In Affluent County, Needy Families Struggle to Share Christmas Magic

Christmas is supposed to be a special time for children ---- for discovering stockings filled with toys and maybe a new bicycle under the tree. But for children whose parents are ill, or jobless, or working but still poor, the magic is often gone. Even in prosperous Orange County, there are many needy children for whom Christmas may be just another day. Here are some of their stories.

The Herrera family--parents Carmen and Bulmaro, their eight children and Carmen’s 75-year-old mother--was expecting this to be a hard Christmas. But not this hard. Nothing could be this hard, Carmen Herrera said.

For the last seven years, the family has lived in a ramshackle, two-bedroom wooden bungalow in Placentia that rents for $75 a month and has no heat.

Three weeks ago, Carmen, 37, was laid off from her food-packing job, and the burden of supporting her mother and the children fell entirely on Bulmaro, 34, a landscaping worker who earns $145 a week.

Next, it was discovered that her mother, Carmen Ramirez, already blind in one eye, may be going blind in the other.

Then, on Tuesday, 5-year-old Daniel Herrera, playing with matches, set the house on fire.

Daniel, his 2 1/2-year-old sister, Virginia, and their grandmother were trapped inside briefly, but a neighbor saw the flames, broke down a back door and pulled them out, Carmen Herrera said. No one was hurt, but the small house is now barely livable. The acrid smell of smoke is everywhere.

For the Herreras, Christmas is usually a time for small presents, turkey and tamales, and fun. But this year, “We have lost everything. Everything. . . . It is a disaster,” Carmen Herrera said.

When she is working, she always buys toys and dolls for “my littles.” But now, she said, there is no money for presents, no money for gasoline for the car, no money to repair the burned part of the house and barely enough money for food.

“It is a brown Christmas,” the Herreras’ oldest daughter, 17-year-old Guadalupe, said.

Still, despite the fire and their other troubles, several of the younger children say they still can find hope in the holidays. For Lucia, 12, Christmas still means “joy . . . friendship,” she said. But this year she had a special wish: “I hope somebody gets a house for us.”

Since the fire, the Herreras, who receive no welfare or food stamps, are receiving help from a division of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, its St. Anthony Claret Conference in Anaheim. Members have provided food, clothing and brightly wrapped presents that surround a tinsel-draped Christmas tree in the Herreras’ tiny living room. The night after the fire, the Red Cross put the Herreras up in a motel.

The family returned home Wednesday but had no electricity until Thursday night. By the end of the week, Bulmaro Herrera had boarded up the damaged service porch where Leticia, 10, and Lucia used to sleep. But because of lingering smoke, the girls slept on the front-room floor.

Covered With Debris

Behind the porch, the backyard was covered with debris. As Carmen Herrera surveyed the rubble Thursday, Daniel discovered a favorite toy, a small stuffed mouse. He picked it up, curiously looking at the sooty mouse for a moment. Then he threw it back onto the pile.

Although times are bad, the Herreras are trying to cope. Late this week, there were signs of Christmas in the house. Someone had taped a child’s drawing of Santa Claus to the front door. This Christmas will be “good anyway,” Lucia said. “Because I have my family. And my family’s OK.”

Christmas is hard on needy parents, too. “Parents are parents,” said Don Sizemore, director of the Community Development Agency, a Santa Ana anti-poverty agency. “They want to make sure their kids get something for Christmas” and feel guilty if they have too little to give.

In a small, two-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, a welfare mother and her two little girls have been planning a terrific Christmas.

Under a small pine tree decorated with cherished ornaments and colored lights, Patsy Watts, 29, and her daughters Jae, 3, and Shante, 9, have assembled a pile of packages done up in paper and ribbon.

On Christmas, Watts said, she will make a special dinner of glazed ham, whole kernel corn, stuffing mix and yams, and she and the children will “just kind of sit here and watch television and they’ll open their gifts and play with them.” Later, her sister will visit and they will all sit by the tree “and just share,” Watts said.

No matter that the stuffing mix, corn and yams came from a food basket donated by a local church. Or that the ham probably would be a very small one that would cost, perhaps, $5. Or that most of the girls’ presents also were donated.

Without those gifts, “we wouldn’t have had much of a Christmas,” Patsy Watts said.

Watts, who is studying to be a registered nurse, survives with the help of $603 a month in Aid for Dependent Children, about $40 a month in food stamps and a $150-a-month federal rent subsidy on her $620-a-month apartment.

Watts has been on her own since 1980, when she left an abusive husband, moved to Orange County and found a clerical job. But after three years she was fired. Although she said that state unemployment officials later ruled the firing was without cause, Watts said she was unable to get a decent reference and therefore unable to find another job.

But, “I didn’t just sit here and do nothing,” Watts said. In 1983, she entered a licensed vocational nurse program. She graduated in July but is still taking nursing courses at Rancho Santiago College, preparing to take the nurse credentialing exams in April, then enter Santa Ana College’s registered nurse program.

Comfortably Furnished

Her apartment is comfortably furnished; the living room includes twin couches, a video recorder and two tanks full of tropical fish--but “everything in the house came from garage sales except for the beds,” Watts said. And although she and the children are well dressed, she credits frugal shopping and charities.

As an example of how she gets by, Watts said she bought the children clothing for Christmas instead of toys. Any toys they receive will be donated, she said.

Shante “asked for a ‘My Child’ (a doll) and a boy Cabbage Patch. No, I didn’t buy those things because I feel like she has enough dolls. I bought her clothes because that’s what she needed and if I was going to squeeze out a bunch of money, I didn’t want to give her toys,” Watts said. “It’s sad, you know--the things that they want and you’d like to buy them. . . . And you can’t.”

