Program Gives Youngsters a Short Break From Gang-Infested Areas : A Day at Beach and Away From Reality

Nicholas Conway is big for his age. The sixth-grader-to-be at 93rd Street Elementary School is only 10, but he is built like a lineman on a junior high school football team. Teasing isn’t the problem. The problem is that Nicholas lives in the Avalon Gardens housing project in a home right by McKinley Street, a demarcation between the Crips and Bloods.

Little gangsters, Nicholas has learned, tend to pick on kids their own size.

About a year ago, Nicholas was outside his home when he heard shooting across the street, he said. When he ran for a gap between houses, “they started shooting-- pow, pow , like that. . . . They were shooting at me.”

“They be shooting out there sometimes,” affirmed Bryan McKinney, age 5.

A Day Off

But last Thursday, Nicholas and Bryan were given the day off from such realities, transported to a privileged world with a different set of turf rules. They were among about 60 children from Avalon Gardens and other Southside neighborhoods who were invited to spend a day at the beach as guests of the private Sand and Sea Club in Santa Monica.

“Hey, we’re going to a private beach! Where rich people go!” said Tazie Ashley, 11 years old.

“I want to go surfing,” said Tenisha Collins, also 11. Tenisha said she likes the beach: “I think it’s fun because your parents don’t get mad at you if you have a good time.”

It was a hazy day, but that didn’t seem to matter. When the bus rumbled through the tunnel where the Santa Monica Freeway merges with Pacific Coast Highway, the kids gazed out at the Pacific and most seemed excited.

Vontrell Lewis, 12, nervously eyed the horizon: “The waves can pull you out there, can’t they?”

Summer-Long Program

All of these kids said they had been to the beach before, some just once. The fact that many inner-city children grow up without seeing the ocean inspired the summer-long beach program, sponsors say. About 10 groups have made the sojourn since Ike Jones, a TV producer, put the endeavor together with the Brotherhood Crusade community improvement group and Sand and Sea owner Doug Badt.

At first, Jones said, the plan was to mix fun with lectures about the evils of drugs and gangs: “But the more we thought about it, we decided, why not just let them play?”

They hear plenty of lectures, Jones said.

“This sort of thing has to happen all the time,” said Leon Watkins, a community activist with Brotherhood Crusade. “If they see somebody trying to help them, then maybe they’ll want to help themselves later on.”

Jones, who grew up in Santa Monica, said he tried to recruit two more exclusive private beach clubs to participate, including one where he said as a youth he had worked “cleaning toilets.” The clubs turned them down.

Unlike other beach clubs, which have exclusive membership rules, Sand and Sea has no membership restrictions other than its $1,950 a year fee for families and a cap on enrollment at 700 families. It operates as a private concession on state park land.

Built By Hearst

The club’s structures are what remains of a lavish beach estate built in 1929 by William Randolph Hearst for actress Marion Davies.

The membership rules of other beach clubs, Badt said, have helped make the Sand and Sea about 75% Jewish. On this day, though, the Sand and Sea was about 90% black and 5% Latino.

The kids were on the beach for about two hours. They seemed to act like any other kids at the beach, which of course was the point of the entire exercise.

Nicholas splashed in the surf. Bryan raced the tide.

“It feels funny,” Nicholas said, feeling sand underfoot.

Vontrell stood a good long while at the water’s edge, wary. He asked once again about the pull of the tide. Finally, he ventured in and lived to tell about it.

The Vasquez brothers--10-year-old Jesus, 8-year-old Esau, and 6-year-old Lionel--spent much of the day building their own private sandcastle.