City Youths Get Vacation From Poverty in Calabasas

The first order of business each week at the Rev. Fred Hilst’s summer church camp in Calabasas has nothing to do with either religion or the outdoors. It’s collecting switch-blades and other knives.

“The kids we send to camp aren’t the healthy, wealthy and wise,” Hilst said. “They’re kids who don’t go to church. Kids who aren’t accepted at church. Once, we collected 54 knives at the start of camp.”

For 15 summers, Hilst’s Bible Tabernacle in Venice has sent as many as 300 of Los Angeles’ poorest children a week to four-day camps at Tapia County Park, next to Las Virgenes Road near Malibu Canyon.

The campers, ages 7 to 17, many of them inner-city blacks and Latinos, sleep in two-person pup tents, hike in the nearby Santa Monica Mountains, swim at Zuma Beach and listen to reformed drug users and ex-gang members describe how God has changed their lives for the better.

Hilst Hands Out Hugs

Along the way, plenty of hugs are handed out by Hilst, 69, a one-time movie studio craftsman.

“I never intended a ministry,” Hilst said Thursday as campers played a noisy ball game next to an oak grove at the Los Angeles County-owned park. “I just wanted to reach people in trouble. I’d been there.”

Hilst, a recovering alcoholic, and his wife, Pat, 52, launched their church in 1962. Since then, they’ve set up self-supporting rehabilitation centers and shelters for the homeless in Canyon Country, Inglewood and Venice.

Their work has won the admiration of police and welfare officials, said Kathy Martin, an aide to Los Angeles City Council President Pat Russell. She said that city agencies refer homeless people daily to the Bible Tabernacle. “Rev. Hilst won’t take any government funding,” Martin said. “He has a good program that helps those in the very lowest levels of poverty.”

Private Financing

Financed by private donations, the camping program was started when Hilst heard that groups could reserve free camp space from county parks. At Tapia Park, he found a little-used mountain facility that was a convenient bus ride from the Tabernacle.

Since then, county officials have begun charging $1 a night for each camper. But Hilst has negotiated an agreement that allows his group to camp free in exchange for performing maintenance and weed abatement around the park.

Hilst credits “the Lord” with resolving the fee problem and smoothing over occasional skirmishes with county health inspectors, who are opposed to his open-air camp kitchen and limited washing facilities.

Howard Mull, an aide to County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, said the “marvelous work” that Hilst does at the camp makes it worth working to overcome minor deficiencies

in facilities.

“The kids are camping out, for crying out loud,” Mull said. “If they were in the Sierras, they wouldn’t have an enclosed kitchen. If the health department tries to close him up, Mike will put his foot down.”

Cal Miller, a county Department of Health Services rural sanitation specialist, said Thursday that no decision has been made on the sanitation issue at the camp but that a final ruling may come next month.

Nor is the rent compromise completely secure. Joy Meade, a private concessionaire who manages Tapia Park under a two-year county contract, said she hopes that county Parks and Recreation Department officials will soon take another look their fee arrangement with Hilst. She said the amount of park work done by the group does not cover the “full market value” of the camp space the church uses Tuesdays through Fridays.

Fee Compromise?

“There are other church groups that come in here and pay the going rate,” Meade said. “I believe in total separation of church and state.”

But John Weber, deputy director of county parks, said his agency has long had a policy of allowing nonprofit groups to “work off the fee” for campgrounds. “We can’t waive the fees,” he said. “But, with groups that can’t afford them but do have the labor potential, we work with them.”

At Tapia Park, children such as 13-year-old Mark DeCosta of Culver City were oblivious to the disputes as they prepared for their last night at camp. “It’s been fun out here,” he said. “We’ve hiked and gone to the beach and gone go-carting. And I’m learning about God.”

Louis Montgomery, a 27-year-old ex-street person who is among 30 unpaid camp staff members working for Hilst, said the outings give disadvantaged children “four days of peace from the shootings and so forth they might have where they live.

“There’s no swimming pool or other stuff here that other summer camps have. But there’s love here.”