OAK VIEW : Senior Citizens Club May Lose Its Home

For 14 years, the Golden Age Activity Club sold fruitcakes and held rummage sales. Its members succeeded in matching nearly $20,000 in federal grants to refurbish a meeting hall in Oak View where members meet each day to talk, play cards and eat a hot lunch.

The group of two dozen senior citizens bought appliances, laid linoleum, put in new gutters and windows and paid their share of the utilities. Now the owner, the Oak View First Baptist Church, is telling them to find somewhere else to go.

“The new minister said he wants God-oriented people in there,” said club Secretary Ann Davis, 79. “I lost my temper and shouted, ‘Do you think we’re all heathens?’ ”

The Rev. Kevin Johnsen, 29, said that to obtain a $14,000 grant in 1978 to build a kitchen in the hall, the church promised the federal government that it would be used exclusively by senior citizens and “not for the sectarian purpose of any religious group.”

However, Johnsen said, those terms have expired and his growing congregation, up from eight members when he arrived in January to nearly 70, supports his dream of putting a low-cost children’s day-care center in the senior citizens hall.

The plan, he said, was to have an intergenerational facility where the senior citizens could take care of the children. But some of the senior citizens said they’d “done their time” and had no desire to be liable for other people’s families.

Then, after the pastor gave the irate Golden Agers their 30-day notice, the Ventura County Senior Nutrition Program decided that it was time to discontinue its daily delivery of hot meals to Oak View, said Nancy Steinhelper, deputy program director.

“It’s been under discussion for two or three years to discontinue the Oak View meal site. The pastor’s decision just brought it out,” Steinhelper said.

The average crowd of nine lunch patrons, who are asked to pay $1.75 per meal if they can afford it, does not justify the county’s $12,000 salary for a part-time meal coordinator, Steinhelper said. Other meal sites, such as in Ojai, have 30 to 50 regular patrons, she said.

Oak View meal coordinator Dee Curson said 14 lunches have been served each day this week, but it has been several years since she had 30 customers. “We lose them to death or they move away,” said Doris Baker, 76, a meal server for 10 years who is “very, very upset to be leaving.”

Steinhelper said the county is willing to bus the senior citizens to Ojai, but most are unwilling to go, a fact many confirmed.

Thomas Hartigan, 76, said he drives a car but prefers walking the mile to the Oak View site. “What bugs me,” he said, “is how the county can build a new senior center in Ventura and another one in Saticoy, but we can’t get any money to save us from drowning.”

Johnsen said his church will not turn away the hungry. “We know that feeding people is part of our purpose. But in keeping with that purpose, we must feed them in a Christ-centered consciousness,” he said, adding that the senior citizens group is not interested in his church’s mission.