Many people--be they anonymous donors, Salvation Army workers or El Toro Marines--have been packing baskets of food, wrapping toys and working hard to bring cheer to the disadvantaged. For one day anyway, a small gesture, a gift and a candy cane, may make a difference.

“Our children, the children coming to shelters, most of them have no toys and when Christmas comes, we give out a few toys and then the toys are gone,” said Mike Elias, director of the Christian Temporary Housing Foundation, a shelter for homeless families in Orange. “They have grown up with not having toys and when there are a few toys in the cupboard, they just wear them out.

“It’s like my homeless dog; he just grabs everything,” Elias said. “One little kid will just grab it (a toy) and hold it. It’s his. He’s not being selfish. The poor kid is just starving for something normal children have.”

Laurie Keeler sat quietly as a younger sister cheerfully recited a long list of toys she wanted for Christmas.

Then it was 10-year-old Laurie’s turn, and, in a shy, soft voice, she made a simple request. “I want a home,” she said.

Last June, Laurie and her family--sisters Melissa, 7, Misty, 5, and their parents, Jerry, 28, and Brenda, 27--joined the ranks of the homeless.

Evicted from their home in Chino, they have spent the last six months on the road.

For three months last summer, “home” was a campsite, sometimes at Lytle Creek in San Bernardino County, other times at Featherly Regional Park in Yorba Linda.

This fall, when Laurie was hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy, the Keelers stayed three weeks with Brenda’s sister in a Huntington Beach apartment. Then the manager learned about them and asked them to leave.

Living at Motel

Lately, the Keelers have been living at the Ranch Motel in Garden Grove. For $35 a day, they share two sparsely furnished bedrooms. Dinner consists of canned goods, which Brenda Keeler heats in an electric frying pan. Most of their belongings--blankets, spare clothes--are in the car.

The Keelers got the motel through a $400 emergency grant from county welfare, but when that runs out they expect to move again, Jerry and Brenda Keeler said. They don’t know where.

The family’s troubles began last winter when Jerry Keeler, a non-union carpet layer, got sick and then couldn’t find work, they said. They were evicted from their house, a comfortable, three-bedroom place, they explained, as Brenda Keeler showed color photographs of their last Christmas there. The pictures showed a tree and red stockings hung by a brick fireplace. In another shot, the Keeler children and a dozen cousins grinned at the camera.

“It was fun!” Melissa said. “We got lots of presents. Our grandma came over!”

Taste of Christmas

This year, the Keeler children are still getting a taste of Christmas. Two weeks ago they visited Santa Claus at a Christmas party held by a Huntington Beach church. And another church has put them on a list to receive a Christmas basket Dec. 25, Brenda Keeler said. Of course, if they have run out of money and have to leave the motel, the Keelers may never pick it up.

The family would love to celebrate this Christmas in a house or an apartment that Jerry Keeler, who by his own account is “real handy” with tools, could fix up.

Still, “even if we end up in a motel for Christmas, the main thing is just being together,” Brenda Keeler said. “Maybe the children will find out the real meaning of Christmas this year.”

Brock Evans’ blue eyes sparkled. For Christmas, “I want a jackknife!” he said. Not a Boy Scout knife, for Brock at age 9 is no longer a Boy Scout. But a workmanlike knife that he could use to defend himself and his mother, if he had to.

Recently, at a store in Santa Ana, Brock found one that fit the bill. “It was brown and it was big. It was like a man’s knife,” the 4-foot, 5-inch fourth-grader said. “If somebody came up on me and my mom, I would kill them.”

Over the last year, the tow-headed youngster has had to think a lot about self-defense.

For a week in early December, he and his mother, Roxine Evans, 35, who lost her job in the town of Liverpool in Upstate New York, spent their days on the Santa Ana streets.

Other Transients

During the day there were other transients to worry about. At night they slept at the Salvation Army shelter. And last Sunday there was a new threat, Roxine Evans said; a shelter worker told her that a social worker would be coming soon to take Brock away.

Whatever happens, mother and son vowed to fight to stay together. “It’s just me and her,” Brock said.

Brock and his mother talked about their troubles this Christmas as they sat in the office of the Christian Interfaith Temporary Housing Foundation, a shelter for homeless families in Orange. The foundation’s comfortable, buff-colored house provides free food and lodging for up to seven families lucky enough to get a room. The Evanses had been accepted several hours earlier.

They had lived happily in Liverpool, Evans said. A single mother, she managed a mini-warehouse business. As a side benefit, she, Brock and two daughters, ages 15 and 17, lived rent-free in a three-bedroom house on the warehouse lot.

Protective Custody

Then on Dec. 12, 1985, police came to the front door and falsely accused her of child neglect, she said. They took her 15-year-old daughter, Sabrina, into protective custody.

(Deputy Robert Burns of the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department in New York said that Sabrina was taken to a foster home that day after Roxine Evans said that she did not want the girl to live at home or with her natural father. She is now staying with friends in Long Island.)

A protracted custody battle followed, during which Evans lost both her job and the house, she said. Her older daughter, now 18, is living on her own.

So when a friend in Santa Ana offered Evans housing and plane fare to California recently, she accepted. But after three weeks here, the friend kicked them out, Evans said. After walking the streets for a week, they wound up in the shelter.

But shelter director Mike Elias said Evans and her son must move soon unless she tries to find work, as shelter rules require. Evans claims she is trying.