Couple’s Indian Clinic Fills Health Gap

“It’s ironic,” said Jeannine Veraldi, recently returned from India, where she attended the dedication of the J. and J. Veraldi Health Center. “At the crossroads of my life (12 years ago, just before she met the man who is now her husband), I was going to join Mother Teresa’s order. I was going to go wherever she needed me.”

But, Veraldi added, “God had other plans.” These included marriage to Jim Veraldi, president of Veradyne, an aerospace parts firm in Burbank, and, ultimately, a mission in India, where Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity work among the poorest of the poor.

For Jeannine Veraldi, a former newspaperwoman, it is an odyssey that began in 1980 at Loyola Marymount College, where she was earning a master’s degree in theology and planning a career as a religion writer. There, she met Father Herbert DeSouza, a visiting teacher, who invited her to go with him to India to see the work he and other Jesuits were doing in Ahmadabad.

“When I visited a leper hospital and saw the poverty, I just wept,” she said. “I came back and I felt compelled to help.” Her husband, too, went to India and was, she said, “deeply touched”; together, they founded the International Education Mission, a nonprofit corporation that in five years has raised $44,000.

IEM (P.O. Box 4070, Burbank 91503) is helping to support the Veraldi health center, a small free clinic in Ahmadabad where, Jeannine Veraldi said, “people who have no money” come to be treated for eye and skin diseases, leprosy and tuberculosis. It is staffed by volunteer doctors and the Missionaries of Charity, and run by a Jesuit brother.

But the lion’s share of donations is earmarked for Father DeSouza’s project, construction of an institute for the production and distribution of television films to teach villagers who cannot read the basics of good health and nutrition and more efficient farming.

“They want to put a television set in every village,” Veraldi said. “Thousands and thousands of people will be helped through this school without walls.”

Jim Veraldi has visited India three times, Jeannine Veraldi five, most recently for the dedication of the Veraldi clinic Jan. 17. The clinic has only two rooms but, she said, “I have visions, of course, of building a 20-story medical center.”

Mother Teresa, she said, “has given this work her blessing. I had two private audiences with her in India.” Some years ago, she added, “Mother Teresa taught me what it meant to serve.”

Jeannine Veraldi, an orphan who was “kind of thrown around from one foster home to another” until being placed in the hands of the Good Shepherd nuns in Cincinnati, said, “I wanted to do as much as I could for the poor because I knew what it was to be poor.”

Reading Not Just for Fun

Grownups standing up in public and reading aloud from such literary works as “The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash” and “Sunny the Lucky Bunny”?

You bet.

That’s what the fourth Garvey School District community read-in, scheduled April 17 in celebration of National Library Week, is all about. “Some people really get into acting out,” said Elena Wong, a district administrator, who sent out “Dear Reader” letters soliciting volunteers.

She hopes to have the mayor of Monterey Park, David Almada, as a reader again this year and maybe members of the City Council. “It doesn’t take that much time out of a person’s life (only 30 minutes in the classroom),” said Wong, “and it’s a win-win situation for both the school and the person doing it.”

Readers are asked to share a little about themselves and their jobs. Because Garvey, encompassing Rosemead and Monterey Park, is an ethnically mixed district, 60% Latino and 30% Asian, Wong is appealing for readers who can put across the likes of “Swamp Monsters” and “Harry the Dirty Dog” into Cantonese, Spanish, Mandarin or Vietnamese.

“We really need to encourage more reading,” Wong said. “The kids just can’t get glued to the boob tube.”

During the week, each child will read a book and, on April 18, 7,200 red, white and blue helium balloons will be released, each carrying a postcard with a child’s name, grade and the title of the book he or she read.

“People wrote back to us from as far as Kansas last year,” said Wong. “If it’s a clear day, look up in the sky . . . .”

It Was a Real Reunion

High school reunions are dandy, reasoned Lee Arditty, but “other than graying a little bit, people basically look the same” 15 or 20 years later. Why not a real reunion, he thought, a get-together for grammar school graduates, class of ‘56?

It all began when Arditty, a 41-year-old chemical company sales manager who lives in Reseda now and has a grammar school age son and a preschooler, started driving by dear old 42nd Street School now and then, just to reminisce. One day, popping in for a visit, he met a friend of his kindergarten teacher, Margaret Smart; he called Smart and “lo and behold, she remembered me. We got together for lunch and started talking about a reunion.”

Last Saturday night about 45 one-time schoolmates, teachers and PTA members gathered at the Newport Beach home of former third-grade teacher Lou Bennett. The former principal, Ruth Myers (who sent Arditty home one day for being a bad boy), came from Leisure World, and the former kindergarten and fourth-grade teachers were there, too. Marie Cunningham, 82, the sixth-grade teacher, flew in from her home in Washington state.

“We were like one big family,” Arditty said, “but as you get older, you begin to separate.” Arditty went on to Louis Pasteur Junior High, Hamilton High and, on a football scholarship, to USC, but an injury ended his football career early on. One classmate is a psychologist, another a fireman, another a pastor . . . .

There was lots of “remembering when”--the Frontier Days dances, touch football games, Cub Scouts and Brownies, the chair-throwing free-for-all that erupted one day in fourth grade when teacher Dorothy Stevenson had to take a child to the principal’s office. (Stevenson showed up for the reunion).

“Two people didn’t even recognize each other, and they were neighbors” as kids, Arditty said, but “Everybody looked tremendous. It was almost like yesterday.”

As far as the teachers were concerned, Arditty said, he had only one problem: “I just can’t call them by their first names yet.”

Soviet-Style Veterans Day

“You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather,” said Ted Ott of the missive from Moscow.

Ott, chairman of the 40th Anniversary Memorial Commemoration Commission planning a four-day event here in July to mark the end of World War II, had just received from the Soviet Veterans’ Committee an invitation to send two delegates to its anniversary observance May 7-13.

Ott, whose commission represents a coalition of veterans’ organizations, said 67 governments, the Soviets among them, had been invited to take part in the Los Angeles observance. Ott delivered the invitation in July to Soviet Vice Consul Genady German in San Francisco, who flew here to discuss the matter with Ott.

Then, “out of the blue,” said Ott, came the invitation from the Committee of Soviet War Veterans to Ott “and anyone else I would care to take. That came out of left field.”

Ott, at 39, likes to think of himself as “the youngest World War II veteran,” explaining that both of his parents were in the Navy and “for the first five months of my existence I was in the Navy.” (At that time, women in the service were permitted to remain through the fifth month of pregnancy).

“I’m trying to raise the money for the ticket” to Moscow, said Ott, who is a part-time X-ray technician and fulltime volunteer for the memorial commission. U.S.-Soviet tensions exacerbated by the killing of an American officer in East Germany would not keep him from going, he said.

He hopes, rather, that the commemorative observances will serve as a reminder that “at one point, the greatest majority of the family of man, shoulder to shoulder, dug in their heels and said no to a real evil.”