Ex-Vandal Now Keeps Kids Straight : Juveniles: A counselor won the bad boy a second chance. Now an executive, he offers young people alternatives to the gang life.

William Granville Jr. had a close call back in 1957. He and his pack in Trenton, N.J., had armed themselves with baseball bats and vandalized his high school that Halloween night. They threw chairs, smashed windows and broke up furniture.

He had spent the previous night in jail. He already had a police record.

Now it was time to pay the price.

But one of his teachers saw hope in Granville and persuaded the judge to give the 16-year-old another chance.

As a 50-year-old executive of upward mobility and programs at Mobil Corp., Granville reflects on those days as he administers an after-school program for youths who remind him of himself 35 years ago.

In 1983, he founded Granville Academy in Trenton. The twice-a-month program, named after his parents, offers minority children across the country a glimpse of the corporate world and the opportunities to be found there.

Granville sees the future as these 13-year-olds add terms such as “accounts payable,” “assets,” and “liabilities” as part of their new vocabulary.

“Right now, young people only see dope pushers, pimps--that is what they see is a business. Why not transform these young people into corporate Americans?” he asked.

“It broadened my horizons,” said David Zambrano, 15, a third-year student. “It’s like having a coach along the way.”

For Granville, the program helps repay a debt to those who helped him get where he is today. Tuition is free, and he personally paid for much of that first program.

Affiliate programs have since been established in Cleveland; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Detroit; Fairfax, Va.; Tampa, Fla., and in Camden, Newark and Bordentown-Burlington, N.J., for teen-agers in those cities. Programs are planned for Richmond; Hartford, Conn.; Wilmington, Del.; Atlanta; Atlantic City, N.J.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Students begin in the eighth grade, learning the basics of finance, accounting and computers. There is a formal graduation after a two-year entry phase.

Then they specialize in science, finance or entrepreneurial training before spending a final year getting ready for college.

The dropout rate was 20% the first few years, but since has dwindled to “practically nil,” Granville said. Last year, all the graduates went to college except one who entered the military.

Granville and his wife, Jessica, have three children in private schools, but he knows where these kids are coming from. He’s been there.

His family moved to New Jersey from Georgia to find work in industry, and the tight labor market kept both his parents away from home for long hours. His father worked two jobs, but left home while he was in junior high school--about the same time he got involved with the Whips East Trenton Trotters.

“Young kids started bonding together,” Granville said. “The gang became more important than the family. The gang was just a natural part of the process, like gangs are today.”

Granville became head of the Whips when he was 15. He was out in front during the melee at the school and was held responsible when police arrived.

He remembers thinking of penal work gangs as he stood in court, the judge peering down at him through bifocals.

It was his guidance counselor, Bessie Hill, who “pleaded with the judge not to send me,” he recalls. Later, she encouraged him to switch to college-preparatory courses.

He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in math and joined Mobil Oil Corp. several years later.

Seymour L. Meisel, vice president emeritus of Mobil, said Granville’s academy does for his students what that school counselor did for Granville.

“Facing what appeared to be impossible odds, he reduced them to a human scale, then set his sights on new challenges,” Meisel wrote in the forward of “Just Say Yes!” Granville’s handbook for success for young blacks.

Granville cautions, however, that getting into the corporate world isn’t enough. His book advises aspiring corporate success to live within their means.

In the book and in person, he tells of losing the first flashy car he ever owned because he couldn’t make the payments. He drives a Cadillac these days.

“I like to be a little ostentatious,” he said. “I’m competing with the dope dealers.”

He comes down hard on drug abuse and on teen-agers who have babies before they can afford to support a child. “Drugs have become the No. 1 barrier to blacks’ full participation in the American dream,” he wrote.

“A man is not a man simply because he can make a baby. He is a man when he can take care of that baby as well.”

Granville’s advice in the book ranges from keeping one’s shoes shined to telling blacks they need to make whites feel comfortable with them.

“Sure, I can afford an eight-course meal at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant, but I feel just as satisfied the next night putting away a $3.50 meal of ribs, collard greens and potato salad at Waldine’s in East Trenton. I pride myself on not having lost touch,” he said.

He ends the book by saying that anyone can play by the rules of the corporate world without loss of self-respect, as long as one knows what the rules are.