PTA Honors Actor for ‘Dear Bruce’ Project

The letters begin “Dear Bruce.” In schoolchild scrawls, the messages sometimes barely discernible in a string of misspellings, they tell of being “smashed out of my brains” on liquor, of “sniffing spray paint,” of taking speed and smoking pot, of having “nothing to do besides sit around or cause trouble.”

They were written by 7- to 18-year-olds to 42-year-old Bruce Weitz, the actor who portrays Mick Belker, the tough little plainclothes cop on television’s “Hill Street Blues.” And what they’re saying is: We’d like to talk to our parents about this stuff, but they wouldn’t understand.

The youngsters--10,000 of them--wrote anonymously to Weitz in his role as honorary chairman of the National PTA Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Project. Weitz discussed findings of “Write Bruce,” a pilot campaign staged from January to April in Chicago and the rural Midwest, with delegates to the national PTA convention under way here.

At a workshop advising PTA members on how to get celebrity involvement in their projects, Weitz joked, “To me, ‘Write Bruce’ has always sounded like people should write in asking advice from their hairdresser.”

For his participation in the project, Weitz, who is not a parent, is being honored here as a recipient of the PTA’s highest award, an honorary life membership.

While acknowledging in an early interview that “all celebrities are looking for a place for exposure,” he said his involvement has been more than just lending his name. Perhaps as many as 1,000 of the letters were forwarded to him, he said, and “I read all of them.”

It was just after 9 on a recent morning and in the offices of Lippin & Grant, publicists, in Los Angeles. Bruce Weitz, seemingly in high gear less than 48 hours after jetting in from a European vacation, was drinking Diet Coke and smoking cigarettes (a habit he acquired only eight years ago). “I’m sort of compulsive,” he said.

He was talking about his “affinity for children,” explaining, “I was a child.”

Growing up in Miami, Fla., he was, in fact, a jock, an all-American in baseball and football whose English teacher convinced him that he was “made up of many more complicated things than throwing a football.”

Only Lip Service

Weitz said, “It seems to me that as a country we dismiss two sets of human beings. One is a teen-ager and the other is an old person. We pay lip service to those people.”

During youngsters’ “most formative years”--up to 18--Weitz said, “the system is not able in most instances to cope with them, and their parents can’t cope with them,” can’t communicate.

As Mick Belker, a ragtag character young people can identify with (and one who neither drinks nor does drugs), Weitz said, he sees an opportunity “to make a positive impression.”

He makes his living as a television personality and, he acknowledged, “television has a very bad influence, with alcohol. It’s a real disservice. I don’t think it has a bad influence with (street) drugs because the dealers always get killed or it destroys their lives.”

Would the real-life Hollywood show business community be a good place to zero in on drug abuse? Weitz grinned and said, “You mean there’s drugs in Hollywood? How surprising.”

And he suggested that “every place in the country should be cleaning up its own act. Hollywood is no different. There might be more of it here because there’s more money. But how about doctors as role models? There are more doctors who are drug abusers than actors, I guarantee you. And we don’t entrust our lives to actors.”

Alcohol Problem

When he was a teen-ager, Weitz said, “alcohol was a big problem” among his peers. Sure, he experimented, but was never in “serious trouble.” (No prohibitionist, he says the extent of his drinking is “a beer on occasion.”)

But, no, he never tried other drugs. Lighting another cigarette, he said, “Just tobacco.”

There was a short pause and then, matter-of-factly, Weitz said, “I told a lie. I don’t need to do that. I did experiment with drugs--marijuana and, when I was in college, LSD, and cocaine. And I reject them all.”

It started, he said, when he was about 20 and studying at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. He was at that time “experimenting in every facet of my life. It was not something you could pass by in the early ‘60s. I wanted to see what everything was like, experience everything, and be able to pick and choose.”

LSD Experience

On three occasions, Weitz said, he dropped acid. He described his hallucinations after one LSD experiment: “I walked outside and across the street the gas station just kind of crumbled and collapsed. But it crumbled quite beautifully.

“I had spent a lot of time writing things down that made absolutely no sense to me the next day, but at the time I thought were quite brilliant.”

Cocaine, he said, was a Hollywood experimentation, a one-time thing--”It made me feel real good about myself for about 15 minutes,” he said, but it also made him realize that those who snort it “never tell the truth and never have an honest feeling in their body. It’s all hype.”

