‘Safe Place’ for Children Faces Shortage of Funds

The Ninth Street Elementary School is a haven, a refuge, a summer camp for 390 children this summer, thanks to the Downtown Children’s Service Coalition, the Los Angeles Unified School District and lots of other people. For kindergarten through sixth-grade children living in hotels in central Los Angeles, the camp means two square meals a day, clothes, recreation, fun and safety.

“When I get here at 7 a.m., they are already lined up. Their parents can go to work or look for work and don’t have to worry about those children. They don’t go off this campus except for field trips until 4 p.m. when the bus picks them up and takes them home,” said Jorge Armendariz, Ninth Street Summer Day Camp director.

Two rented buses haul kids to museums, the mountains, beaches, even to the airport to see the inside of a Boeing 747. The kids take dance lessons and swimming lessons in a portable pool, and about 125 of them get scholarships to a camp for a week.

“If we had to charge, it would be about $80 a week for one child. Some of these parents might make that much in two weeks,” Armendariz said. “When they go on camp-outs, they are competing with middle- or upper-class kids, so we give each one two pairs of nice pants--not new but with no holes--new underwear, socks, toothbrushes, clean sleeping bags.”

Police officers visit the camp to let the children know they need not fear the police. Older children receive anti-gang, drug and alcohol information.

“They are learning that people care about them and they are special,” said Julia Hilleary, ballet instructor at the Downtown Dance Studio, which provides free lessons for the campers.

But the day camp, set to run from June 30 through Aug. 28, is running out of funds. Starting with a projected budget of $76,000, the Downtown Children’s Services Coalition--made up of various charity agencies, such as the Salvation Army and Para los Ninos--is about $11,000 short, Armendariz said.

“If this were to close, those children would be in those little rooms or out in the street with drug problems, abuse, no proper nutrition,” he said. “Recreation is good, but there is no safe place for them to play.”

Rightful Name Restored

For four years, Culver City’s monument to Olympic marathon winners has sat unobtrusively, screened on the north by a splendid fountain, camouflaged by the grayness of the surrounding steps, sidewalks and park benches, diminished by nearby tributes to fallen soldiers.

Recently, however, the bronze lettering on the monument’s tarnished plaque caught the eye of an official from the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee. Man Kyu Park did not like what he saw. Dead center on the list of marathon winners was the name “Kitei Son,” the country, “Japan,” and the year, “1936.”

“He shook his head and started talking a mile a minute in Korean,” remembered Syd Kronenthal, Culver City’s director of human services. “I could tell he was very unhappy.”

Was the world’s only monument to marathon champions marred by some grave bureaucratic blunder?

Alas, it was nothing so simple.

Kitei Son, a Korean athlete by the name of Kee Chung Sohn, ran under the Japanese flag in 1936 because Korea had been annexed by Japan 26 years earlier and had no national Olympic committee of its own. Kitei Son is the Japanese translation of Sohn’s Korean name.

To this day, many Olympic histories do not mention Sohn’s Korean name, and official Olympic records credit Japan with his medal. But among Koreans, Kee Chung Sohn is a hero. Now 74 and living in Seoul, he said he still grieves for his country’s lost laurel.

Last June, the City Council voted to change the plaque. On Saturday, at 10 a.m., in front of the Veterans Memorial building in Culver City, a new plaque will be unveiled. The words Kitei Son of Japan will disappear from the monument, replaced by Kee Chung Sohn of Korea. It will be 50 years to the day that Sohn won the Olympic Marathon.

Sohn, who is expected to attend the ceremony, reportedly wept when he first learned of the proposed change. “This honor is more valuable to me than the first-place honor I received in Berlin,” he said in a telephone interview.

E. T., Call London

Self-Drive Center, a British car-rental agency popular with Californians, uses a 24-hour, toll-free telephone number that rings through to its London office.

Most calls to 1-800-828-8802 are routine business, reports owner Gary Flynn. One in ten, however, is a person responding to the company’s California advertising by dialing for the fun of talking to someone in England.

“We’ve had school girls wanting to know what the weather was like in London . . . and a salesman on a used-car lot on a slow Sunday afternoon who sang us the jingle for Slick Sands Auto Center. We’ve kept that one on the recorder and play it back on our slow afternoons.

“Then we had a Los Angeles woman who called and kept calling back no matter what we said. We finally convinced her we had no idea when her furniture would be delivered.”

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