Gridiron Grandma

It was a familiar scenario from the explosive urban 1980s. Imagine, if possible, the sheer terror of facing 2 members of Southern California’s largest and most-feared gang, moments after one had threatened to inflict serious bodily harm upon you.

It is dark. One of the arrogant young men is wearing blue and identifies himself and his companion as members of the Crips. The target of their verbal abuse is a bespectacled, gray-haired woman, a 5-foot, 2-inch great-grandmother who often requires the assistance of a walker just to get around the house.

The scene was played out last month in West L. A., at Westchester High’s football stadium. The gang members unwisely had chosen to mix words with Winifred (Freddie) Cranston, the irascible first-year owner of the Burbank Bandits, a semipro football team.

“There was a little altercation,” said Cranston’s son Walt, who plays on the team and was present during the confrontation. “And they were the ones who were intimidated. If they had stuck around, it would have been a grave, grave mistake.

“Like she says, ‘If you wanna get some, you better bring some.’ ”

The gang members retreated--and Cranston, it seems, had broken down the walls of yet another stereotype. To the naked eye, there is nothing unusual about her appearance; she is just another older woman. The naked truth is that she is anything but. This is a woman who once ran with the likes of Bobby Layne, who once served as an accountant for Barry Minkow, the former head of the collapsed ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning empire who is now on trial for federal securities and bank-fraud charges.

Cranston, the daughter of a former Michigan United Auto Workers union organizer, has sponsored family members of some of her clients for U.S. citizenship and has served as a matriarch to several wayward youths since moving to California almost 25 years ago.

Cranston, who turned 69 last month, is also the lone woman owner in the High Desert Football League, a 53-year-old organization that comprises 10 teams from throughout the Southland.

Compared to some of the adversity Cranston has faced, staring down street hoods and being the league’s only woman owner aren’t especially worrisome.

Assuming she ever worries.

“She doesn’t really strike me as a firebrand type of person,” said Jim Lott, the 83-year-old commissioner and founder of the HDFL who granted Cranston a franchise this season. “But she’s not going to let anybody walk all over her, either.”

The threats of a teen-age thug would be more than an irritation for most people, but Cranston’s mortality has been pushed to the limit before. In 1974, her medical condition was diagnosed as terminal abdominal cancer. After 5 years of radiation therapy, she recovered. In 1983, she had 3 heart attacks. In 1986, she recovered from cancer of the thyroid. Cranston, who is a diabetic, also suffers from cirrhosis of the liver and arthritis in her hips and joints so severe she often must use a walker. Her knees are so arthritic that a doctor once mistook Cranston’s X-rays for those of her son--who has had knee surgery and wears a brace when playing.

So when the gang members started verbally accosting one of her players during a recent 8-0 loss to the L. A. Hurricanes, she made her way down from her seat in the bleachers to investigate.

“These two guys came over from their side of the field and started yelling at one of our players,” she said. “Then one guy yells, ‘I’m from the Crips.’

“Everybody in the stands left but me. I told the guys I’d take care of it.”

Her son and a small group of players approached the pair but warily backed off. Cranston, however, jumped right into the verbal fracas.

“Somebody had said he might be carrying a gun, and then he said he wasn’t afraid of any white old lady,” she said. “That’s what he called me, a white old lady.”

Appearances, it seems, can be deceiving.

“So I told him, ‘Do you think I got to be 69 years old by being afraid of a punk?’ ” she said. “I had my purse right there in my hands and I asked him, ‘Do you think they stopped selling guns when you bought yours?’ ”

The young man and his friend beat a hasty retreat. So did several others.

It was a gamble, to be sure, but Cranston’s life has never been otherwise. Though she is now the owner of a successful accounting business, it has rarely been the smoothest of roads.

She was an only child, growing up just outside Flint, Mich. Her father’s union activities at General Motors led to death threats on several occasions.

She grew up a tomboy, spending much of her spare time hunting and fishing with her father.

“He wanted a boy,” she said. “But I didn’t mind.”

She was a cheerleader at a tiny high school in rural Michigan that fielded no baseball or basketball team. The football team played on a field scratched out on land donated by a local farmer. Despite the school’s rather rudimentary approach to the game, the hook was set.

When Cranston graduated from the University of Michigan in 1942, she was the only woman in the school’s accounting department: “And they didn’t want me there,” she said. “In 1942, they weren’t as liberal as they are now.”

At age 30, rather old by the standards of the day, she married. However, the marriage did not last long and she and her husband soon separated, though they continued to live together, she said. Cranston has remained single since--by choice.

“I’ll be blunt,” she said. “I got married because I wanted to have a child. He was a very nice fellow, but we didn’t have that much in common. I don’t miss being married.”

After college, she kept the books at several prominent Detroit nightspots and restaurants, and eventually ended up “hanging out with the same crowd” with legendary night prowler Bobby Layne, the former Detroit quarterback, and Dick (Night Train) Lane, another Lion star of the day. Cranston says she also was an acquaintance of former Detroit Tiger pitcher Denny McLain and was the accountant for the restaurant at which McLain did most of his gambling--a crime for which he was later banned from baseball.

In 1964, Cranston finally left her ex-husband and the house her father built for her and moved to North Hollywood, where she still resides.

As many neighborhood children soon learned, Cranston had a soft spot for troubled youths. Over the years, she has taken in the children of many parents suffering through one crisis or another, sometimes for long periods. “I was an only child and I had it kind of easy,” she said. “My father and mother raised cousins and other people’s kids. It’s just the way you are brought up.”

