A Close-up Look At People Who Matter : Graffiti Buster Puts Youths on the Right Track

Monday night, Charlotte Bedard laid down the law. In a metal building near a remote baseball field, the co-founder of Sylmar Graffiti Busters faced two troubled teen-agers and their parents.

“There are some rules you have to follow if you’re going to work for me,” she said to two 16-year-olds sentenced to work for Graffiti Busters instead of sitting out their time in the clogged Juvenile Hall on the other side of town.

In the folding chair closest to Bedard sat a youth convicted of armed robbery after holding up someone with a .22 at a Van Nuys carnival. Behind him, tending her 7-month-old child, sat a Pacoima teen-ager convicted of possession of PCP and being under the influence of the drug.

Still wearing her business clothes from earlier in the day, Bedard leaned against the grill of a worn, mustard yellow truck parked in the warehouse and began to lecture.

“From 8 o’clock in the morning to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, you belong to me,” said the Sylmar business owner to the two teen-agers who must work weekends cleaning graffiti and streets. “That clock up there is God. If you come one second after 8 o’clock, don’t even bother signing in.”

Eight o’clock is starting time on weekends for the juvenile offenders and court-assigned adults sent to Graffiti Busters. It’s a rule Bedard has written in stone.

She continued lecturing the youths and their impatient parents with the firm voice of an annoyed substitute teacher.

“No baggy pants. If the pants, after I take the belt off, fall down, that’s baggy to me,” she said, moving to absenteeism. “If you’re dying in bed, I’ll excuse it. You have a sentence to serve, and I expect you to be here.”

Then she smiled and added, “I really am a good person.”

The 62-year-old, with a persistent New Hampshire accent despite 27 years in Sylmar, helped form Graffiti Busters in 1988 after having spray paint cans tossed at her car in a grocery store parking lot.

She and fellow Sylmar resident Hannah Dyke, who recently left California, formed Sylmar Graffiti Busters in February, 1988.

“I always felt if I took one kid doing wrong and set them on the right track, we would have done something,” Bedard said.

“She truly cares about the kids’ best interest,” said Tom Weissbarth, who joined the group about four years ago. “Charlotte’s a lady with a lot of energy and care and concern for community. . . . She knows all the players in graffiti, in law enforcement and politics.”

Weissbarth, now president and director of the group, said Bedard also knows when to push the youths.

“She’s got guts. She’ll go up against the kids,” Weissbarth said.

“She donates a lot of her own time to make sure the system works,” said Glen Younger, the Los Angeles Police Department’s senior lead officer for the Sylmar area. “She’s out there every weekend with the community service workers and she drives around the Sylmar area looking for graffiti to make sure it gets painted out.”

Municipal Judge Kenneth Lee Chotiner has seen Bedard in action.

“She is just a ball of fire. She’s unbelievable,” he said. “Nobody backs her down.”

Bedard believes the youths expect her to be tough but that they look forward to the praise they get when they work hard. They can learn more by putting on gloves and a reflective orange vest than they can by putting on prison garb, she said.

“When a kid has to come every weekend for three months and clean graffiti, streets, it has more of an impact on them and is more than just a penalty for them,” she said.

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