I low many classy women were living with skid row bums?

Stroganoff was pale as a skid row bum with an air conditioned bar available.

He looked like a skid row bum.

He gave up; joined the skid row bums.

And most folks have a picture of an alcoholic as a skid row bum, which is true for only about 5 percent of all alcoholics.

The hopeless junkie, like the skid row bum, represents the extreme end of a very broad spectrum.

Eight years ago Cleveland Turner of Houston was, as he put it, a "skid row bum."

Such critics raise the specter of skid row bums swamping transplant registries.

One reviewer said, "The others just looked like actors in make-up, Walter Matthau really looks like a skid row bum!"

They are neither movie stars nor skid row bums; the great drama of their lives has not been played out in the spotlight or in squalid flophouses.

Most people, says a spokesman for the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, still think of the homeless as aging bag ladies or Skid Row bums.

To help the most distressed of the homeless population, Baxter has reinvented the single-room-occupancy (S.R.O.) residential hotels that once offered cheap lodgings to a collection of former mental hospital patients, aging pensioners and skid row bums.

"From the sidewalks in this Franklin Street Neighborhood [ in 1939 ] exhorting derelicts, drunks and Skid Row bums," the marker says, Graham tuned his voice while graduating from nearby Florida Bible Institute in 1940.

So it was that the intensely American small-town story of Francis Phelan - an Irish-American ex-baseball player from Albany who, in his search for redemption, becomes a Skid Row bum, came to be directed by an Argentinian film maker who had emigrated to Brazil.