South-Central Challenge : Youth: The Challengers Club began as one man’s struggle for the hearts and minds of kids in South-Central L.A. It’s now a bona-fide program for gang prevention.

Three years ago, when Inaliel Lisbey was in the third grade, he was in constant trouble for fighting and vandalizing at his South-Central Los Angeles elementary school.

Then he stopped going to class altogether.

“He was leaving the school with gang members as soon as I dropped him off,” said his mother, Leilani Pettiford, a single parent with three other young children.

Unable to control her son and desperate for help, Pettiford called the police, asking that Inaliel be placed in a juvenile hall.

The police said that wasn’t possible since the boy hadn’t been arrested. Rather than wait for that to happen, they referred her to the Challengers Boys and Girls Club.

Over 22 years, the Challengers Club has established a reputation among South-Central law enforcement, social service and school officials for keeping youths off the streets and out of trouble through a comprehensive program of education, recreation and family support services.

“Challengers is designed for the kid not yet into trouble or just on the verge,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Mike Downing, whose 77th Division includes the Challengers’ neighborhood. “The club kind of sways them over to the positive side.”

For Pettiford and her son, the club was a life raft. Inaliel became a Challenger and took the first step toward turning his young life around.

Located on the corner of 51st Street and Vermont Avenue, the Challengers’ blue and white clubhouse stands pristine amid the broken down storefronts that surround it, many tattooed with the graffiti of the local gang, the Five Deuce Hoover Crips.

“We are surrounded,” said Lou Dantzler, the Challengers’ 53-year-old executive director and founder, referring to the gangs. “But in all the time we’ve been here, we’ve never had any gang incident.

“We have kids who may have belonged to a gang at one time, but when they come here, those things are stopped at the gate.”

About 200 children come to Challengers each day, many picked up from their schools or homes by club-operated buses. All are between the ages of 6 and 17. About 90% are black.

From the time they sign in until checkout time at 7 p.m., club members are closely supervised by Challengers staff and volunteers.

Those who have homework are sent to the library. Only after their work has been completed and checked will they be released to the other activity areas.

Many head for the arts and crafts room. Others go to the club’s computer center, where the eight IBM terminals are in near-constant use. Each computer is fitted with learning programs aimed at improving math, reading and science skills at various grade levels.

For members who need one-on-one help with their schoolwork, club members’ parents conduct tutoring sessions each Saturday.

Challengers operates on an annual budget of about $600,000 and receives funding from a variety of sources including the Brotherhood Crusade, United Way, the city of Los Angeles, private foundations and local corporations and individuals, Dantzler said.

The annual membership fee of $15 per child is considered a bargain by most parents.

“This right here is the perfect environment,” said Leilani Pettiford during a recent visit to the club. Pettiford said Inaliel’s behavior and truancy problems ceased soon after he joined Challengers.

Pettiford credits the club’s tutorial program for improving Inaliel’s school performance. “From the program here, he was put in a magnet school for gifted kids,” she said, adding that she has since enrolled her three other children at Challengers.

In the 22 years since its inception, more than 25,000 South-Central youths have belonged to Challengers, according to club statistics. The club recently boosted its full-time staff from nine to 15, adding, among others, a nurse who screens members for health and dental problems.

By Dantzler’s design, Challengers also relies heavily on parent volunteers.

“We wouldn’t have nearly as many problems if parents were more involved in the lives of their kids,” Dantzler said.

To promote interaction and communication between club members and their parents, Dantzler requires parents to donate two hours of volunteer work at the club each week.

Dantzler also puts 75 to 80 teen-aged club members to work each summer as junior staff, part of his gang prevention strategy. Their duties include supervising younger members, administrative work and picking up. Junior staff are paid $4.25 an hour through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program.

Lou Dantzler’s struggle for the hearts and minds of South-Central children began three years after the Watts riots.

The youngest of 17 children born to South Carolina sharecroppers, Dantzler moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘60s, while serving with the Air Force.

After his discharge, he married, fathered two sons and was working as a public school janitor when he took the first steps in forming what would become the Challengers Club.

“There was no master plan,” Dantzler recalled recently. “I’d just bought a new pickup truck and kids liked to ride in the back.”

Dantzler saw that many of the boys in his neighborhood had no fathers living with them and nothing to do on weekends, so he started driving the children to the park on Saturdays to play ball.

As more and more boys showed up, Dantzler enlisted the help of neighborhood parents. Soon, the weekend trips involved dozens of youths and a caravan of cars.

Dantzler had tapped a vein of need in his community and the club’s membership snowballed.

In 1970, Vons donated an abandoned 22,000-square-foot supermarket to serve as a clubhouse. The building was renovated with help from foundation grants and volunteer labor. The club opened its doors to girls in 1974.

One of Challengers’ earliest members was Carl Reed, who is now the director of operations and Dantzler’s right hand man.

In 1971, Reed was a 15-year-old gang member and drug seller. He joined the newly opened Challengers’ Club because it had the only basketball courts in the area. But he soon found out that to enjoy the club, he had to follow Dantzler’s rules.

