Volunteers Keeps Boys Home Part of Community

The Pacific Lodge Boys Home for juvenile wards of the court came to Woodland Hills long before Woodland Hills did.

And so, when the handsome middle-class, postwar community was springing up, some new suburbanites found themselves living side-by-side with a 30-year-old institution they didn’t quite understand.

Perhaps there was no single incident that crystallized the reaction. It was more a general mistrust, one resident recalls.

“If there was trouble, it was very easy not to blame anybody’s own son but to blame the boys at the lodge,” said Hope Perry, who still lives within walking distance of the Serrania Avenue home occupied by about 80 juvenile delinquents.

‘People Were Apprehensive’

“As far as I know, there was nothing done,” Perry said. “But people were apprehensive.”

Into that tender situation stepped a suburban housewife of strong values and generous mind.

Virginia Boyack, who has since moved to Valencia, was then already a volunteer for another boys home in Van Nuys and a member of the charity league, said Wallace Wilson, director of the lodge from 1955 to 1983.

“We got to talking,” Wilson said. “I knew of her interest in volunteer work. She said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ ”

Boyack set out to recruit the housewives of Woodland Hills into a venture to bring the lodge and the community closer together through modest acts of charity.

The organization she formed, called the Fortune Hunters, raised money for the lodge, bought gifts for the boys, and relieved the staff of driving boys to appointments away from the lodge.

Long after those early tensions subsided, the Fortune Hunters continued their tradition. This year, the organization celebrates its 30th anniversary.

No one, however, seems to recall its exact birth date.

“We searched high and low through the records and couldn’t find a day and month,” said the current lodge director, Dick Hill.

Arbitrary Date

So the lodge arbitrarily set a date and held a birthday party last week at the boys home.

None of the original members was present. The most senior member was Perry, who joined in 1959.

It fell to her to remember some of the good times and the bad, among them, the infamous red socks incident, in which she was a key player. She recalled that it occurred about 1962.

Though high-school classes are now taught at the lodge, in those years, the boys attended a nearby public school.

“This was back before our bigger fund-raising events, when the members all decided they’d be the last of the big spenders and kick in a couple of dollars and buy all the boys something for Christmas,” Perry said.

“I went to a men’s store and talked the merchant into giving me six dozen pair of socks. I got them for about 50 cents apiece.”

The only drawback of the bargain was that they were all red.

“I realized afterward I just unloaded the last of his Christmas red socks,” Perry said. “The Scarlet Letter couldn’t have been worse. Talk about stigma.

“It only took about a dozen of them with their red socks to have the mark of the lodge on them,” Perry said. “So Mr. Wilson wisely redistributed the red socks somewhere else.”

Since then, she said, it has been an unwritten rule that any items of clothing for the boys at the lodge must not be all alike.

Main Duties Today

Today, the Fortune Hunters buy fewer items of clothing because the city and county grants that sustain the lodge provide them, Perry said.

The main duties of the Fortune Hunters today are still much what they were then. For each new resident, members make up welcome kits containing toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo and deodorant. With changing times, hair conditioner has been added, Perry said.

Perhaps most important, the Fortune Hunters helped make the community and the lodge comfortable together through fund-raising events at the lodge.

“We just invited everybody in the neighborhood to come and meet the staff,” Perry said. “Those who were not closely involved would have a better understanding of what kind of boys were up there.”

Then, as now, the boys were from 13 to 18 and were all delinquents adjudicated in juvenile court. Their crimes could include breaking and entering, theft and drug abuse, but not violence against people, Hill said.

Often there are psychiatric problems to contend with. Thirty years ago, that meant chauffeuring boys to their counseling appointments.

“The West Valley was nowhere near as developed as it is today,” Perry said. “We didn’t even have bus service. We had to go to Sherman Oaks to take the boys to their psychiatry. Nobody knew about group therapy then.”

Trips Still Needed

Today, psychological work and counseling, like school work, is done at the lodge. But the boys still have appointments with doctors and dentists, and the women still drive, usually about three trips a week.

The Fortune Hunters still raise money for Christmas presents and to buy what Perry calls “things to make the cottages a little more homelike--popcorn poppers, toasters, which 15 or 20 boys can ruin in a year.”

“It’s a matter of replacing some of the things that the city-county funds would not replace,” she said.

At least partly through the good will of the Fortune Hunters, the Pacific Lodge seems secure today in its Woodland Hills niche.

But for the women, the challenge over the next decade may be tougher than the misapprehension they dealt with 30 years ago.

“As things changed and more women began to go back to work, as the younger women went to work, they didn’t have time for volunteer work,” Perry said.

The change has showed in the Fortune Hunters’ membership.

After reaching its peak at about 30 in the 1960s, membership in the organization has fallen to only 11 today, Perry said.

“We could use more people,” she said. “But we’ve managed to hang in there.”