Her house soon became a neighborhood favorite.

“I think lots of parents knew that if their kid was at Freddie’s house, they’d be properly supervised and that if they ever got out of line she’d take care of it,” said Walt, 35, who moved back into his mother’s home 4 years ago.

Walt’s brother-in-law, Richard McCornell, also lives with Cranston. Like many others Freddie has temporarily taken under her wing, McCornell is black. Walt is married to Richard’s sister, Ruthie, though the pair are separated.

“We were brothers long before Walt ever married my sister,” said McCornell, 31, who has lived with Freddie “for around 22 years.”

“She’s kept a lot of young people off the streets and away from crime,” said McCornell, a defensive back for the Bandits. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

“She doesn’t worry about race or any of that. To her, we all bleed the same color, and that’s all that matters.”

Perhaps it is fitting that the enigmatic Cranston should end up owning a team in the HDFL, a league in which many players are infamous for unorthodox behavior. Admittedly, many of Cranston’s most vivid memories of semipro football are less than favorable.

A few years ago, a player slugged a referee in a scrimmage against UC Santa Barbara--which was fielding a team for the first time and was seeking practice games--and his mates “smuggled him home in the bus baggage compartment because the police were looking for him,” she said.

“I wanted to start a team that wasn’t known for that stuff,” said Cranston, whose team plays its home games at Monroe High.

She first began discussing with Walt the idea of forming a team 2 years ago. At the time, she had been helping pay the bills for the Freelancers, an unaffiliated team that plays at Taft High.

“Sooner or later, if you stick around and watch enough games, somebody’s going to ask you to foot the bill,” said Walt, who played at North Hollywood High and Pierce College. “And she didn’t like some of the things she saw with the Freelancers.”

She approached Lott, the commissioner, about reviving the Burbank Bulldogs, a team that had folded a few years ago, and he granted approval. Consent from team owners, however, was harder to come by, she said.

Resistance from the other owners has been subtle, but measurable, she insists. “They’ve tried to patronize me,” she said. “I mean, when they can’t spell your name right on your mail, something’s wrong. If the mailman didn’t know me, I wouldn’t get any (HDFL) mail. It’s a macho attitude thing, I think.”

Cranston estimates that starting a team from scratch cost her approximately $6,000 primarily because she again has taken a different tack. Where most teams charge players $200 or more to cover expenses, she has provided equipment and covered the fees for any player who couldn’t afford to supply his own uniform and pads.

“Her attitude is that anybody who wants to play ought to be able to,” said Bandit Coach Ed Perales, 34, a 1972 Grant High graduate who works for the postal service. “If you look around at our guys, most of them are wearing equipment that she furnished. Lots of them couldn’t afford it on their own.”

It has not all been smooth sailing. Movie stunt man Ron Ellis, who agreed to coach the team, was killed in the preseason when he fell from a window at his home, Cranston said. Perales, a former semipro teammate of her son, volunteered shortly thereafter.

To help recruit players, Cranston placed ads in several Los Angeles-area newspapers. Bolstered by her reputation, spread by word of mouth, players started trickling in.

The team, she says, has been her passion--and her panacea. If absorbing the costs of the team means longer hours in her Van Nuys office, so be it.

“I would just waste the money anyhow,” said Cranston, whose desk is piled a foot high with the files of clients. “I only work as hard as I want to work to make the money I need, anyway. I need to have projects to motivate me to take on the extra work.”

Some of her patrons are immigrants she sponsored upon their entry to the United States, and many regard her as a member of the family. She often counsels them on personal as well as financial matters. Cranston often “forgets” to charge some of her clients when she knows they cannot afford to pay for her bookkeeping services.

But altruism carries a heavy price; she also suffers from ulcers, which she says partly stem from her inability to say no to her extended family.

“I think I get too involved in their personal lives sometimes,” she said. “But I’ve known some of these people for years and years. They’re all family to me.”

Yet her activity has not necessarily been unhealthful. Her doctor, with whom she is in frequent contact, has applauded her involvement with the team, she said.

“The doctor told me that if I retire, I’ll be dead in six months,” Cranston said. “Football and work is all I do. I don’t enjoy going to the movies. Almost all other ladies my age belong to card clubs. I don’t watch that much TV. I happen to like football.”

Walt agreed that football has helped keep his mother alive and kicking. Kicking and screaming, that is.

“If she didn’t have football, she’d be what everybody’s impression of what a little old lady should be,” he said.

Instead, she is the team’s biggest booster. Turnout at games is usually sparse. Her voice, she admits, tends to carry.

“I don’t go down on the sidelines with the players because I get so emotionally involved in the game that I’d probably grab ahold of some of them and shake them up,” she said “I usually sit in the stands.

“I do get very involved. I’m not a lady at football games--I’m a truck driver. You do not get to be 69 years old and not have a bad vocabulary.”

Bill Hoston, 34, who went to high school with Walt and has known the family for 2 decades, says he thinks Cranston’s bark is much worse than her bite. Usually.

“I only remember her getting legitimately mad once, way back when we were in high school,” said Hoston, owner of a Van Nuys distributing company that Cranston helped through its formative stages with free financial counseling. “She was mad at Walt about something and chased his butt down at the house. He was a pretty big guy, but he was fast. Somehow, she ran him down, cornered him and beat the crap out of him.

“She gets mad at you and yells sometimes, but she always gives you a second chance. With her, it’s your heart that counts.”