A BEACON ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY

Ron Ferrick has been gone for nearly two years now. But along San Pedro’s gritty Beacon Street, they’ll tell you he’s still saving lives.

There’s Jim, a tall, handsome kid, who has finally quit the drugs and alcohol and has just been accepted by Chapman College. And Louis, who used to be so strung out on heroin that he’d shoot up before, during and after each day he taught at an elementary school. And Tim the mechanic and Wayne the poet and Patrick the draftsman.

You see, around Beacon House, a place where alcoholics and addicts have been getting help for 20 years, they all know the story of how Ron drank himself to death.

But no one at Beacon House who has turned things around thinks about Ron more often than Terry DeKraai. The two of them used to run together, panhandle together, get so drunk together that life meant nothing without a bottle. Sobriety was tough for DeKraai, but he did it. Ron couldn’t. Not even after the agony of having doctors shove a needle into his belly, so bloated from booze that the ex-Marine should have died long before he did.

“I remember the night they stuck the needle in his stomach,” DeKraai says painfully. “I thought that would end his drinking.”

It didn’t. And one foggy morning, two days after he was last seen by those who remember him as a charmer, the best panhandler around, Ron was found dead by DeKraai beneath a tree on Beacon Street where the two of them had often passed out.

He was 35.

“He’d been there for a day or two,” DeKraai said. “He’s gone now, but he’s kept a lot of people sober just knowing how he died.”

Ferrick’s story, the story of someone who didn’t make it, is one they don’t mind telling around Beacon House, a San Pedro recovery home for addicts and alcoholics. After all, they say at Beacon House, life is about failures as well as successes.

And for those who don’t seek help, an early death is likely.

“That’s the reality. That’s what usually happens,” says Beacon House Director Mary Proper. “And we don’t want to create the false sense of security that once they get here, their alcoholism is taken care of.”

If Beacon House is about anything, it is about the reality of overcoming drug and alcohol abuse. How hard it is and how long it takes. How others can help, but no one can do it for you.

In 1970, Beacon House opened for those who wanted to do something about their problem. From a ramshackle building occupied only by drunks, it has become a fixture in San Pedro.

Over the years, 70% of the estimated 2,000 men, women and teen-agers who have entered Beacon House have overcome their addictions, according to program and government officals. Referred by agencies or coming in off the streets, those who enter Beacon House begin with a 90-day recovery program. After that, where they go is up to them, though most stay at least a year, finding jobs and renting a room in one of the six nearby homes or apartment houses leased by Beacon House.

And even for those who long ago left Beacon House, it remains a sort of touchstone, a place where former residents drop by for coffee or coun seling or conversation. A place where those who have moved away still call or send cards around Christmas.

“It’s like a family here. You feel wanted and needed and accepted unconditionally,” says John G., a former resident whose anonymity is in keeping with the rules of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Since it was founded, Beacon House has grown from a single 20-bed recovery home to a nonprofit association that houses 100 adults and sometimes their children. With an annual budget of $500,000, derived from government grants, donations and activities like a thrift store, Beacon House not only provides a safe environment for those needing shelter, it offers counseling programs, job referrals and education classes. In addition, residents provide community services that include regular neighborhood cleanup programs.

“They do a wonderful job there,” said Joy Graham, a senior counselor for the state Department of Rehabilitation office in Long Beach. “From the moment a person comes in, they have a very planned, very supportive, very sequential way of helping people deal with their problem. And they really work at it.”

One measure of Beacon House’s success is its selection this month by the department’s local office as the finest community-based program in the region, which encompasses 19 cities and 200 programs.

Another measure of its success is Terry DeKraai.

“This place saved my life. I know that,” DeKraai says.

Twenty years ago, he was an All-American receiver on a USC football team that included O. J. Simpson. The game and the fame came easy to DeKraai. So did alcoholism.

“I started drinking when I was 15 years old,” DeKraai says, remembering how the parties just seemed to be a part of the post-game celebrations. But that changed over time. “It got to the point where drinking after the game became almost more important than the game itself,” he says.

The obsession grew stronger over time. And when DeKraai’s football career ended at age 23, after two years with the Houston Oilers, the drinking took over his life. “I didn’t really know what to do after football was over,” says DeKraai, who had left USC before graduating to join the NFL.

