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14 Years of Living in Elysian Park : Fall Shatters Hermit’s Hip and His Way of Life

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Times Staff Writer

Charles M. Broyles, 72, knows he can’t go on this way. For the last two weeks he’s been lying at home--which, in his case, is a long, sloping, grassy hill in Elysian Park near downtown. He is unable to get up because the hip he broke a month ago is still weak from surgery.

It’s a hell of a way for a hermit to go out.

Broyles, who looks every inch a bum but talks with the spry lucidity of a shy, retired professor, has lived on his hill for 14 years, withdrawing from the workaday world, speaking only when spoken to, buying his meals, he says, with family inheritance money kept in an Echo Park bank.

It all worked fine until Jan. 2. On that day, as Broyles tells it, he walked down the hill to a McDonald’s before dawn to buy breakfast and found the restaurant closed. He went to sleep on some crates stacked a few feet off the ground, groggily rolled off and broke his left hip. Surgeons at County-USC Medical Center fixed it and Broyles hobbled back up his hill on crutches. But he wasn’t the same man.

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Were it not for the food that is brought to him each day by several residents around the park, who have glanced at him for years, Broyles would have starved. A quick drop in the temperature or a hard rain may kill him anyway. He can’t make it farther up the hill to the shelter of “my pad,” a plot of ground covered by plastic sheeting.

“My world’s blown up,” he admits. “I always was a loner. I was quite cocky. I always figured I could survive by myself. Now I’m uncertain.”

Broyles must make a decision. He can maintain his life style and risk death by exposure. Or, he can accept assistance from a county social worker who wants to place him in a retirement hotel and spend some of what he describes as his “sizable” savings account. And Charlie doesn’t like to spend money.

“They showed me a place on Commonwealth, two men to a room, two meals a day, a coffee table, recreation rooms. The place looked nice,” Broyles said one day this week, lying on his back under a pair of fading blankets, wearing his one and only greasy old corduroy jacket and a red stocking cap, squinting through steel-blue eyes and talking through a mouth of missing teeth.

“I said, ‘What’s the business here? What are the rates?’ They said $675 a month. I have never paid $675 a month!”

This kind of stubbornness is the product of a life in which convention has been a benign enemy, something to be dodged. As with many of the faceless souls who sleep outdoors, either through choice or circumstance, something about Broyles is a little out of sync.

Born in Los Angeles

Broyles said he was born in Los Angeles in 1916 and moved to a home on Echo Park Avenue with his mother and stepfather. The family struggled through the Depression. Broyles went to Belmont High but never learned a trade. “My stepfather was a carpenter, but he didn’t want to teach me.”

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He was drafted into the Army in 1942, serving as a military policeman, and moved back in with his family after he came back. He never left. The rental property that his stepfather’s family owned was generating income, which was fortunate for Broyles because he and work were never properly introduced. He had some odd jobs--restaurants, laundry shops, gardening--but nothing clicked. His stepfather died in 1956, his mother in 1968. He was alone--no brothers or sisters. Eventually he sold the home to a mental hospital that was buying up property in the area.

“They suggested I move into a hotel for disturbed persons,” Broyles said. “That adjective,” he added parenthetically, “doesn’t bother me.”

He spent a few more years drifting from one hotel to the next before getting fed up with a place that had “a lot of immigrants. They were rowdy. They kept me awake. I finally decided in a huff, ‘I’m going to go out and be a hermit or something.’ ”

And so he came to the hill. It was close to his family’s former home. It was beautiful, wide and long, a thin hiking trail beside it. A huge leafy tree in the middle became his “pad,” where he slept and cooked. He’d walk a mile down to Echo Park in the mornings and hang out. He became a regular. At night the moon came up, the stars twinkled, the coyotes howled, the dogs from surrounding homes responded. He was alone. He liked it that way.

‘Keeping to Myself’

“I’d just gotten into keeping to myself, the older I got,” he said. “When I was younger I was more gregarious and friendly, but I began to get a little more solitude. I got closer to my family.”

