Managing With Heart : Good Will: Couple running apartment uses loving ways, clean surroundings to keep elderly residents happy.
The recreation room at the Oxford Park Apartments on a rainy afternoon was full of the goings-on that fill dens of iniquity--poker playing and pool shooting, table-hopping and sashaying, loud laughter and joking.
And yet, apple pie itself could not be more wholesome. There’s a sweetness about life at Oxford Park.
“Everybody has a smile on their face now,” said the Rev. Matthew Titsworth, the president of the tenants association.
It has something to do with the managers, Diane and Joe Cole. How else to explain a recent action of the tenants? They entered the Coles in a nationwide “manager of the year” contest and contacted the newspaper, urging a story on “two managers who manage from the heart.”
The building the Coles manage is a neat, anonymous-looking tan stucco structure just north of the Santa Monica Freeway near Western Avenue. Its 109 units house senior and disabled people whose rents are subsidized by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Joe and Diane Cole are a middle-aged couple with million-dollar smiles, high energy and watchful eyes that take in everything from a few wet leaves on the sidewalk to a shy, withdrawn look on a resident’s face. He handles the maintenance; she does the paper work.
Joe leaves most of the talking to his wife, and it was Diane who tried to explain, without much precision, just what their formula for success in this work is.
“We’re just doing it naturally,” she said.
“I don’t know,” she mused. “When we were young, Joe always used to say ‘When you’re old, nobody wants you.’ It seems to me seniors have paid their dues in life. They deserve peace and quiet and a nice place to live. They shouldn’t have to be worrying.
“And handicapped people deserve special attention. They should have access without having to apologize. It’s their right.”
Joe had only his version of the Golden Rule to add: “My philosophy is, ‘I’m treating somebody nice so (people) will treat me nice when I get old.’ ”
He’s 55 and a former construction worker; she’s 48 and a former federal civil servant in a bureau personnel department. Having raised their six kids and seen five grandchildren and a great grandchild come along, they came out here from Washington, D.C., two years ago ready for Southern California weather and something new.
When the Coles arrived at Oxford Park, they found--the tenants testify--a dreary, poorly kept building with some rough “undesirables” among the tenants and a general atmosphere of distrust and isolation.
The Coles held a meeting and heard people’s needs and grievances: Everybody wanted everything fixed at once, Rev. Titsworth remembers. The Coles wrote it all down. They did not promise the moon but they did promise to do their best. They weeded out the undesirables. They cleaned up and prettied up. The management company agreed to redo the rec room.
Joe took a vacuum cleaner into the halls and Eleanor Richards, a tenant for 15 years, opened her door to find out what the commotion was all about. It was the first time she had seen anyone vacuum the hall, she told Joe.
Tenant Roberta Quintano sent along a poem to The Times, a collective effort, with lines such as “Diane is my name and sprucin’ up spirits is my game.”
Quintano suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she says, and she credits life with the Coles and her own “just getting involved with everything here” with making her less dependent on her oxygen tank.
“Once it started catching on that we really cared,” Diane Cole said, “the residents started catching on.” Now, everyone takes an interest in the building and each other.
The signs of caring are many:
Birthday and get-well cards without fail. The monthly newsletter. Safety meetings with the police, a phone buddy system to check up on each other. Summer barbecues and holiday parties.
More than one resident will fix a listener with a knowing look and observe that they well know some of the money for such things comes out of the Coles’ own pockets. The Coles don’t deny that, but are quick to say that the building’s management, G & K Management Co., has been good about helping out with financial contributions.
Having just won a round of dominoes Friday afternoon, Bill La Chapelle paused while a new game was being set up and said the men play dominoes three times a week. The women play different things, he said--whist, keno and other games.
“They’re welcome to play,” he said of the women joining the dominoes game, then broke himself up with his punch line: “if they don’t mind getting beat.”
A resident since the apartments first opened in 1971, La Chapelle summed up the difference the Coles have made:
“It’s just a pleasure. This is a family. It’s really home now.”
