Arcade Owner Pushes the Right Buttons : Youths: Taggers and gangbangers find a father figure in La Habra merchant. After earning their trust, he tries to steer them away from trouble.
In the weeks after he opened his video arcade, Richard Chipres would sit wide-eyed in the rear of the modest storefront and watch a parade of taggers and gangbangers straggle in, their caps pulled down over their eyes, their swaggers full of menace.
Some of the teen-agers had battle scars he could see; others, he knew, had weapons hidden in their baggy clothes. But Chipres steeled himself and reached out to them, convinced that he could get beneath their tough exterior and help them overcome the allure of the streets.
“You should have seen these guys,” said Chipres, who opened his arcade nine months ago. “Real tough customers. I was pretty leery of them, but I wasn’t scared. Not too much.”
Although the youngsters come to the arcade looking for a 25-cent distraction, they--like the six foster children that Chipres has taken into his home--find an unexpected father figure in the 54-year-old.
By respecting and befriending the youths, Chipres has earned the arcade status as neutral territory. Gang grudges and graffiti tools get checked at the door.
“We don’t write here. Everybody knows not to touch this place,” said James, a tagger and frequent arcade customer who declined to give his last name. “Richard told us that he would be shut down if the place was all covered, and we like him too much. He doesn’t treat us like we’re nothing. He makes you feel like a friend.”
That friendship, and the guidance that comes with it, can help fill a void in the youths’ lives, Chipres said.
“All the problems with the kids today, the drugs and gangs and graffiti, all of it can be cured by good parents,” he said. “Kids aren’t born bad. These kids, if they aren’t loved, what are they going to do? They go looking for it, and the closest thing they can find are their friends. Gangs are just families for kids who give up on their parents.”
Chipres and his wife, Angela, know firsthand the costs of unraveled families and wayward youths. They hear it every day in the crying of their emotionally delicate foster children, such as Cynthia, 4, who was beaten by her mother and sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend.
And they see it in the photographs they have of a serious, handsome boy named Leo Huiochea, a local teen-ager whom the Chipres family took under their wing after his parents moved away in 1990. Gunned down by gang members in February, 1991, Leo lives on in Chipres’ memory.
“See, ‘Leo’s Arcade,’ that’s the name of the place,” Chipres said, pointing to a recently finished tagger-style, Day-Glo mural on the wall behind a row of video games. “I think he’d really like the place. Maybe if it were here back then, maybe Leo wouldn’t have been out on the street, you know? Maybe he’d be safe. Maybe he’d be alive.”
By design, Chipres gets to know the youngsters individually. “I don’t have a change machine,” he said with a conspiratorial smile. “If they want quarters, they have come to me. That way I can get to know their names.”
First their names, then their problems. Chipres’ son, Adrian, said he sees the process from his vantage point as the arcade’s assistant manager.
“He knows everybody real well, on a first-name basis,” Adrian, 20, said. “And a lot of these kids tell us their problems. Some of them are foster kids, a lot of them are on parole and stuff, or they’ve got parents on drugs. Or they’re into drugs. And my dad always tries to talk to them and help.”
When the scent of weekend barbecues from an apartment complex had some arcade regulars complaining that they had no family outings, Chipres helped them organize a carwash to buy hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken.
“The trick is, if you treat them like normal kids long enough, they slip and they start acting like normal kids,” Chipres said. “At first they like to act all bad, and you have to say ‘OK, fine, you’re tough,’ now let’s have a good time.”
He stopped jingling a handful of quarters and his eyes grew serious. “Hey, those are our kids out there with the guns, they’re our future. They’re not somebody else’s kids, they’re all ours. And we have to get them back.”
