A Journey Worth Making : Public service: A former gang member is a friend, role model and adviser to inner-city youths. His message: It’s never too late to change.
It’s only about eight miles from the corner of 55th Street and Vermont Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles to Eddie Frey’s executive office at the Northrop Corp. plant in El Segundo.
But for a lot of kids in the tough neighborhoods of South-Central, those two places might seem worlds apart.
W. E. (Eddie) Frey III spends a lot of his time teaching those kids that it’s a journey worth making--and that they can make. He talks to high school classes, acts as friend and counselor to students going through his company’s training program, and takes an interest in individual youngsters who ask for help.
Mostly by example, he lets them know that no matter what their circumstances, no matter what grim road they’re on right now, it’s not too late to change their lives.
Eddie Frey knows what he’s talking about. Because although today Frey is a 47-year-old, $65,000-a-year production administrator at Northrop’s F/A-18 fighter assembly plant, 30 years ago he was one of those kids--a gangbanger hanging out on the street, a kid on a collision course with the law, a kid with no apparent future.
“They used to tell me I was bad, just like they tell these kids they’re bad,” Frey said. “I burglarized houses, I rode around in stolen cars, I was out there in the park drinking wine and just hanging out. But I wasn’t really a bad kid. I had just taken the wrong road.
“Fortunately there was a bridge I could cross over again. Now somebody’s going to have to get off their butt and do something with these kids, help them cross those bridges, or else we’re going to lose an entire generation. That’s all I’m trying to do.
“Besides,” Frey added, smiling, “what else am I going to do? Watch television?”
Frey’s journey from problem child to problem solver at an aircraft factory began in the early 1960s, when he was a teen-ager in the neighborhood around 55th and Vermont, in what is now called South-Central. A student at Cathedral High School and then Manual Arts High School, Frey early on started running with a gang--although gang had a different connotation in those days.
“There weren’t any Crips and Bloods back then,” Frey said. “We were just a bunch of guys who called ourselves ‘The Gladiators.’ We’d fight, we’d steal, you know, break into a store and steal some bottles of wine, but it wasn’t like it is today. If we got into a fight, most of the time it was a fistfight, toe to toe, man to man. Most we’d ever have was a zip-gun we made in shop class, one of those one-shot things that would blow up in your face. But even that was rare.”
A zip-gun, he said, was a homemade gun made out of a piece of pipe with a rubber band-powered firing pin.
Although Frey said he was questioned by police on countless occasions, he managed to avoid arrest and acquiring a juvenile criminal record--at least partly because, he said, “I was one of the fast ones.” Still, he said, most of the kids he hung out with wound up in prison, or dead or caught in dead ends. That Frey didn’t was, he said, an accident of luck and timing.
“I joined the Marines when I was 17,” Frey said. “The Marine Corps saved me.”
Frey trained as an aircraft mechanic in the military, got his high school equivalency diploma and served two tours in Vietnam. After he got out of the Marines in 1966, he worked for Continental Airlines for a while, then as a professional photographer. In 1978 he got a job on the production line at Northrop, helping to build the first Navy F/A-18s.
A few years later he was promoted to management. He and his wife, also a Northrop employee, now live in Ladera Heights. He has three children by a previous marriage, two of them college graduates, the third with two years of college--a record that makes Frey, who’s about a semester away from a college degree himself, an extremely proud father.
Frey’s work with inner-city youths began 10 years ago, when he volunteered as a speaker for the Youth Motivation Task Force, a program that sends people from the business community into schools to talk to students about careers and the importance of staying in school.
And what does he tell those children?
“First thing I tell them,” Frey said, “is, ‘I’m not going to tell you to don’t use drugs and stay in school.’ That always gets their attention, because everyone is always telling them, ‘Don’t use drugs and stay in school.’ I don’t try to force anything on them. I just tell them a little of my own experiences, show them that it can be done.”
A lot of the time the youths will sit there, seemingly bored, not asking any questions, acting as if Frey is just one more out-of-touch adult. But Frey has noticed that after his talks some of the kids will come up to him, privately, one on one, and hesitantly start asking him things about his job, how to get the training, and so on. Frey gives them his phone number, takes an interest in them. If he sees a ‘Help Wanted’ sign in a storefront and knows someone who needs a job, he calls the person and says to get on down there.
“The opportunity to talk to a male adult who understands them is important to these kids,” Frey said. “They need that.”
Frey takes an almost fatherly pride in the success stories. There was the South-Central high school dropout and gangbanger who, after being taken under Frey’s wing--including getting Saturday-morning math tutoring from Frey--finished high school and eventually graduated with an accounting degree from UC Berkeley.
There was the young man incarcerated in the California Youth Authority whom Frey has helped to finish high school and get a heavy-equipment operator’s license. There are numerous others whom Frey helped to finish high school, sometimes by gentle encouragement, sometimes simply by “getting on their case” and challenging them to live up to their potential.
Frey also participates in Northrop’s “High School Involvement Program,” which takes students from Los Angeles high schools and lets them work two hours a day--for school credit--on the production line to get hands-on experience in the real working world. Like the other Northrop workers who participate in the program, Frey serves as friend, adviser and role model to the students.
“He really helped me a lot,” said 18-year-old Andrey Williams, a recent graduate of both the Northrop program and Morningside High School in South-Central.
“These kids need somebody to help show them the way,” Frey said. “There just aren’t enough people doing that. We just can’t stop helping these kids.”
Of course, Frey is just one person. So measured against the vast numbers of inner-city kids who are facing big problems and long odds, he said his success stories may not mean very much.
Eddie Frey hasn’t changed any statistics, but he hopes to have helped change some lives.
HYUNGWON KANG / Los Angeles Times
