Activist Couple Respond to the SOS of County’s Needy

Pedro Morales is a migrant farm worker from El Salvador who harvests fruits and vegetables in a field only a few blocks from the glitz of South Coast Plaza and the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Because of an accident when he was a baby, Morales has one leg several inches shorter than the other. He didn’t walk until he was 16, but today he spends 50 to 60 hours a week in the fields of Orange County picking produce for our tables.

Frank Forbath found Pedro Morales two years ago on one of his weekly visits to the migrant labor camp where Morales lives--after a fashion. Morales endures constant pain in his shortened leg from stoop labor, and when Forbath discovered him, Morales had never had medical help. Forbath took him to the SOS (Share Our Selves) Clinic in Costa Mesa, then to an orthopedic specialist.

Morales was offered two options: surgery that would remove the pain but make the leg stiff and therefore prevent him from doing farm work, or medication that would ease the pain without dealing with the cause. Morales chose the medication. He has an elderly mother and an ill sister in San Salvador who depend on his earnings. So periodically, Forbath takes Morales to the SOS Clinic for a new supply of the medicine that at least enables him to live without constant pain.

Frank Forbath has been doing this sort of thing for more than three decades. The 62-year-old senior engineer at Hughes Aircraft has since young adulthood felt a strong sense of outrage at what he perceives as social injustice. But unlike a lot of other people with similar feelings, Forbath does something about it. He’s been helping others for so long and so well that a few weeks ago the Orange County Human Relations Commission recognized him with one of its annual humanitarian awards.

Although the impulse was present long before, Forbath’s activist phase started in the mid-1960s when he was appointed head of an adult education program at Costa Mesa’s Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church. The emphasis then was on socializing rather than social action. But during Forbath’s tenure, the U.S. Council of Bishops put out a Labor Day message urging, Forbath recalled, that “we respond to the needs of our country’s poor not with Band-Aids but by rooting out the causes of poverty and social injustice.”

Given this mandate, Forbath divided his members into discussion groups aimed at coming up with action programs. As head of the research committee, Forbath was appalled at the poverty he found in comfortable, prosperous--and myopic--Orange County. As a result of his report and the ideas from discussion groups, the Share Our Selves organization was born under sponsorship of the church. It originally was dedicated to addressing Orange County social problems such as aiding migrant farm workers, staffing community centers in poverty pockets, providing lunches for indigent Santa Ana schoolchildren and preschoolers, and assisting UC Irvine students who had started a volunteer clinic to provide medical help for the poor.

SOS was launched 18 years ago and has been gaining in strength and expanding its horizons ever since. Its long-range goal is to attack the causes of poverty in Orange County; its short-term goal is to offer emergency food, funds, shelter and medical care to those in immediate need. To that end it opened a medical clinic three years ago that now cares for more than a thousand patients a month who are ill and can’t obtain treatment elsewhere.

In 1978, SOS left the umbrella of Saint John the Baptist Church and became an independent, tax-exempt corporation.

From the beginning of SOS, Forbath concentrated his efforts on helping migrant farm workers. (He stressed repeatedly that this has been a group effort, citing particularly Alan Baer and John Timmons as associates who have “worked tirelessly in this cause.”) He’s still doing it, but the problems have changed, and there have been some lively detours along the way. The best publicized came when SOS members did an exhaustive study of migrant labor camps in Orange County in the early 1970s and found unsupervised, subhuman conditions in most of them. They also discovered 26 migrant labor camps in Orange County, in contrast with two reported by the federal government, four by the state and seven by the county.

This information was turned over to the newly established Orange County Human Relations Commission, which made it public. Growers responded vehemently that it was a pack of lies, but SOS helped provide enough evidence to prompt an Orange County Grand Jury investigation. Result: a Grand Jury blast at the state, and the shift of responsibility for inspection of the camps from the state to Orange County.

Although the number of migrant workers has dropped off sharply over the past decade (“there’s a lot less land to farm”), those remaining still operate pretty much by the traditional credo of “if you’re too sick to work, get out.” This leads to cases such as Pedro Morales--or the worker Forbath remembers vividly whose hand was crushed between two trucks in the field and continued working with a mangled hand for eight days until Forbath found him and got medical help. “But there has been substantial improvement in the growers’ sense of responsibility in recent years,” said Forbath. “It is better for the workers than it used to be.”

Most of the growers’ antagonism toward Forbath and his fellow volunteers appears to be gone. Over the years, the volunteers were frequently challenged by security guards when they attempted to help the field workers. Several efforts to hold English classes for the migrant workers, for example, were aborted by guards who ordered the SOS teachers off the property.

