Retired Bullock’s Official to Open Skid Row Center
Last week was the week that was for Frank Rice. After almost 43 years with Bullock’s, the vice president for public affairs left the store. And headed straight for Skid Row.
Those who know him, judging from the way they were talking at the farewells in his honor last week, could see it coming--one of those things that was bound to happen.
Rice has been headed for Skid Row for quite some time, ever since the days that preceded the founding of the Skid Row Development Corp. in 1978. Then he was simply serving on a task force. Today, he is not only completing a three-year term as president of that corporation and serving on the board of the Community Redevelopment Agency’s new SRO (Single Room Occupancy) Housing Corp., he is about to become a provider of services on the Row himself.
He is getting ready to open the doors of the Los Angeles Men’s Place. He has formed a nonprofit corporation, raised start-up money, hired a director, Mollie Lowery, and, as of the beginning of this week, closed escrow and taken possession of 627 San Julian St., a cheerful-looking, two-story structure that until recently was a health clinic.
“Mollie tells me we’ll open in May” after some renovations are done, Rice said last week in his by-then semi-stripped office at Bullock’s. The facility will be open as a daytime center for men of Skid Row who are mentally ill, some of them de-institutionalized, some developmentally disabled. (A similar facility in the area, the Downtown Women’s Center, has been serving women for the past seven years.)
Rice will not be living on Skid Row or even working there full time in his retirement. He will continue to live in San Marino, as he has for the past 30 years with his wife, Dorothy. And from San Marino he will pursue what was to have been his complete retirement program--he will serve along with Dorothy as co-publisher of the weekly San Marino Tribune, thus fulfilling what he said was a high-school ambition.
He and Dorothy bought the paper seven years ago with an eye toward “something for Frank to do when he retired,” Dorothy said recently. She agreed to run it until his retirement (which they thought would happen three years ago, but Bullock’s asked him to stay on). The kind of publisher who knows her way around “the back shop,” Dorothy learned about newspapers from the top down, she said recently, and got caught up in it. Her husband “moonlighted” for her, writing editorials and covering the school board. She has no objections to letting him now assume the leadership, she said, but she wants to remain involved. Practically speaking, with his interest in the Men’s Place, she knows her days as publisher will not be over.
“It’s not a hobby with her,” Rice said. “I’ll be co-publisher with her. We’ll divide up the duties somehow.”
As far as the Men’s Place is concerned, Rice said that before he left Bullock’s he obtained a pledge of $20,000 a year for five years from the firm, and committed himself to at least five years of service at the Men’s Place. (Funds to buy the building, for $207,500, came from Atlantic Richfield and the Community Redevelopment Agency, he said.)
However, he said, since Lowery is “a very professional director” (who formerly directed the Ocean Park Community Center in Santa Monica), he will not need to get involved in the daily operation.
“But certainly I’ll be spending time helping get things going,” he said. He will continue to raise funds, and he, with Lowery and Jill Halverson, director of the Downtown Women’s Center, who served as Rice’s co-founder, will be putting together a board of directors. (“So far Jill and I are ‘it,’ with an advisory committee.”)
In spite of his calm, considerate, unhurried manner, he is, apparently, a man who is used to being busy and has arrived at a young 67 that way, seemingly unaware of any alternative.
He could, of course, keep busy on a golf course, or puttering and cluttering in the yard and empty spaces of his home, even building a golden pond to fish in. Stereotypes being what they are, retired corporate executives who live in San Marino tend to bring such images to mind. Stereotypes aside, their numbers are not legion among providers of services to the down and out.
So why Frank Rice? Lots of people get asked by their companies to sit on civic committees.
Long Stretches
The world lost a great poker player when Rice went into merchandising. He can go for long stretches without cracking a smile--at least when the subject under discussion is Frank Rice, past and future. He is polite, tries to be cooperative, but is not given to public soul-searching.
He is more relaxed going over the chronology of his career or telling what he has learned about needs and services over the years and those whom he admires for dealing well with such matters. The most enthusiasm he displays is for practical steps that can be taken to improve things.
His years at Bullock’s were spent in advertising, merchandising and management. He had taken a circuitous route from copywriter in the ad department to vice president for sales promotion when he was asked to write a job description for the new position of vice president for community affairs. He did a good job outlining executive volunteerism in community activities, management of the contributions budget and political contributions. . . .
