‘I don’t want to go to a home. I want to keep going to the senior citizens’ (center).’--Dolores Henry : Seniors Argue for Survival of Their Center

Her chin barely cleared the podium, her hair was pure white, and her mind wandered a bit. But 90-year-old Evelyn Ferrell made her point--she wanted the Buena Park senior citizens’ day-care center kept open.

Ferrell and other senior citizens using the Project TLC Center asked the county Board of Supervisors this week to override an advisory group’s recommendation and give the Buena Park facility the $36,505 it was seeking.

The supervisors--who will disburse an estimated $4 million in federal and state funds next week--were faced with applications for more than $4.3 million in assistance from 28 groups that provide food, transportation, legal help, medical aid and other services for senior citizens.

Earlier, a five-member advisory group, all of them specialists in helping the aged, recommended that 22 of the groups receive funds, though in many instances less than was sought. The group also suggested that the Buena Park organization and a Brea project for the homebound, among others, get nothing, contending that other groups could serve more seniors from a wider geographic area.

“My wife at the present time is at the Buena Park day-care center, and because of that I am able to be here now this morning and work with the seniors again,” Will Armstrong, 76, said in arguing against the recommendation.

“She has a very serious memory problem . . . I didn’t want to bring in the personal part of it, but I think it’s important that I personally know what I’m talking about here. And I know what has been going on there in that day-care center. And without that, believe me, I would be in an awful mess.”

Dolores Henry also spoke in favor of the center, calling it “the only thing we’ve got to look forward to.

“(It’s) either that or go to a home,” said Henry, 60. “And I don’t want to go to a home. I want to keep going to the senior citizens’ (center).”

Kate Hassin, manager of the day-care center, which is operated by the nonprofit Feedback Foundation, said about 25 seniors use the center, which is owned by the city. If the facility has to shut down and the elderly can’t go elsewhere, “approximately half would have to be institutionalized” because their families must work or their spouses are too infirm to offer help, she said.

Supervisor Harriett Wieder, listening to the testimony from senior citizens and executives of the various seniors’ groups, said quietly, “I don’t want to get old.” Wieder is 65.

Supervisor Ralph B. Clark, 69, added that he was “impressed with some of the things I’ve heard here this morning” and expressed hope there was “room for compromise” to keep the Buena Park facility open.

Peggy J. Weatherspoon, manager of senior services for the county, said the advisory group’s guidelines called for continuing existing programs wherever possible.

However, she noted in a report to the board that the advisory committee had recommended providing $46,000 to expand day-care facilities in Garden Grove--which could serve some of the seniors using the Buena Park center--and spending $30,000 to begin a center for Vietnamese senior citizens.

Last year, in seeking money from a special state bond issue for senior citizens, Bill Nguyen, the executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., told the supervisors that “the most urgent need for the Asian seniors is for a place of their own.”

Nguyen said then that the county’s Asian population has tripled in the last 10 years and that the elderly of that ethnic group need a place to meet with friends of similar background.