“I wasn’t used to being bossed around or given instructions,” recalled Reed. His violent temper resulted in repeated suspensions from the club for fighting.

But Dantzler saw potential in Reed and gave him a chance to prove himself. “He gave me a job after all that I did,” Reed said. “I felt like I owed it to him to do right.”

As a junior staff member, Reed learned to show up on time and handle responsibility. “Lou taught me discipline and how to listen to other people,” said Reed. “He basically taught me how to be a man.”

Reed quit his gang, finished high school and spent three years at Chico State College. After a stint in the Air Force, he returned to the neighborhood with his wife and two sons. Intent on giving something back, Reed began working with the club.

Reed noted that in his youth, gang violence rarely went beyond fist-fighting, but today automatic weapons are standard gang equipment.

“The disease is getting worse,” Reed said. “But the club is the cure.”

“The thing that makes Challengers unique is the people involved,” according to Gloria Clark, a director of the city’s Community Development Department, which funds a number of youth development programs including one at Challengers designed to attract high-risk children to the club.

“Lou Dantzler is a committed, loving mentor to those kids,” Clark continued. “He has the ability to bring out the positive in them.”

In the words of Sgt. Downing: “Lou will hug the kid with one hand and discipline him with the other.”

Club members who have excelled at school or in club athletic competitions are publicly praised and recognized with awards.

Gum-chewing, swearing and fighting are prohibited, as are hats, khaki pants and red or blue shoe strings--attire associated with gangs.

Members are told that if they break the rules or step out of line either at school or at home, they may be subject to “swats”--public spankings with paddle. Upon enrolling their children at Challengers, all parents must sign a release permitting Dantzler to administer swats.

Marcy Frerichs, a counselor at Norwood Street Elementary School who referred about 30 children to Challengers last year and is a staunch club supporter, says she is uneasy about the practice.

“It’s a concern we have because we’re referring the children out of the school,” she said. “Our position is: If there are options other than the swats, we encourage them.”

Dantzler acknowledged the delicacy of the matter: “It’s a very touchy subject and that’s why we don’t let anyone come in here without them being aware of what we’re doing and who does it.”

Dantzler is considered a positive role model by many club parents and a confidant by club members. The same is true for director of operations, Reed.

“Being a single parent, I especially like that my son has good role models in Lou and Carl,” said Mildred Parker, the mother of 12-year-old Brandon. “It’s good for him to have a man to talk to.”

For Parker, the club has become much more than a place for her son to spend time after school. “It’s like having an extension of a family that I don’t really have,” she said.

Parker added that, in addition to helping her son improve his grades, Challengers has given him a sense of pride and place to belong.

“The club teaches self-respect and self-esteem,” Parker said. “They teach kids, ‘It’s OK that you’re right here in South Central. You can come to the club and be a part of something that’s positive where people care about you. You don’t have to go out and create a little clique you call a family.’ ”

Challengers has had some failures, and in the gang milieu, failure is dangerous.

Among the inspirational banners hanging on the gymnasium wall is one that reads: “Eddie we love you. Our prayers are with you.”

Late on the night of July 20, 15-year-old club member Eddie Chillies was shot in the back of the head in a drive-by shooting three blocks from the club.

According to Eddie’s uncle, Level Henderson, Eddie was wearing a black Houston Oilers cap, part of the uniform of the Five Deuce Hoover Crips.

Friends of Eddie’s claim that he had initially broken away from the Crips after joining Challengers, but he had recently slipped back into gangbanging.

Now Eddie spends his days in a wheelchair, a piece of bullet so deep in his brain that doctors are unable to remove it safely. He undergoes six hours of therapy five days a week to re-learn how to speak and walk. Although doctors say Eddie is improving markedly, chances for full recovery are uncertain.

Eddie had been admitted into the Whittier Family Foundations’ “I Have a Dream” program, administered from the club, ensuring him funds to go to college. Today, Eddie’s chances of realizing that dream are diminished.

One of Eddie’s closest friends is 16-year-old Challengers member Devon Logan, also in the “Dream” program. Logan said that what happened to Eddie has made him all the more determined to stay out of gangs himself.

Since his friend’s shooting, Logan said he spends every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at the Challengers’ computer center, using learning programs to improve his math and English skills in preparation for college.

“I can go to any college I want to,” Logan said. “I’m going to stay out of trouble and do the right thing.”

Dantzler recently started construction on a lot next to the Challengers clubhouse where he intends to build a larger facility with classrooms, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a senior citizens lounge and a day-care center.

The project will cost an estimated $5.2 million to be raised from club members, foundations, public grants, individuals and corporate donors. Dantzler said he has secured almost $3 million toward his goal.

“People must think I’m crazy,” Dantzler said, as he examined blueprints for the new building.

“Sometimes I wonder myself how I got into this.”

A moment later, he answers his question: “It’s because there’s a need.”