By the time he reached Beacon House, DeKraai had been married and divorced twice. He’d lost every job that came along. He’d also lost hope.

“I’d hit bottom. I was in the gutter,” he says. “I kind of thought it was my lot in life to live that way.”

Three years after his arrival, DeKraai is now one of the Beacon House success stories. He stopped drinking, went back to college and earned a degree in recreational therapy, hoping to work with the emotionally or physically disabled.

Like all those who have gone through Beacon House, DeKraai learned what it’s like to stay sober and accept responsibility. “Fighting this,” he says of his drinking, “was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Doing it, DeKraai adds, would never have been possible without the support of others at Beacon House, both staff and residents.

“What makes a program work is not necessarily the dollars, but the commitment,” says Paula Sawyer, district administrator for the state Department of Rehabilitation.

“That is what creates success, particularly in the area of substance abuse. What Beacon House represents is one of those programs that works.”

What makes Beacon House work?

“It’s caring,” says Mike Dowling, the impish program director of Beacon House who’s been there since its inception.

Back in 1970, a plain-talking Episcopal priest, Arthur Bartlett, grew tired of watching drunken sailors gather night after night in the park across the street from the Seamen’s Church Institute on Beacon Street.

Bartlett, who was then the institute’s director, knew Beacon Street. He’d pretty much grown up on the docks, delivering newspapers as a boy in the 1920s. He remembered how it had once been dubbed “the toughest street in the world” by Ripley’s Believe it or Not. It was a street of rowdy sailors and rough bars like Shanghai Red’s, now gone.

Over the years, Beacon Street grew tamer. But the alcoholics still gathered every night in what they call Wino Park. And Bartlett, desperate for some solution, started talking to recovered alcoholics. One of them was Dowling, a crusty former merchant seaman from New York City.

“I remember him asking me, ‘What does a drunk need in this town?’ ” Dowling said last week. “And I told him there were a lot of loners around, a lot of guys who had nowhere to go but their hotel rooms. And I said if there was only a place they could be together to deal with their drinking.”

Several days later, they found that place--a run-down old house at 1003 Beacon St. The house was vacant, save for the drunks who would come in from time to time looking for a place to sleep. The rent was $126 a month, and Bartlett didn’t hesitate to pay it.

Since its founding, Beacon House has seen it all. Children have been born there. Couples have married there. People have died there.

People like Mary K., a 64-year-old recovered alcoholic who moved to Beacon House three months before she died from cancer.

Mary K. was watched around-the-clock by the residents at Beacon House. The vigil was a logical extension of the way they look out for each other every day.

“I remember when I first got here, I came to the back door and said I needed help. And four guys came out to talk to me,” remembers Patrick B.

At the time, Patrick was just a short walk from his mother’s home. But he couldn’t go there because his mother, hopelessly frustrated by her son’s alcoholism, had gotten a court order to keep him away.

“I told the guys I couldn’t go home. So they wrote me a note to give her,” recalls Patrick. He returned the next day and has been sober for two years.

“The great thing here is that the residents are so involved in every aspect of what goes on. They practically run Beacon House,” says director Proper, who came to the facility in 1985 and heads a staff of five people.

From the shopping to the cooking to the cleaning, the residents are responsible for Beacon House, Proper says. And those chores are never an excuse for residents to miss other requirements for staying at Beacon House: counseling meetings five days a week, book groups, alcohol education programs, community cleanup activities, even working one day a month at the Beacon House thrift store.

“If someone comes here to ask for help, which happens all the time, the residents do it. We don’t do it,” Proper says. “They find out how to help someone else, and by doing that, it helps them.”

The approach sounds simple enough, and Proper is among those who believe there is nothing mysterious about Beacon House’s success.

“This can happen anyplace. I truly believe that,” she says. “I think there are a lot of places that do this and a lot more that could.”

Dowling says: “It’s not like Beacon House has found something totally unique. Yet there is something special about it. And if I had to use a word, I guess it would be the love,” Adds Bartlett: “In church parlance, we’d call it the Holy Spirit. But you can just call it magic.”