Migrant worker problems are less frequent now, and the focus of social action has shifted to the homeless, the jobless, the ill and injured who need medical care--and speaking out against the kind of action being taken in Orange against Latinos gathering on downtown streets to wait for day work. Forbath believes strongly in the need to provide help in all of these areas--and he has a powerful partner at home who also believes. And also acts.

Frank and Jean Forbath met at a Catholic alumni function in Orange County, “and she was so impressed it took 4 1/2 years before she’d agree to date me.” They were married in 1957 and have seven children, whose photos are displayed in a gallery that fills one wall of the dining room of their Costa Mesa home. Only one--their oldest son, Stephen, 29--is married, and the Forbaths’ first grandchild is expected soon. Daughter Mary, 26, will be getting married this summer. Kathy, 28, is a lawyer who is also a director of Orange County Public Interest Law Advocates; Joe, 24, will graduate soon from Loyola Marymount Law School; Susan, 25, is a travel company executive; Patty, 22, is a senior at UC Santa Barbara; and the baby, Brian, 16, is a senior at Estancia High School.

One recent day at the Forbath home, Jean was in animated discussion around the kitchen table with daughters Kathy and Patty and a friend. Throughout the afternoon, there were assorted comings and goings and an air of easy geniality. The house--a spacious ranch typical of the Mesa Verde area--was in a state of amiable disarray. “Something has to give,” Jean said cheerfully. “But the only complaints I’ve ever heard from the kids was when I stopped baking Christmas cookies.”

Jean is even more involved than her husband in community service. For starters, she puts in two days a week at SOS headquarters in Costa Mesa’s Rea Community Center and serves as a member of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. The last time the Forbaths took a trip was almost six years ago, when their children sent them off to Puerto Vallarta for their 25th wedding anniversary. “I promised her a trip to Hawaii when we got married,” recalled Frank, “and we finally got there 20 years later.”

Despite their dedication to social causes that almost always have been counter to the prevailing political and philosophical sentiment in Orange County, the Forbaths seldom have been hassled. Forbath could recall one episode in which he was reported to the leaders of his church as a Communist because he was passing out leaflets against Proposition 14 that tried to do away with fair housing legislation in California.

“Over the years, we’ve found a lot of socially conscious people in this area,” he said. “Maybe this is because the people we come in contact with respond to what we’re doing. Maybe we don’t see the bigger picture. But I think people are becoming more sensitized--even though we still have a long way to go.”

To illustrate how far, Jean produced a recent newspaper article quoting Newport Beach Assemblyman Gil Ferguson as saying that he believes a large number of homeless people suffer because of their own irresponsibility and “that’s why they’re homeless. A significant number of them want to be homeless.”

“I just wish,” Frank Forbath said mildly, “that people who express these views might have been with us when we were trying to get homeless people off the streets during the cold spell last Christmas. I could spend an hour talking about each case--people who are desperately looking for jobs and a place they can afford to live and who find themselves in these straits because of conditions over which they had little or no control. Before critics make these kind of judgments, they should meet these homeless people face-to-face and find out who they are and how they got there.”

Added Jean: “It’s just not reasonable that any human being would choose to live this way or would put their children through it. At SOS, now, we’re helping about 3,000 homeless people each month find places to stay. It’s a problem that can no longer be hidden.”

The Forbaths agreed that the five most important social needs in Orange County--in order--are: low-cost housing; jobs (“employment figures are very misleading because many of these people are working only a few hours a week at very low-paying jobs--and many others are not counted at all”); access to medical care for the poor; proper facilities to care for the mentally ill and the homeless, and detox facilities for the alcoholic poor.

They also agreed that Orange County’s proposed slow-growth initiative would destroy efforts to provide desperately needed low-cost housing. “I never,” said Jean, “thought I’d be on the side of the Building Industry (Assn.), but passage of the slow-growth initiative would really hurt the people we’re working with.”

If Frank and Jean Forbath ever allow themselves time to dream, what would they like?

“I guess,” said Jean, as Frank nodded approval, “that someday there might be no need for SOS. Then both of us might have time to read the things we’ve wanted to read all these years.”

Meanwhile, there are more practical problems. As I left the Forbath home, I stumbled over a pile of clothing and other debris that had been dropped on the front porch while I was in the house. Frank was mildly embarrassed.

“This must be some stuff for the Salvation Army that one of the neighbors dropped off here,” he said apologetically. “We’re sort of a neighborhood collection point for them, too.”