard in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which caught the attention of recruiters for Ottumwa-based Indian Hills Community College’s basketball team, and later, the hoops squads at DePaul University in Chicago and Iowa State University in Ames.

Other kids were getting offers from recruiters of a different type, the gangs that enticed them with easy money and a sense of community in the housing projects, where most of the households were headed by single mothers. But they left Parks alone. “Everybody in the community knew who I was and knew I was into sports and knew I was good,” he said. “I was representing our neighborhood, and they didn’t want me out there selling drugs. They wanted to see me do better, and didn’t want me involved in nonsense.”

Not that his name-brand basketball shoes didn’t make him a target for violence. Obtaining high-priced sneakers – Air Jordans, for example – was often the motivation for gang-related armed robberies in Chicago when Parks was growing up. It was the status the shoes provided that the criminals were after more than the shoesthemselves. Nevertheless, a $200 pair of shoes could have cost Parks his life had not the neighborhood guardians, even those inextricably tied to the gangs, told the would-be assailants to back off because he had a chance to make something more of his life.

But Parks’ status as a star athlete didn’t insulate him from all danger.

Once, he and teammate Darren Randall – one of the few neighborhood kids Lucille Parks would allow him to hang with and a big brother in all respects but genealogy – were waiting for a bus to take them to high school when a gang member forced them to the ground and put a rifle to their heads and told them to pass a message to another neighborhood kid that “the next time I see him, I’m going to kill him,” Parks recalled, the scowl that he wore during his youth returning momentarily to his face. “The kid had beat this guy’s mother with bats, and he did end up killing him, all for nothing, but money and drugs.”

Parks knew then that he had to get out, and that the way out was education and that “the knives, the guns and the drugs were not the way to go.”

Lucille’s legacies

In 1999, he earned a degree in criminal justice from Iowa State University. Lucille Parks died not long after that. Seeing her grandson graduate from college was a nearly lifelong goal for her, and it was as if she clung to life until he reached it, Parks said.

The degree, and his work on gang violence at DePaul University, helped him get a job at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, where nearly three-fourths of the more than 500 inmates are serving sentences for non-violent property or substance-abuse crimes. He enjoyed the work, which involved counseling the inmates. “It’s not just African-Americans who go through it,” he said of the cycle of poverty, substance abuse and criminal activity that destroys lives. “It’s not just my people.”

He lost his job to state budget cuts. To remain in the queue to be called back when budget constraints are eased, he accepted another state job, with the Iowa Department of Transportation’s maintenance division.

To influence others’ lives as his grandmother did, he has established a non-profit group, Positive Brothers and Sisters of Iowa. Through it, he preaches the same positive lessons his grandmother drilled into him: that education paves the path out of poverty and despair, and that violence is a detour that will end in death or imprisonment.

In Greater Des Moines, he said, it’s easier to make a dent in the problem, he said. “If I’d lived in Oakridge [Neighborhood] compared to where I did live, Oakridge is like a condo,” he has told the youths he works with through the foundation and the YMCA, where he volunteers as coach for his son’s basketball team.

If they keep their grades up and remain involved in positive activities, Parks rewards them in a number of ways, including offering discounts at Lucille’s Big City Fashions. His background has given him keen understanding of the status value of designer labels.

“If a kid can’t afford it, I’ll discount it so they can,” he said. “If they are willing to work and apply themselves, I’ll give them discounts.”

The business appeals to his less serious side, an interest in a style of clothes that he couldn’t find in the Midwest without traveling to Chicago, Minneapolis or Kansas City. A body builder with broad shoulders and muscular forearms, he could only find clothing that fit his frame at stores that cater to big and tall men.

Lucille’s is stocked with urban gear bearing the designer labels of Louis Vuitton, Von Dutch, Gucci, Christian Dior, Lacoste, Baby Phat, Phat Pharm, Rocawear, Seven, Ecko and others, and is already a favorite of students from nearby Drake University.

The store also makes Greater Des Moines ultimately more friendly to minorities, he said.