Health Center Fills Rx for Watts : Communities: Born from the 1965 riots, the facility is a vital medical asset. It also is the area’s largest employer and a point of pride.

The atmosphere was charged in the pediatric-care waiting room at the Watts Health Center. At last, the climax of the soap opera was about to be played out. Diane Thomas, a young mother who had been staring at the TV for half an hour, didn’t intend to miss it.

As she watched the screen just above her head, Thomas clutched her sleeping 1-year-old son and leveled occasional warning glares at other children slaloming around her. She would brook no interruptions.

Donzella Lee interrupted. Coming through the waiting room doorway, Lee, director of the center’s Women and Adolescent Children Services, stopped and exchanged brief pleasantries with Thomas. The soap opera was forgotten.

“I’d rather talk to her,” said Thomas. “She used to be my teacher in a prenatal-care class. There were so many things I didn’t know. I don’t think I could have learned them anywhere else except here.”

Thomas is not alone. For many Watts residents, the health center has been a source of help and hope. A direct outgrowth of community and government response to the 1965 Watts riots, the health center was designed to heal the physical ailments of those in the distressed district.

More than two decades later, the Watts Health Center has gone a long way toward healing the community’s battered spirit as well.

“This place is beautiful--makes you feel good knowing it’s here,” said Frederick Edwards, 38. “The people here have sewed me up a few times. I’ve been stabbed, had my head busted. My kid has had his head busted. But they do us right. The community around here is real proud of this place.”

Functioning on a $100-million annual budget, the facility offers the most extensive basic health-care programs for indigents in South Los Angeles--”womb-to-tomb service,” as the center’s employees like to say. It treats about 120,000 cases a year.

The center was the brainchild of the Watts Health Foundation, a band of activists and residents organized to advance the recommendations of a gubernatorial commission that probed the causes of the riots. In its 1965 report, the state panel found that health care in the area bordered on Third World conditions.

With those findings, the health foundation went to several public and private backers and persuaded them to support the comprehensive low-cost center.

After opening in 1967 in a small cluster of prefabricated buildings on a corner of Grape Street, the center moved three years later to its modern, fully equipped facility on 103rd Street and Compton Avenue.

The health center is not the only high-profile program run by the foundation. The group operates a drug-rehabilitation center, a medical center in nearby Compton and a major community AIDS awareness project.

In addition, there are mobile health-care programs and even a controversial school-based clinic at Jordan High School that offers medical advice to teen-agers.

“We’ve been marched on quite a few times for that,” said Lee, laughing sardonically. “Some people think we’re telling their kids to have sex. Sure, like we’re telling them, ‘The cots are over there in the corner. Go lie down.’ ”

Beyond its efforts to doctor the district’s physical ailments, the center has attacked Watts’ social woes. With nearly 1,000 workers it is the leading employer in the area, said Benjamin N. Wyatt, chairman of the board of trustees of the Watts Health Foundation.

Many of those employees are graduates of the center’s job-training programs, which enable local residents to obtain skills and find jobs in clerical and medical professions inside and outside the center.

“That was part of the goal,” said facility spokeswoman Emma Pullen, “to provide not just health care for the community, but employment. We need jobs in this area--bad.”

Watts is also sorely in need of heroes. Residents say that in a district all too frequently associated with drug pushers and gang members, the health center has furnished several professional role models for children and adults.

“I certainly see myself as a role model,” said Frazier N. Moore Jr., director of the center’s dental services. “People are often surprised to see a black dentist. I’ve had a couple ask me how long it takes, where do you go to school for it. It’s good for them to see we can do anything we want to do.”

The center has had its troubles. Two years ago, a miscalculation nearly shut it down.

“We had received information from our outside accountants that misstated our financial condition,” said Wyatt. “It said we were $6 million ahead of budget, and it turned out that we were more than $6 million behind.”

The foundation discovered the error in time to avert disaster, but Wyatt said the center was forced to file for bankruptcy as part of a financial reorganization plan.

“There was never any interruption of services, and we have been out of Chapter 11 for more than a year,” said Wyatt.

Today the center is grappling with another crisis: dwindling federal funds. Wyatt said that recent cuts in federal funding for community health services around the country have forced the center to lay off nearly 500 employees and cut important research efforts.

The layoffs hit vital employees such as nurses, interpreters and medical assistants, Wyatt said, but the worst blow was to the center’s research into diseases such as sickle cell anemia and hypertension, two ailments that kill many black Americans. Over the past few years, those programs were cut by 80%.

“More than 60% of the black people in this area suffer from hypertension,” said Wyatt. “We really can’t afford to cut research in that area, but we have to. We have to be there for our patients.”