The man whom she calls “John, my bodyguard,” has lived next door for 20 years. He is one of the newer fellas. The family across the street has owned for 40 years. She reels off the names of families who have lived 30, 40, 50 years in the little “T shaped neighborhood” formed by Allen and Orchard Streets.

Today she keeps involved in nearby Porter Square, but also with developments at North Point and Western Avenue. And she has some suggestions..

“They’re having a lot of children falling out of windows in Massachusetts. Affordable housing is built, but families go in there, families come with children.... There are safety bars that you can buy at the hardware store... This shouldn’t have to be on the initiative of the tenants... I have an idea that in each building with affordable units, management should have a supply of these in storage, they should set up the windows accordingly....”

“People in my building and neighbors have been very supportive. The city had seen my unit four years ago and they liked it, so its a matter of…. it’s gonna take time,” but she is now confident that her home will be saved.

“What I’m happy about is that when I’m gone someday, someone of moderate means, a couple or or a single parent, can live in a community again and have a side yard, can have trees and be in this neighborhood.”

And as we chat, people pass by on the street below and look up. Her next door neighbor comes out and has some lunch with a guest. They join our conversation for awhile.

The street is lush with summer leaves and flowers. You forget that Mass. Avenue and Porter Square are just a few house lots away.

“My mother was a single mom, who gave us everything and herself nothing. That was par for the course…. People did not go into your privacy. It wasn’t that kind of community where you woke up in the morning and the coffee was already on. But they were there when you needed them.”

Jean still has four close friends from those days who have moved away but still keep in touch. When they were kids, “we used to have carnivals, plays, invite the neighborhood....” Now they work in offices and hospitals, like people from this neighborhood usually have.

For most of her life, Jean says, “I never came across or talked about, really, the word eviction.”

She remembers 1994. Talking with her neighbors in the building about the rent control question on the State ballot that year. “Nobody thought it was possible that it might pass, and we would lose rent control…. Well, it happened. We were all stunned.”

“I joined Eviction Free Zone, I guess that opened my mind to a lot of things around the city.... Rent control went out, and there were a lot of threats to people who were renting, I became conscious of the fact that it was better to fight than to do nothing at all.”

Now eviction became a household word, even an ever-present threat. Jean turned to friends and neighbors, and they backed her up. To keep it affordable, the Cambridge Housing Authority tried to buy her apartment. “But they couldn't come to terms” with the owners.

Her attorney secured an agreement giving her a four years stay, but that expired in August 2003. The eviction papers started coming to her door again.

“Alice Wolf went to work on it.” Terry Lurie, at the Cambridge Housing Authority, was warmly supportive. A few months ago, EFZ and Jean’s neighbors went to City Council and got a unanimous resolution passed on her behalf.

“I learned about funds, where they get their money.” She is grateful that at least some “people who are not of high money means” can again afford to live in Cambridge neighborhoods.

But she knows not everyone gets the help they need.. She mentions Ken Eisenberg, who has been facing eviction year after year across town on Prospect Street.

“Ten years ago [under rent control] we had all this for nothing, now we have to re-buy this back.”

For forty years, her building had one “private owner,” and then Stephen James, who was in the real estate business. Alex Steinbergh bought it on behalf of a group of investors ten years ago.

“I’m just a person,” says Jean Keldysz, “who doesn't want to move. I’m happy where I am.”

With a clear goal, simply to stay in the very place, the apartment which has been home for more than fifty years, as stressful as it has been at times, she has remained determined without rancor. And she seems to have won.

“I’m a lady and try very hard always be a lady. Just because I don't agree with you in something does not give me the right not to treat you with respect. I think that's wrong…. I’m a Catholic Youth girl from away back.”

Years of wariness and mistrust do not keep Jean from speaking well of her landlords, Alex Steinbergh and Jesse Hsu. “Actually, I’ll have to honestly say they’ve been nothing but gentlemen, both of them— all along.”

“This is why I think my landlords were respectful of me and more or less left me alone ... I take care of the place, I enjoy doing it.... But I don't let people walk all over me like I did when I was very very young.”

“I was always very shy, very self conscious, up until I was an adult.” She reflects on twelve years of schooling in St. John’s parish. “I was so self conscious, when the nun called on me I would take a zero rather than stand up,”

In the 1980s, Jean took some courses at Lesley College because she wanted to work with young children.

“They held their classes in the round, so that you have to change, you can’t sit in the back. Everybody is in the same place in a circle. I believe that helped me to come out of my self and learn how to stand up for myself….”

“At the end of rent control, I joined Eviction Free Zone, and the word civic entered my head. I got interested in my community, I am interested in all of Cambridge. We have to support each other, we have to in this day and age….

Being conscious of civic Cambridge when I was going to lose my home when rent control went out— that's when I became aware.” It’s hard to believe that Jean was not always very involved in civic life. “I remember years ago, Somerville had rent control, then they let it go. I never heard any complaints about it,” she says, so she assumed they got along all right without it. “I wasn't into it,” she admits.