“It sounded so good,” he said, for once laughing outright at the memory of unwittingly writing himself into a demanding and open-ended eight-year involvement:
The Visitors and Convention Bureau, the Central City Assn., the Chamber of Commerce, California Roundtable, the Mental Health Assn. . . .
It was at a meeting of the various task forces appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to work on the Central Business District Redevelopment Plan that he jumped ship from the Spring Street Task Force.
The goings-on at the Skid Row Task Force “were more to my interest,” and, in particular, he was impressed with two members of that committee, Harold Katz, the chairman, and Jeff Dietrich of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker Community.
“I was first involved in Skid Row,” he said, “because of the concept of containment (keeping it within its present boundaries and improving it). I was looking at it as good for business.”
By the time that committee got approval to form the Skid Row Development Corp., with a mandate to provide jobs and housing for Skid Row residents, Rice was in deep.
Dietrich and the executive director, Martha Brown Hicks, whose hiring he calls “nigh unto providential,” made a deep impression on him. It was not just their commitment. It was their expertise, a quality he seems always to be seeking.
“Providers are realists,” he said. “Do-gooders sometimes are apt to have concepts that are not too practical. But with an excellent leader like Martha, and an excellent mix on the board. . . .”
Learning about Skid Row, he came to the conclusion that the mentally ill there were the ones getting too little attention. Those services that were available seemed more designed for alcoholics, chronic drifters and others whose circumstances lead them to live marginal lives. He became president of the board of the Mental Health Assn. and has recently been active as director of the newly formed Mental Health Policy Forum for California.
His involvement led to the inevitable, the conviction that he had better provide something for the men getting so little attention. Halverson agreed to help him get started.
“The system is complicated for anyone well, let alone ill. . . . So many of these men apparently have been institutionalized. The formality of an institution can be frightening. This is the thing Jill has done so well--and this place will be patterned the same way--anyone can come in without being registered, asked their name. There will be no institutional overtone.
“Only time will tell, but my feeling is socialization among women is probably easier to achieve. We’ll see. The lure will be a good meal and a place to get off the street. You know, there’s no legal place to sit down in Skid Row, other than that one little park (on the corner of 6th Street and Gladys Avenue).”
He had been talking for more than two hours about what had led him from Bullock’s to Skid Row. He had yet to mention anything about his motivation, why he chose to get so involved. And he had yet to tell one anecdote.
Finally, without prompting, he told a story about himself, hesitating about its appropriateness, reddening in the telling. It explains a lot about Frank Rice:
Sang in Glee Club
A long time ago when he was a student at Redlands University, he sang in the glee club and thus was headed with 40 others for Los Angeles one Sunday afternoon, dressed in a tuxedo, to give a concert at the First Baptist Church. They passed a mission on Main Street on the way in, and as he saw the men lined up outside, it occurred to him that they would enjoy a concert as much as the congregation at First Baptist would.
He persuaded the glee club president to stop on the way back. They did so, and Rice told a disinterested man behind a desk how happy the club would be to sing three or four songs for the men. Within a few minutes they were told to come ahead. The men filed into the hall, the glee club sang.
“The audience was very unreceptive.”
On the way out, Rice found out why. The men had already been forced to sit through one long prayer service as a condition for getting their supper. And now this. They were hungry, tired, uncomfortable when the boys in their tuxes arrived. . . .
“Our intentions were so good,” Rice said, so freshly embarrassed and dismayed 45 years later that he was laughing, shaking his head, and even looked as if he had tears in his eyes. “I guess the moral of the story is it pays to know more about Skid Row. Here I thought I was going to do such a wonderful thing. It’s been an object lesson to me. It’s come back to me several times when something would be suggested and a provider would point out what was wrong with it.”
Now he is the provider.
He had still not quite said why, and he almost shrugged off his remarks at first: “I guess it’s a feeling of wanting to help--and the fact I have a belief that things can be done if people set their minds to it.”
Finally, no longer holding back, he had one last story, not his own:
“I guess of all the Bible stories, the one that has always impressed me is the Good Samaritan story. And the interesting thing is at the dedication of Transition House, Jeff Dietrich talked about the Good Samaritan and pointed out that nowhere does it tell that the (injured man) got up, joined the local Rotary, became an upright citizen, paid taxes. . . . That’s not the point of the story.
“The point being the story does not say that the man on the side of the road had to do anything in order to (warrant) the story and the Samaritan didn’t demand any kind of performance. He simply helped him and, hopefully, went on to help others.”
