Centers Help Seniors Stay Young : Day care: Four facilities offer a place to socialize and provide an alternative to nursing homes. They also give relatives a respite from round-the-clock attention.

Laying aside his crutches, Louis Steneman steadied himself on the arm of a chair as he rose to deliver his clue in charades.

By his own reckoning, Steneman last stepped onto a volleyball court 50 years ago. But he delivered an imaginary serve with a force that nearly knocked him off his feet.

“I’ve tried to keep a photographic memory, because so many places I’ve seen don’t exist anymore except in my mind,” said Steneman, 89, whose hearing and eyesight are failing him. “You especially don’t forget the good times.”

Many of the good times for Steneman lately have been supplied by the Fitzgerald House in Thousand Oaks, one of four Ventura County day-care centers for the frail elderly where charades, group exercise and other activities are part of a daily regimen.

“This place keeps me alert,” said Steneman, former owner of a small Bakersfield oil refinery who now lives with a grandnephew in Moorpark. “It’s a big question what I’d be doing if I wasn’t coming here.”

In a county where the senior population is increasing rapidly, it is a question for thousands of people such as Steneman.

According to the Ventura County Area Agency on Aging, the county’s 60-and-over population has jumped from 35,000 to 95,000 since 1970. About 27,000 county residents are 75 and older, the fastest-growing age group in the country.

Nursing home beds have become so scarce that nearly half of all Ventura County Medi-Cal recipients are placed in nursing homes in Kern and Riverside counties, isolating them from relatives, said Colleen House, the agency’s director.

An alternative in some counties to residential and home health care is day health care at centers staffed by a registered nurse and part-time therapists. Nearly half the counties in the state have opened such centers, which are half as costly as individual home care for shut-ins, according to the California Department of Aging. But Ventura County has not taken the preliminary steps necessary to open a day health-care center.

Elderly people with infirmities that do not need daily medical attention can find day care at four nonprofit centers--the Fitzgerald House, Club Camarillo, Camp Ventura and the Oak Treehouse in Ojai. The centers are licensed to serve fewer than 120 participants a day, out of an estimated 2,000 county residents gerontologists say need such services.

“It’s well-established that people who stay out of nursing homes live longer and have better quality lives,” said Patty Longo of the Ventura County chapter of the American Assn. of Retired Persons. “You get the budgetary response from government all the time, that we can’t afford these alternative programs. But we must face it, the empire of the old will soon be upon us.”

For people with elderly relatives, the centers provide respite from the tensions of round-the-clock care that can lead to elderly abuse, said Dr. Rick Zawadski, a researcher with the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center.

“Family members can assume responsibility for a senior’s physical well-being, but not their social well-being,” said Susan Salguero, director of the Oak Treehouse, which opened three years ago. “This is a place for them to be with their peers, people they know on a first-name basis.”

The need for such programs is growing more pronounced as long-term residential care for the elderly contributes to the nation’s soaring health-care bill, Longo said.

Zawadski said up to 10% of the country’s 65-and-over population suffer infirmities, from minor confusion to physical limitations, that might warrant day-care placement.

However, the four Ventura County centers do not have waiting lists.

Center officials said the reason is that government and private insurers do not cover day care because it is considered a non-medical expense.

Unlike senior centers and child-care facilities, there is no government assistance or tax credit for senior day-care participants.

The cost of senior day-care centers runs $20 to $32 a day, including lunch, with a sliding scale for people unable to pay. Nursing homes charge $60 to $95 a day for 24-hour care.

“We hope our people pay the full amount, but we don’t turn them away if they don’t,” said Jean Schipper, program director for the Fitzgerald House, which receives an average of $18 from participants toward its daily fee of $31.75.

Oak Treehouse, licensed for 20 participants, usually has only eight to 10 participants and has never had a full house since opening three years ago, said Salguero, whose program is run by Help of Ojai.

“There’s a very large need for senior day care, but a very small demand,” Salguero said. “Maybe it’s because day care has a connotation that you’re losing your independence, when in fact it’s the opposite.”

The Fitzgerald House, also licensed for 20 daily participants, has had to turn people away in its 12-year history, and now limits most participants to three days a week to accommodate more people, said Don M. Hegarty Jr., executive director of Canejo Valley Senior Concerns Inc., its parent organization.

“It’s happened that people called on behalf of relatives, and we had no room in the program,” Hegarty said. “When we would call back when something opened up, we’d find we’d lost them to a nursing home.”

The Fitzgerald House will move next year into larger quarters that could take up to 35 participants daily and would house the county’s first day program for people with Alzheimer’s disease. The new building, which also could take clients overnight so relatives could go on weekend getaways, is being paid for, in part, by a developer who received special zoning considerations from the city on an adjacent project.

Carol McDougall, 53, of Thousand Oaks, credits the Fitzgerald House with virtually saving her mother’s life.

When McDougall’s father died in 1987, her mother, Marjorie Wiggin, decided to leave the New Hampshire home she shared with her husband of 63 years and move to Thousand Oaks to live with her daughter.

“She didn’t take time to say goodby to New Hampshire, and once she got here, she wanted nothing more than to die,” said McDougall, who with her husband lives with eight adopted and foster children. “She just sat in a rocking chair in the kitchen and watched us all like we were a TV show.”

The strain of providing constant attention led McDougall to the Fitzgerald House, and then she convinced her mother to attend.

“They were her lifeline,” McDougall said. “She is a very creative and intelligent person. They got her doing needlework and sewing and painting, all the things she loved doing years ago that we couldn’t get her to do at our home, try as we might.”

Ruth Parutto, 73, says she was ready to put her husband, Joseph, into a nursing home when she found out about the Fitzgerald House. The program kept him at home for nearly a year, before his condition worsened.

The Paruttos were retired for 15 years, living in an oceanfront home north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when Joseph Parutto began displaying symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder characterized by tremors.

The couple moved three years ago to a home in Thousand Oaks, where Ruth Parutto cared for her husband of 30 years. But Joseph Parutto, 85, a former refrigeration engineer, began showing signs of progressive dementia and became prone to severe depression, his wife said.

Then came the fall that left Ruth Parutto with two broken vertebrae and unable to care for her husband. “When you’re ill yourself, trying to care for someone in his condition, everything becomes insurmountable,” she said.

She found the Fitzgerald House kept her husband happy and occupied. “Once he’s there,” she said last month, “he seems to forget all his troubles. He walks better and he talks better and he comes home all buoyed up. This is a wonderful halfway house.”

However, his condition deteriorated late last month, and she placed him in a nursing home, Schipper said.

As advances in medical technology continue to extend average life spans, countless people will find themselves in Ruth Parutto’s situation, said Charlene Welty, the California Department of Aging’s branch chief for adult day health-care programs.

“At different times in our lives, we need different levels of support,” Welty said. “In the 1990s, these programs will grow dramatically as people become aware that they exist and demand they be developed, much like child care in the 1980s.”