The letters to Weitz came in response to television and radio public service spots in which he asked youngsters to “tell me the problems they have communicating with their parents their drug and alcohol involvement,” how it influences their lives and those of their friends and how they feel about their parents’ use of alcohol and other drugs.

Weitz, analyzing the “Write Bruce” letters, found youngsters are “very aware” of their parents’ use of alcohol, cigarettes and other drugs and “confused” about the mixed messages they are receiving.

He asks, writing in a brochure, “If My Parents Only Knew,” distributed to delegates to the national PTA convention and to be made available to schools and other parents: “Please . . . talk with your children, or any children you love, about drug and alcohol use. Talk to them NOW. . . .” “Parents have to listen to their kids, and vice versa,” Weitz said. “Most parents shouldn’t be married in the first place (he has tried it twice), and they shouldn’t have kids. They’re not equipped” to raise children.

Self-Respect in Child

But, for those who are parents, and struggling, he had some suggestions: “They have to risk a friendship with their children and hope it turns out for the best, they have to be willing to accept ideas foreign to them and they have to trust that what they’re doing to bring up the children will suffice, they have to instill self-respect in a child.”

Growing up in a large family that included a brother and three stepbrothers, Weitz said, he got most of these things from his parents.

“I have no idea where we’ve gone wrong,” he added, “but it happened a long time before you and I were here.”

Youngsters drink and take drugs, Weitz suggested, for “the same reasons adults do--a temporary escape, a false sense of security, and because a lot of people get bored. God forbid they should read.”

Television personality Weitz describes himself as an avid reader who’ll read anything “except racing car magazines.”

‘Guarded’ Letters

In reading the “Dear Bruce” letters, Weitz said, he was struck by the “guarded” nature of many, a fact he attributed to the letter-writing having been made an assignment in some Chicago-area schools.

He noted, too, that only about 20% acknowledged personal problems related to drugs and “maybe 5% of those were desperately in trouble, which I do not believe is representative of the school system in Chicago.”

The other 80% of the letters related the problems of “friends”; in most instances, Weitz assumes, the writers were protecting their identities. “Whether the kids are talking about themselves or friends, they’re still talking about what exists in their world,” he said.

What exists is described vividly in letters excerpted in the brochure, which is the tangible product of the “Write Bruce” campaign:

--”I don’t want to have to take drugs or alcohol but, on the other hand, I don’t want to risk losing friends. . . .”

--”Parties out here deal with alcohol and drugs. That is what makes the parties.”

--”Where I learned about drugs is on TV and (in) my health book and outside in the street.”

--”It is very hard for me to tell my parents things that are going on in school because I’m always afraid they will think I’m doing something wrong.”

--”I wonder if (my parents) experienced the things we experience now when they were teen-agers. . . . I think they did but they forgot how they felt when they were teen-agers.”

--”I shared a locker with a girl who used to come to school either high or drunk. She used to say, ‘If my parents can do it, so can I.’ ”

In the brochure, the PTA offers this advice:

--Open communication between children and parents is vital.

--Young people need answers. They know they will be confronted with decisions about trying drugs and they are worried about these decisions.

--Take action, even if your child is not abusing alcohol or other drugs. That child may be making decisions about experimentation.

--Get the facts, from your pediatrician, library, hospital or other sources, before talking to your child.

--Initiate conversations about drugs regularly, using examples from the news, movies, television and magazines as a starting point.

--Set a good example.

--Help your child use leisure time well.

--Let your child know you care.

From Washington, Bruce Weitz heads for New Zealand, where he’ll spend a couple of weeks doing a telethon for children’s charities. The lure: a vacation in Fiji thrown in.

Campaign Future Uncertain

The future of the “Write Bruce” campaign is uncertain. Chicago was chosen as focus city for the pilot because national PTA headquarters is there. The NBC affiliate there, WMAQ-TV, was a co-sponsor and NBC in New York is currently doing some research to determine the feasibility of expanding the campaign.

Addressing the conference delegates, Arlene Zielke, president of the Illinois PTA, said: “Now we are hearing from the kids instead of presuming for them.”

Patti Hoffman, director of PTA’s Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Project, said: “A lot of drug abuse programs are designed by adults. We wanted some feedback.

“What we are hoping to do, ultimately, is take this program national.”