Homeless of Hansen Dam Park Bid Pal Goodby

John Paulino, who spent five years living out of a van at the Hansen Dam Park, wore a tuxedo jacket with a red carnation Tuesday inside a satin-lined coffin.

The tan-faced and toothless man had collapsed from a heart attack in his van earlier this month. He was declared brain dead at Serra Memorial Health Center on April 14 at age 57.

About 20 homeless and former homeless people filed into Rucker’s Mortuary in Pacoima on Tuesday to pay their respects to a man they said had offered them advice, support and sometimes criticism--just like a father.

Sitting on pews under electric candelabras they heard Salvation Army Capt. John Purdell say that Jesus once was homeless, too. They heard Rose Wright, an advocate for the homeless, sing “We Shall Overcome” with two of her friends. And they heard a poem written by Henry Andrews, who has lived in an emerald-green station wagon for the past three years.

It began: “His was a life no one quite understood. It wasn’t all evil and it wasn’t all good.”

Tough-looking men with tattoos and scarred faces cast their eyes down and some even brushed tears from their cheeks. But Julie Glick cried the longest and hardest.

“He was a papa. He was just like a dad. . . . He would do anything for me,” Glick, 25, said after the funeral.

Glick said she had lived in Hansen Dam Park off and on since she ran away from home at 16. Recently, she moved into an apartment with friends.

Rootless people come and go from the park as they fall on better and worse times. They consider themselves drifters, but not bums. They took particular offense when the Rev. Benjamin J. Crouch read a Biblical passage about a beggar to eulogize their friend.

“People here are not beggars; they are homeless people,” said Troy Prentice. “There’s a big difference.”

Paulino seemed to strike a common chord with everyone.

To the divorced man who had lost everything, he too was divorced; to the drug dealer who likes to read he was an avid reader; to a man nicknamed Demon, who loves motorcycles, he had bikes stored away that he was going to ride again, someday.

His work was varied and included jobs as a machinist, cab driver, carpenter and soldier.

Most friends do agree on one thing: Paulino took to the streets when his health started failing and has lived there since, except for brief hospital stays for two or three other heart attacks and a two-month stint in a nursing home.

Paulino was tall and wide--so large that his casket had to be specially ordered. He wore jeans, T-shirts and socks without shoes because his feet had swollen beyond the confines of normal shoe sizes.

His dress was so casual in life that Wright said people teased her about choosing the formal funeral attire.

On Paulino’s favorite cap and jacket was a collection of pins, including wings that some said he earned in the Army Air Corps. Others said he had served in the Marines.

Over the years, he lived in various vehicles, most recently a white, Ford van outfitted with a hot plate and a bed. As he became more ill, he spent more and more time inside, smoking cigarettes, reading books and drinking beer, friends said.

If he didn’t like somebody, he just wouldn’t invite them into the van, said Ron Glick, who met his wife, Julie, at the park. “He’d give them the curb treatment,” Ron Glick said.

Because no family members claimed Paulino’s body and because he had no known savings, plans for a real funeral had seemed like a pipe dream just a week ago.

He would have been cremated pauper-style by Los Angeles County had it not been for two men: fellow park dweller Prentice and bowling alley owner Bill Mossontte.

Mossontte, part-owner of Mission Hills Bowl, donated $1,500 for the funeral after he read about Paulino’s death in a local newspaper. He had never met Paulino or any of the estimated 130 homeless people who live off and on in Hansen Dam Park.

“He just sounded like quite a man,” Mossontte said.

Substitute Relative

Prentice posed as Paulino’s stepson to persuade Serra Memorial Health Center to hold off having Paulino cremated until money could be found for a proper burial.

“I thought he deserved better than that,” Prentice said after the funeral. “Ask anybody here--he was part of us.”

It was Prentice who found Paulino on April 4 and gave him cardiopulmonary resuscitation until the paramedics arrived.

The Salvation Army has donated a burial plot at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, but Paulino cannot be buried there until another $500 is found to pay for digging and filling the grave, Wright said. Rucker’s Mortuary has agreed to keep the body for a few days. Her church, the Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ, organized the funeral.