As the years went by, he withdrew from Echo Park and spent more time on the hill in Elysian Park. The park supervisor who had winked at his homesteading retired. To play it safe, Broyles moved from the tree to his hill’s remote peak, about 150 yards farther up.

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“Anybody who lives around here knows who he is,” said Deborah Perrin, a public relations consultant who lives in a neighborhood near the park and has walked her dog along the trail each morning for 10 years.

“I would see him walking around, looking biblical, wearing a blanket and a long beard,” she said. “After a few years I broke the ice and said hello. He nodded. I figured anybody who wants to be a hermit probably wants to be left alone.”

As long as his legs were good, Broyles figured, he could survive indefinitely. “I had some regrets, thoughts about a sort of wasteful existence,” but he was too old to change. Besides, “we’ve had five beautiful, pretty easy winters in a cycle, and I’d heard a meteorologist who said we’d have another, so I was trusting him.”

Then he broke his hip.

The Fire Department came and moved him from restaurant property onto a curb, he said. He sat there until a man Broyles knows as Bob drove up and said he’d tell another acquaintence, Walter, who wanted to take him to a hospital. Not yet, Charlie said. Take me back to the hill. The next morning Walter came back and prodded Broyles into seeing a doctor.

‘Looked Like Santa Claus’

The people at County-USC were nice, Broyles remembered, except for “the woman with the stentorian voice who could be heard by everybody in the hall. She asked me how much money I had. That was a violation of my privacy.” They cleaned him up. “I got to smell quite a bit, and I looked like Santa Claus. They shaved my beard.”

Two and a half weeks later, on Jan. 20, they released him. He took buses back to the hill and, on crutches, hobbled up. He couldn’t make it to the top, so he stopped midway, lay down and soon found that unless somebody gave him a boost, he could not rise. “I lacked a lot of pep that I had before. It’s noticeable.”

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Sanitation was a problem. Food was not. People brought canned sausage, soft drinks, napkins, paper towels and crackers.

But Deborah Perrin was worried. For all his aplomb, the old man was immobile. Last Saturday she walked across the hill and asked if he needed help.

Yes, he said.

Perrin drove Broyles back to the hospital, but Broyles said he was not admitted because he was not in immediate danger and was told he’d need to make an appointment. He was given enough bus tokens to get home. “I rode one bus to 2nd and Spring, then another up Broadway, then another to Echo Park, rested an hour and came back up the hill during the night. I tired myself something awful. I didn’t move the next day.”

Next, Perrin called the county Department of Public Social Services, which sent a social worker, Ricardo Viera, up to the hill.

“I told him it’s better for him to do something, but he said he wanted to stay,” Viera said. “He’s mentally clear. He’s able to make a decision.” Legally, because Broyles has more than $2,000 in assets, government will not pay for his care. He must spend his own money.

‘Maybe He’ll Rethink This’

“I’m trying,” Viera said. “Next week I’ll see him again. Maybe he’ll rethink this.”

To Perrin, herself a former social worker, Broyles is living in that tricky gray zone between individual choice and society’s responsibility to protect people from themselves.

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“It’s a judgment call on whether he is totally eccentric or crazy,” she said. “He’s lucid when you talk to him, well-spoken. He seems reasonably intelligent and well-read. The question is whether somebody who’d prefer to lay in the middle of the field rather than spend any money is playing with a full deck.”

On Wednesday morning, wrapped in his blankets atop a bare patch of ground surrounded by high grass, Charles Broyles tried to figure out whether he will come in from the cold.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said in his scratchy but relatively youthful voice. “I’m very uncertain. It doesn’t seem practical from a hygienic standpoint to stay here. Other people may notice. I have a sizable amount in the Bank of America, although if you took it out to West Los Angeles you couldn’t use it for more than a couple of those big parties.”

But then he thought about the monthly rate that retirement hotel quoted him. Six-seventy-five? Never.

“Three-hundred would be very fair,” he said with that maddening lack of urgency, oblivious to the 20% chance of rain predicted for today and Friday. “If I could find something like that, it would be great.”

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