An Island in the Calamity

Leon Lasken is the kind of guy I’d have written about with or without the Los Angeles riots. His small grocery store stood untouched in the midst of chaos and almost everyone who came in when things quieted down thanked God Leon was all right.

He’s a small Jewish man of 81 with a smile like sunlight through dark clouds and a soul as wide as heaven. No one goes hungry when Leon is around, and it didn’t take riots to tell him there was pain in the ghetto. He’s been in it for 43 years.

The grocery store, a cluttered little place piled high with boxes, is called the Palace, which in a way I suppose it is. Leon really doesn’t own it anymore but he’s there every Saturday and no one in the area ever thinks of it as anything but Leon’s place.

He opened it on Prairie Avenue in South Central shortly after the Second World War and sold it to his manager a couple of years ago after suffering a mild stroke.

I first heard from Leon when a $100 check arrived in the mail with a note that said I should give it to a minority student trying to better himself.

It was in response to a column I can’t even remember, but I sent it on to where I knew kids to be in need. I thanked Leon and then a few weeks later he sent another check for the same purpose.

I began wondering, who is this guy who sends money on faith to needy kids? I get a lot of mail from a lot of people, and I can’t check out everyone who writes. So I tucked Leon into a corner of my mind and got on with my work.

I next heard from him when I wrote a column about Long Beach bums. Leon was all over me. “When you reach my age,” he wrote, “the word bum will be the least-used word in your vocabulary.”

There are no bums, Leon said, only people down on their luck. He told me about a homeless man in front of his grocery store he gave a dollar to. The guy couldn’t speak English but gave Leon a look of gratitude he’ll never forget and took his hands in his and pressed them to his heart.

“All that,” Leon wrote, “for a buck.”

The kind of compassion we all wish we had shone through in that letter, so I tracked Leon down to his grocery store. It was just a day after the riots and the smoking destruction of other shops could be seen in the neighborhood.

Leon’s store was like an island of serenity in a sea of chaos, a happy, busy place stocked with just about everything I’ve ever seen in a market.

Leon himself was in a tiny, messy back room, a balding, pink-faced man with mutton-chop sideburns and the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard.

He was clearly embarrassed by the attention I was giving him and didn’t want to talk about himself. But I haven’t been in this business 40 years to let questions go unanswered.

Pretty soon I’m hearing about a guy whose philosophy is as simple as rain. He was poor once back in Bismarck, North Dakota, so he helps others when he can. The world was made as much for giving as for taking.

Leon was a hell-raiser when he was young. He wanted to kill a hit-and-run driver once, and for that reason will never have a gun in his store. This is no faint-heart here, but a tough, ex-street kid with a sense of reality as strong as hunger, which makes his compassion all the more genuine.

He spotted a man in his store once he knew was a shoplifter. But he also knew he was hungry. After the guy had wandered around for awhile, Leon got tired of watching him and said, “For God’s sake, man, steal something and leave.” He did.

Leon has been mugged and robbed a few times but that hasn’t changed his attitude a damned bit as far as I can tell. He still gives things away.

This began when he saw people taking produce from trash bins in back of the store. The sight affected him deeply and the next day he put up a sign that said, “If you’re broke and hungry, come in and ask for Leon.”

They were lined up for three blocks the next day, Leon says, and he knew he couldn’t keep that up.

He tried leaving canned food on a rack outside with a sign that said “Take some, leave some,” but one person would take it all so he quit that too and began giving food to places like convalescent homes instead. He still does.

Why was his store spared during the riots? “This is a violence-free zone,” Leon says with a laugh, then adds simply, “They’re my friends.”

Three-hundred years ago John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.”

Here’s a guy who lives that credo every day of his life and it works. If only we all did that. If only we were all like Leon Lasken.