A Cop and a Lady

Bill Ward is a 46-year-old white cop who wears conservative pin-striped suits, speaks in soft, measured tones and looks a little like a Presbyterian minister.

Lillian Johnson is a 101-year-old black lady who wears wildly colorful flowered dresses, loves to garden, speaks in bursts of energy and is as bright and quick as a Hungarian polka.

They’re friends. There’s a story here.

I wasn’t going to write any more columns even vaguely related to the L.A. riots for a long time, but I couldn’t let this one go by.

We’re always looking for meaning in the calamities that dog our lives, and while I’m not sure I’ve got one here, at least the abiding friendship between a cop and a lady hints at those heights to which the human spirit can soar.

She saved Ward’s life 18 years ago and he’s never stopped paying her back.

Miss Lillian, which is what she likes being called, lives alone in a small wood-frame house on West 74th Street, about a half block from where hellfire was burning a month ago.

She’s been in the same place for 27 years, and while things get a little hairy sometimes, this woman is not about to be bullied by anyone. She chased off a would-be mugger once by just shaking her fist and shouting, “You get out of here, you bum, you just go away!” He went.

Bill Ward was raised in South-Central and his mother still lives there, so it was natural he was assigned to patrol the area when he joined the LAPD 22 years ago.

He met Miss Lillian not long afterward.

Ward was on a Neighborhood Watch assignment one evening in an apartment building just up the street from Miss Lillian’s house, talking to a group of women about how to make their homes burglar-proof. Miss Lillian was there.

During the meeting, he and his partner heard a commotion out front. They looked out a window to see the antenna of their car had been ripped off. There wasn’t a lot they could do about it then, so the meeting continued.

A short while later, more commotion. This time, the windows of their car were being smashed. Ward and his partner, both new to the dangers of the street, headed for the door.

But Miss Lillian had seen gang members with guns earlier and was looking out a second-story window as the two policemen were about to step outside. She saw the same gang members getting into position to ambush the cops the minute they hit the street.

She screamed at the women downstairs not to let them out, the gang members would kill them. The warning came just in time. Ward telephoned for help, and the danger was past. It had indeed been an ambush in the making.

There was no question in his mind then and there’s none now that Miss Lillian saved his life, and Ward has never forgotten that.

After the incident, he came by to thank her and brought his whole family with him, mother, wife and three kids.

“I looked out and saw them all standing there and thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses come to preach,” Miss Lillian says.

Later, Ward gave her a potted plant she replanted in a corner of her garden. She pointed it out to me one day with pride.

“It was just a bitty thing then and now it’s seven feet tall. That says something, don’t it?”

They’ve visited many times over the years, the cop and Miss Lillian. Like any good friend, he worried about her during the riots and came by to check. He found her digging in the garden one day, getting by in life the way she always has.

“You’ve got to keep working when you’re my age,” she likes to say. “If you don’t, you get mindless.”

She worried about Ward as much as he worried about her. “He’s too nice a man to be out there,” she said. “I don’t want him hurt.”

Widowed long ago, Miss Lillian is the last of 15 children. A niece comes by occasionally to help out, but mostly she runs her own life.

The Wards and about 300 others attended a party that celebrated her 100th birthday. “I’m glad you’re here and I can say something,” Miss Lillian announced. “I won’t have a chance to speak at my funeral.”

I sat with both of them one day in the tiny house on West 74th. Ward was in plainclothes, wearing that blue, pin-striped suit, and Miss Lillian was in her flowered print dress.

Their affection for each other was obvious. What had been forged in danger was enduring through a mutuality difficult to define. Rodney King is no hero of mine, but I kept thinking of him saying, “Can we get along?”

It’s possible. The cop and Miss Lillian prove that.