Kathy Boone Home : L.B. Refuge Gives Young Women Hope

She said she had been suicidal for years, overdosing on drugs and once coming close to intentionally injecting air into her veins.

Diane, 28, whose first name only is used in this story to protect her privacy, summarized her life before moving into the Kathy Boone Home for Girls in one brief sentence: “I was in very sad shape.”

Attempting suicide was almost a ritual, she said. “That was the only thought in my mind: trying to destroy myself.”

She was working at minimum-pay jobs in the East, running with the wrong crowd and getting in trouble with the law. “It was too much. Coming to California was an escape.”

Needed Help

But she knew she needed help. Diane learned of the Kathy Boone Home for Girls when she contacted the Long Beach Mental Health Services. Doctors diagnosed her condition as manic depression and arranged for her to live at the home in downtown Long Beach, she said.

In the two-story, turn-of-the-century shingled house that has been a shelter to more than 1,000 homeless young women over the past 12 years, Diane said she found a new life.

“They made me open up my eyes and realize how unlimited my potential was, that I could be a productive member of society,” she said.

The private, nonprofit home is run by Carl and Bertha Vincent, a Southern Baptist missionary couple who combine a family-like atmosphere with counseling and religious training.

The Vincents describe it as a place of refuge for drug abusers, alcoholics, women who have flocked to the Los Angeles area with dreams of stardom but have found themselves caught up in prostitution and women simply down on their luck. But they don’t call it a halfway house.

“We like to think of it as a ‘whole way’ house,” said Vincent.

The women, who range in age from their late teens to late 20s, are referred to the home by the Long Beach Health Department, city agencies, rape and battering hot lines, local churches and word of mouth. The length of their stays depends on their needs, lasting two weeks for some, two years for others.

Mary Bradley, a rehabilitation counselor with the Long Beach Health Department’s Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse for 13 years, said she has referred many women to the home.

“If one of my daughters had problems and didn’t have a place to stay, I’d rather have her stay at the Kathy Boone Home than one of the drug rehabilitation programs, because it has a family atmosphere, and the girls can feel it is really their home,” she said.

v The Vincents estimate that 90% of the women who stay there either return to school or find steady jobs after leaving the home.

One recent afternoon, dressed in jeans, tennis shoes and a striped pullover shirt, Diane appeared self-assured and determined as she described the changes in her life.

She is enrolled in a travel agent course on a student loan. Within a few months she hopes to be working for a major airline and earning enough money to leave the home and begin living on her own.

Diane has also become an avid churchgoer. “I’ve accomplished more in the past six months by living here at the home than I have in the past 10 years of my life,” she said.

The Vincents said that Diane’s story is typical of others who have come to the home from all 50 states and nine foreign countries.

The Vincents, who have three adult children of their own, had been foster parents to more than a dozen children before they opened the home in 1972 with Pastor Frank Miller of the Lime Avenue Baptist Church, now the Shoreline Community Church. The home was supported by the church until 1981, when it was incorporated under the name of K. B. Ministries. The church still provides religious training to the women.

The idea for the home began when a 16-year-old vagrant girl wandered into the church looking for food and shelter, Miller said.

“The Vincents and I both had the same dream: to open a place for girls who had nowhere else to go,” he said.

The home was dedicated to Kathy Boone, an active member of the Lime Avenue congregation, who was admired for her volunteer work with the elderly. Boone died in an automobile crash on May 2, 1972, at the age of 17.

Even though the home is host to young women, the name Kathy Boone Home for Girls has gone unchanged.

“No one has ever complained,” Bertha Vincent said, adding that she and her husband refer to the women as “young ladies” rather than “girls.”

The women at the house who can afford it pay the Vincents $150 a month to help with costs. Otherwise, room and board are free. The home operates on a monthly budget of $3,500 but in the past few months has received only $1,000 a month in donations. The Vincents said with their tight budget, they have often come close to having the electricity shut off for lack of payment but that they have always managed to find a way to it keep open.

Each woman is given her own bed and dresser in a room with one or two roommates. The women are required to perform household chores such as cleaning, yardwork or cooking, and all must be present at a nightly “family” dinner. They must also attend regular in-house counseling sessions with Verna Dornbos, a missionary for the Southern Baptist Church.

No one may drink or take illicit drugs during her stay at the house, and the use of profanity is forbidden. Boyfriends and guests may visit but are not allowed in the women’s rooms. Curfew is at 10 p.m. on all nights except Friday, when the women may stay out until 1 a.m.

In addition, the women are required to attend both morning and evening services Sunday at Shoreline Community Church, night services Wednesday and a Bible study session Thursday night. The Vincents do not require that the women become Southern Baptist, only that they learn “the teachings of the Bible.”

Urged to Find Work

Aside from the house rules, the women are free to come and go as they please, but the Vincents urge them either to find employment or attend school.

“These are the same rules Bertha and I would have in our own house with our own children,” Vincent said.

If the women continually fail to follow any of the rules, they are dismissed from the house.

“Sometimes it’s hard for them,” Bertha Vincent said. “Many have never been disciplined in home life.”

Regina Brungard, an 18-year-old who has been living at the home for seven weeks, said the house rules are well worth what she gets in return.

“You have a place to sleep, three meals a day. All they require is you find yourself and find a job,” she said.

Dressed in jeans and a velour shirt with a string of puka shells around her neck, Brungard spoke of herself as an adolescent struggling to live with adult problems.

Brungard said she quit high school in October and was living in her own apartment until she was laid off from her job as a toy store cashier and could no longer pay her rent. She was living in the streets for a week before her boyfriend’s family told her about the Kathy Boone Home.

Brungard said that since she has been at the home, she has been “trying to work out” her life. She said she plans to go to college and study accounting.

Although she did not have extensive religious training as a child, Brungard said she enjoys the emphasis on Christianity at the home.

“I wasn’t used to going to church three times a week,” she said. “But I like it a lot, and I’ll keep going.”

Brungard praised the Vincents for their work and referred to them affectionately as her “family.”

“I don’t care how long it takes me. I’m gonna pay the Vincents everything I owe them,” she said.

Vincent said he receives approximately ten calls each day from women who want to stay in the home. Every woman who comes to the home is interviewed to make sure she will follow the house rules, but otherwise the Vincents said they will not turn anyone away if they have room for her.

“We don’t care what they’ve done in the past. We just care what they plan to do for the future,” Vincent said.

While the Vincents are proud of the many women they have helped, they admit they also had some disappointments. Vincent told of one young woman who was asked to leave the house because she was not following the rules.

“While we were at church, she came back and burglarized our place,” Vincent said.

But when the woman was released from prison, she returned to the house and apologized for the theft, they said.

“Two years later, the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen--the same one--came driving up to the house in a new Porsche,” Vincent said. The woman was working in the wardrobe department of a motion picture studio and earned a healthy income.

Bertha Vincent added, “Many times we think we’ve completely failed, and then they write us and say, ‘Thank you. We would have been dead if we hadn’t found the Kathy Boone Home.’ ”