An Old Cowboy’s Lament : Eviction: A 78-year-old ex-actor searches for a new home for his Heaven on Earth Ranch, which helps disabled youngsters.

If they made a movie of Johny Carpenter’s life, the action would start as the former star of low-budget Westerns gallops in to wrest his ranch from the varmints who poached it.

But in the real world, it will take more than the fast draw of a six-shooter for Carpenter to re-establish his Heaven on Earth Ranch for handicapped children.

After 23 years in Lake View Terrace, Carpenter and the mock Western town that thousands of children in wheelchairs enjoyed were evicted in January to make way for a possible housing development.

Ever since, the 78-year-old cowboy who starred in such 1940s Westerns as “Santa Fe Saddlemates” and “Song of Old Wyoming” has been corralled in his cluttered North Hollywood apartment waiting for a good Samaritan to donate funds or an acre of land so he can reopen the ranch.

But despite support from such well-known citizens as City Councilman Joel Wachs and Deputy Dist. Atty. Albert MacKenzie, Carpenter is no closer to relocating Heaven on Earth than he was six months ago.

“Of course I miss the ranch, you little snot,” Carpenter says with characteristic crustiness. “But I wasn’t born to give up. I can buy and sell anyone, if nothing else, with my mouth.”

But then the expert horseman, who was a parking valet before breaking into movies half a century ago, glances down at his gnarled hands.

“Right now, I could use all the help I can get,” he says in a choked voice.

Evidence of better days surrounds Carpenter.

Every inch of his brown living room carpet is layered with mounds of memorabilia--the 1982 Reader’s Digest article that catapulted him into national fame, tattered newspaper clippings about his altruism dating back to 1945, trophies and letters of commendation from such luminaries as former President Reagan.

Carpenter first developed an empathy with the disabled 60 years ago when he was 18 years old. An Arkansas native who learned to ride horses on the family farm, Carpenter was the victim of a hit-and-run accident that left him with internal injuries, his left leg broken in seven places and a broken back.

“They had to reroute my stomach and put a metal plate in my leg. If you don’t believe me, I’ll drop my pants,” Carpenter offers.

But contrary to many published reports, he didn’t promise God that if he was able to walk again, he would dedicate his life to helping the handicapped.

“If you go around promising things, you’re either a politician, a newspaperman or a fruitcake,” Carpenter says.

Carpenter first opened the ranch in Glendale in the mid-1940s after finding that a group of blind musicians he taught to ride gained confidence and a sense of new-found freedom. In 1970, he moved to a rental property off Foothill Boulevard in Lake View Terrace.

Over the years, thousands of children from the Los Angeles Unified School District and such groups as the United Cerebral Palsy/Spastic Children’s Foundation were greeted at the ranch gates by a hand-painted sign that explained Carpenter’s philosophy: “The service we render to others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth.” The children would spend the day touring the Western town for free in wagons and on horseback, and eating barbecued hamburgers.

One of the children Carpenter helped was Randy Horton, now 33. Horton has cerebral palsy and cannot speak clearly, but his mother, Marjorie McIntosh of San Fernando, is one of Carpenter’s biggest fans.

“They were going to do a hip replacement on Randy because he couldn’t open his legs,” Miller said. “Then Johny taught him to ride, and we never had to do the operation. Randy just worships the ground he walks on.”

Carpenter’s many supporters pitched in to help pay the $700 a month it cost to rent the ranch, while Carpenter spent most of the $613 he receives from Social Security to rent the North Hollywood apartment where he lives.

“The ranch is his whole life, he does it for nothing and he lives like a pauper,” MacKenzie says.

Then in August, the owner of the ranch, June McKinley, evicted Carpenter in the hope of selling the five-acre property or subdividing it for a small housing development. Carpenter didn’t have a written lease for the ranch but fought the eviction in court on the grounds of breach of verbal contract and lost.

The case went to arbitration and Carpenter was awarded $20,000 in damages Thursday. But McKinley could refuse to pay, forcing the civil case to go to trial.

McKinley’s attorney, Frank D. Rubin, could not be reached last week. But late last month, he said his client is simply trying to liquidate her investment in the property.

“This lady is not some big, callous, indifferent corporation turning out poor helpless kids,” Rubin says. “She’s a senior citizen who is property-rich and cash-poor. I can match that old coot tear for tear with June’s story.”

Sympathetic both to McKinley’s property rights and to Carpenter, Wachs’ office tried to find city property that could be used as a ranch, said the councilman’s chief deputy, Arline DeSanctis. But Carpenter grew impatient with the lengthy search and announced he was moving the ranch up to Lake Los Angeles. The move never occurred because the stuntmen who rent the ranch fell behind in their rental payments, Carpenter says.

While he struggles to reopen the ranch, children who used to make field trips to his ranch are going to the beach and Disneyland instead.

“It’s just not the same and the kids can feel the difference,” says Sylvia Rhoades, who teaches preschoolers with communication problems at Braddock School in Mar Vista. “Deep down inside of every child, there is this need for a hero. Somehow or other, they seem to see Johny--this big, brusque man who wears cowboy clothes and a hat that is dirty and dusty--as someone they can really open up to.”