A Long Road : Mary Beth Martin first salvaged herself, then guided a women’s alcohol- and drug-treatment facility from the brink.

In a less-than-trendy tract house in Oxnard, Mary Beth Martin sat in a small office and talked of budgets and miracles. She is intimately involved in both aspects of women’s recovery.

At any given time, Martin is responsible for up to 18 women in various stages of putting their lives together. They have previously relied on alcohol and drugs to get them through. In residence at Miracle House, a residential treatment facility for alcoholic or drug-addicted women, they are learning other means of coping.

To Martin, the change in those who complete the program is nothing less than a transcendent event. And she regards the funding that makes it possible in the same way.

“We are never more than two or three weeks from shutting down,” she said of the nonprofit program’s financial resources.

With all its financial woes, Miracle House is in better shape now than six years ago, when the chief source of income came from brownie sales.

Martin, who was then the baker as well as the entire live-in staff, received the idea of Miracle House during a midlife crisis that was undeniably more severe than the average.

In her mid-30s she made several suicide attempts, the last one with razor cuts to the wrists. But, she says, she unknowingly cut alongside the veins instead of across them. At the time she was daily ingesting whiskey, beer, diet pills, cocaine and marijuana.

Substance abuse for Martin started when she was 13 and learned to raid the liquor kept by her father, a Navy man at Point Magu and a practicing alcoholic.

Serious addiction began when she was divorced at 23. Her daughter Shannon, then 5, went to live with her paternal grandparents, and over 15 years, Martin became totally dependent on drugs and unable to hold a job.

She acquired three drunk-driving convictions, and in dread of another arrest and a probable jail sentence, adopted her present last name, which she later acquired legally.

She takes little credit for overcoming her addictions. She believes that they were removed literally by the grace of God and the care of other women who believed in her at a women’s recovery center in Ventura.

Fresh from that program in 1985, she went through manicure school and dedicated herself to gluing fingernails. It didn’t touch her core. The inspiration came to her that she must get involved in drug and alcohol recovery, an experience she remembers as overwhelming.

I couldn’t NOT do it,” she said. “If I could have not done it, I would have. I was just driven.”

She offered to join the program that had helped her, but was told her sobriety was too new to give her stability.

It wasn’t the answer Martin needed. At random, she called an attorney’s office for advice in setting up her own nonprofit agency. Gary Orthuber of Ventura answered the phone, and agreed to write incorporation papers for free. He told her that she needed a board of directors, and she convinced her brother and several friends to come to a meeting.

“None of us had any power, any money, any influence, any social position--we were just a group of alcoholics,” she says.

They were, however, a group that dared to put on bake sales and invest their savings.

When their bank account reached $6,000, they went to find a landlord who would look kindly on their project. Seventeen turned the opportunity down.

Then Martin found the Oxnard house, and decided not to mention its intended purpose. By the time the owner learned who his tenants were, he was on their side. They have lived in harmony with the neighborhood ever since.

Martin learned to run the program, as they say, by the seat of her pants. After two years of brownies and struggle, she took a course in grantsmanship and began obtaining some corporate funds to help support Miracle House. She also logged 6,000 hours in Alcohol Information School to earn a state certificate in alcohol counseling.

“Everything I do, I am doing usually for the first time,” she says. “It’s all exciting and scary.”

In 1987, Supervisor John Flynn appointed her to the Advisory Board on Drug and Alcohol Problems, where she served for 1 1/2 years. He describes her as “an outstanding leader,” and said, “She brought a great sensitivity to the board on problems that women have.”

The first county funding went to Miracle House in 1988, and last year the county drug and alcohol services office referred and funded about half of the 65 women who participated at an average cost of $3,500. About 300 women have gone through the program in all.

There are seven paid staff members now, community-sponsored fund raisers, and recently two additional houses were opened in Ventura, making room for 18 women to be active in the 90-day process.

Those who enroll are led through a regimen of one-on-one counseling, group therapy, dietary advice, job training and chores. When they get jobs, they help to pay their own expenses, but they are encouraged to stay on until the full three months are up.

That extra time of support is why Miracle House’s recovery rate averaged 89% for 1989-90, based on one year’s continued sobriety, Martin said. For women who drop out midway through, only half remain sober. There are too many “triggers” for them if they return to their old environment, Martin said.

Cynthia, 27, of Oxnard graduated from the Oxnard residence this month after landing a job as a shipping clerk in a uniform factory. Although she has been in two other recovery programs, this time she feels secure about staying sober.

“All of the programs are good,” she says, “but it feels like this is my home, like I can come back here. The bonding here--the way Mary Beth runs it--there’s something. I can’t even explain it--it’s love. It’s got the right name.”

Most of Martin’s time is spent in administrative work now, and she lives apart from the residence with her brother, daughter and her daughter’s fiance, all recovered alcoholics. But she is still available for program counseling.

“I think of her as the big guns. I call her in if there’s a lot of bickering going on or a lot of breaking of rules,” said Marci Jordan, assistant program director. “She has a way to reach women that creates a trust and creates a faith in women who don’t have any trust or any faith.”

Martin feels assured that the program has a winning format. Her continuing concern is that more women cannot experience it since funding is always short. Her current dream--far more practical than the one that initially conceived Miracle House--is to find 1,000 people in Ventura County who will pledge $100 a year to support the program.

She is motivated by a vision.

“I get some sense of watching people come back from the dead. You watch people that you know would be dead in another month turn their lives around,” she said of her clients. “All we can do is provide the space for the miracles to happen.”

UP CLOSE / MARY BETH MARTIN

Her Job: Director of Miracle House, a nonprofit residential treatment center for alcoholic or drug-addicted women.

Her Calling: To keep Miracle House going so that other women can do what she has done--become free of substance abuse.

Her Clients: “They tell me their lives are over, they have damaged themselves and the people they love too much, and that’s not true. There aren’t too many things they can tell me they did that I can’t say, ‘I have done that too, and here’s how I have dealt with it in sobriety.’ ”