Volunteer With Special Commitment

Rick Berry is a volunteer at the county’s Orangewood Children’s Home for the abused and abandoned. He has worked there since 1985. But a year ago, the Cal State Long Beach junior discovered something that caused him to increase his commitment: he learned that he had been an abandoned newborn.

Twenty-six years ago this week, Berry was found by Westminster Police Officer Russ Miller, lying on a beach towel in tall grass behind an apartment complex near Westminster Avenue and Beach Boulevard.

Miller, now a sergeant, said last week that the incident remains fresh in his memory.

“It’s one of these things that will never happen to you again,” Miller said. “A woman reported hearing some screams coming from behind an apartment building . . . the kind of place where no one ever goes. We found him (Berry) with the (umbilical) cord still attached. He was lying on a beach towel. There were five cigarette butts nearby.”

Berry’s adoptive mother, Millie Berry, says her family heard the news about the abandoned infant on the radio as they returned home from a vacation. “We decided to adopt him,” said the mother, who already had two daughters of her own. “We didn’t have a baby and he didn’t have a family.”

For 25 years, Berry was unaware that his first few minutes in the world were spent in abandonment, or that his first baby pictures were taken in a police station.

“My mother said she told me,” Berry said, “but I probably was too hyperactive to remember.”

The story of his birth was recounted to him last year when he and his mother attended an uncle’s funeral in Arizona. “My two cousins, who were adopted, questioned my mother about their situations, and she told them how they were put up for adoption,” Berry explained. “I always knew I was adopted, but I wanted to know my ‘situation’ too. So I asked her, ‘What about me?’ ”

The answer he received made him rush to the Santa Ana public library the night he returned from Arizona. “I had already waited 25 years (to find out),” said Berry. “It was time to get moving.”

It did not take him long to find a newspaper story that reported the details.

Armed with a copy of the story, Berry rushed to the Westminster police station to seek out Miller. The sergeant was not on duty, but the next day he left a message on Berry’s telephone answering machine.

Even though learning about his birth provided some satisfaction, Berry says he has many questions. He insists that he holds no bitterness toward his birth mother, saying that he was fortunate to end up in “a good family . . . and be saved from an irresponsible person.”

Referring to a recent Times article about the four abandoned newborns found in Orange County last year, Berry said, “I’d love for one of these women who abandoned their baby to call me and tell me why. I’d like to know what caused that person to make that decision. With the baby in Mission Viejo (who was left with only a note, some diapers, and a $20 bill) that’s something else.”

“But the way I was left,” Berry said, glancing at a Jan. 3, 1964, Times article headlined “Abandoned Baby Howls Bring Aid in Westminster,” “they said if it wasn’t for my good pair of lungs . . . “

The discovery of his abandonment, he says, made him intensify his volunteer efforts. “I realized that I was so lucky to get out of this alive,” Berry said. “It made me feel that I was not doing enough.”

Berry signed up as a volunteer at Orangewood after accompanying some of the shelter’s children--it houses children up to 18 years of age--on an outing to Disneyland. His mother, a county social worker, had encouraged him to become involved.

“I got hooked,” he recalled. “I came out of it (the outing) feeling that these kids were so happy just to talk to me and also that there was a big need just for me to be there.”

As a volunteer at Orangewood, Berry learned about the county’s other volunteer programs. He is now a volunteer with PAL, an Orange County social services program modeled after Big Brothers.

And about 18 months ago, he joined VIP--Volunteers in Probation--a program that encourages volunteers to befriend children who wind up in Juvenile Hall.

“They (the kids) feel people don’t care so they do what they think is best at the moment,” Berry said. “They are ‘system kids.’ The system is overloaded (and) no one is there for them.”

Berry’s mother and the supervisors of the county volunteer programs say that the 26-year-old does more than his fair share. When he is not attending classes in educational development at Cal State Long Beach, he works as an assistant teacher at the Mardan Center of Educational Therapy in Irvine, a private school for children with learning disabilities.

He spends the major part of his free time with the children--whether it’s taking a PAL out to a movie, “shooting hoops” with a youngster, or allowing them to help work on his 1974 Camaro.

“He’s a great son,” Millie Berry said. “He’s outspoken, dedicated, and pretty much of a humanitarian. . . . He gives of himself and what little money he makes.”

While Berry foresees a career working with children, he says he has no firm plans. “I am satisfied to make it through each day,” he said.