Families in Need Losing a Friend, Indeed

The joy of giving will be bittersweet this year for Santa Claus Inc., a volunteer group that provides toys and gifts for needy families in South El Monte and El Monte.

This will be the last year for the group, founded by El Monte resident Lee Bollen more than 20 years ago.

Citing city budget cuts, smaller donations and fewer volunteers, Bollen said, “I feel bad about it, but it’s time.”

“The impact is going to be horrendous. I can’t even imagine it,” said Lillian Rey, executive director of Emergency Resources of South El Monte, Santa Claus Inc.’s parent group. The charitable organization, which also works with needy families throughout the year in addition to providing Christmas food baskets, will try to fill Santa Claus Inc.’s boots as well.

Rey said that even counting the approximately 2,500 children who will receive presents from Santa Claus Inc. this year, “I still have a waiting list of 200 families. There’s never enough. Never.”

Bollen founded Santa Claus Inc. in March, 1972, modeling the new group after similar organizations in San Bernardino and Ontario that took in old toys and refurbished them. “We used to have used toy drives,” she said. “Then, through word of mouth, people brought in their used toys and we repaired used toys all year round.”

The group used condemned warehouses to house its operation, moving when the building was about to come down. “We kept moving from one condemned building to another. . . . The move always came two months before Christmas,” Bollen said.

Fed up with the hassle, “we decided to go to the cities (that they served) and asked them to split the rent, and El Monte and South El Monte agreed. They’ve paid our rent all along,” Bollen said.

Until last year, that is. “When the state took away all of the tax money from the cities, then the cities felt they couldn’t afford many of the social service programs, so they cut back on our rent,” forcing a move to a smaller building in April.

Miller Brewing Co. stepped in with a grant. However, donations in general are down because of the recession, and many former corporate donors are no longer in business.

“We do not have a budget,” said Santa Claus Inc. president Jim Kelly.

Kelly, a retired truck driver who is also a member of the South El Monte City Council, has been doing almost all of the group’s fund raising. He estimates that he raised about $20,000 this year, but part of that was needed for rent, as well as the toys the group must now buy because there aren’t enough volunteers to do the work.

“There’s just no one to work,” Bollen said. That includes Kelly, who plans to move to Tehachapi in 1994.

That leaves only four regular volunteers to help Bollen, who at 73 is unable to drive because of a medical condition. There is no paid staff. So, with Kelly’s impending departure and the uncertainty of city funding, Bollen decided it was time to let it go.

“She made Santa Claus Inc. She is Santa Claus Inc.,” said volunteer Ruth Fry. “No matter what other organizations come up with, they won’t have the success we have. Without (Kelly) and without Lee, we don’t have anything.”

Kelly agreed. “It saddens me deeply that we can’t find someone to take over.”