Upbeat Attitude in the Inner City : Parolees’ Band Strikes a Responsive Chord

Larry Reed’s small, sparsely furnished office in the California Youth Authority’s Watts parole center is one of the last places in town you’d expect to pick up the silent vibes of metaphysics.

But, then, that’s Larry Reed.

How many other people could spend 18 years as a parole officer, supervising some of the toughest young ex-cons in California, and retain enough faith in the mystical patterns of life to say chirpy things like, “To me it just seems like it’s destined to happen . . . “?

What’s being brought together inside Reed’s office these days is the first link in a big, improbable inner-city dream.

Reed started it last year by searching out the CYA’s ranks of parolees for musically talented young men and women. He spent months organizing them into a pop band of seven musicians and three singers.

Performing Parolees

He got his bosses to rejiggle his caseload so that the only parolees he supervised were performers. He got a small state arts grant to hire singing and instrumental advisers. Last December the band began performing, doing concerts at a halfway house and at a CYA facility where many of them had once been confined.

These days they are rehearsing for their first benefit concert, intended to raise the first dollars for a more grandiose stage of Reed’s dream: a cultural center in South-Central Los Angeles, where community volunteers would offer instruction in music, dancing, drama, reading and sports to neighborhood youngsters. In addition, the 50 most talented former wards of the CYA would be recruited to teach and to warn of the harshness of life in prison.

Such dreams have been bounced around the city’s poverty-stricken neighborhoods for decades, taking on dozens of incarnations but always featuring the same theme--giving children something to do besides hang out.

Music Aids Adjustments

Whether Reed will succeed is problematic, but he has at least scored a hit among his band of parolees, who say that getting involved in the musical group has helped them adjust to life on the outside world after life inside the CYA, the state’s prison system for teen-agers and young adults convicted by county juvenile and criminal courts of various crimes.

“It keeps me on the right track,” said Michael Bush, 24, who had sung on street corners and church choirs but never in an organized pop group until Reed recruited him. Bush had been out of CYA custody for several years but did not find employment until after he became affiliated with the group, Reed said.

“It lets us clarify ourselves,” said William Prince, 26, who plays saxophone and piano. “To say we can make something of ourselves.”

The band and the would-be cultural center are called Desiderata, after the title of a poem that Reed found in a desk drawer in his office a few years ago after returning from a leave of absence to study music in college.

The poem’s wistful serenity (“Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence . . . “) made it a cult work of the 1960s and early ‘70s, becoming every college freshman’s emotional anchor against the turmoil of the world.

‘Something Greatly Needed’

“I loved it,” said Reed, 47. “I looked up the definition of the title and it was, ‘Something greatly needed.’ ”

It struck a chord that Reed had been feeling since his early days in the CYA, ever since he was working in a custodial facility and bumped into a kid named Kylo Turner.

“He played the trumpet and he loved music,” Reed said. “He’d always walk around the dorm and ask me to ask him questions, like what’s a diminished ninth. There were others like that, but once they got out and were on parole, I would lose them.”

Like many adults who work with youngsters, Reed had long yearned for a way to channel this kind of talent, so that on their release the young men and women might have an outlet to help keep their lives straight and also pass on a message of hope to younger residents of South-Central Los Angeles, some of whom “are like people in the Mideast--sometimes even death is no threat to them.

“Over the years I’ve talked to a tremendous number of volunteers, people who are trying to do something for the community but find there are not enough outlets. I think there should be a center, a place where everybody should come and say, ‘I want to work with drama; I want to work with employment; I want to work with dancing.’ It is vital to turn these kids around.”

A Favorable Reaction

It was not until last year that Reed “got the nerve or the courage” to take his idea to his superiors, and they reacted favorably.

“He is just a miracle worker,” said Noreen Blonien, a CYA assistant director in Sacramento. “He has so much dedication and so much wants to help the youth of Los Angeles. We’re sending out tough kids (as CYA parolees). Larry has reached them and turned them around and worked them into a cohesive group, which isn’t their natural tendency.”

One ex-CYA inmate, Robert Fleming, 22, now a guitar player in the band, said Reed spent parts of a year recruiting him for the group while he was still in custody and helped arrange Fleming’s parole.

“It isn’t just the music,” Fleming said. “It’s the attitude, the direction we want to take. We’re now serving two purposes, trying to help ourselves but also trying to get a message across.”

The message was dramatically offered and accepted when the group performed at the CYA’s Ventura School. Because of security precautions, the performers were separated from the wards. However, when 18-year-old singer Zina Glover, who had spent 2 1/2 often violent years in the custodial facility, sang the emotional pop hit, “That’s What Friends Are For,” she and some of her audience broke into tears.

“It was one of the most touching things I’ve ever seen,” said Mary Fleischer, assistant director of a volunteer group that works with paroled youngsters.

“I think that’s what music does,” Reed said, “especially in the black race. When we don’t have the opportunity to express that, I think it comes out in anti-social behavior.”

First Fund-Raiser

Reed hopes similar emotions can be engendered on Saturday, when Desiderata holds its first fund-raising dinner-dance at the Hacienda Hotel in El Segundo. Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) will be the evening’s keynote speaker.

So far, Reed’s efforts have won praise.

“What he’s trying to do would make a big difference,” said Milton Patterson, manager of Nickerson Gardens, the 4,000-resident housing project that Reed has often visited on his rounds as a parole officer, and where his brother once lived.

“It’s an excellent idea,” said Michael Kannas, a staff psychologist at a CYA facility in Whittier. “A lot of these kids have certain artistic talents, and if you are trying to support them, you’ve given them not only rehabilitation but also hope. He’s really catching the right angle.”

On his desk, Reed picked up a thick handful of phone message slips, all of them from other probation officers around the state responding to his request for names of talented CYA parolees.

“It seems far-fetched, but it’s really happening,” he said. “I’ve been here 18 years and for the first time I really feel optimistic.”