VOLUNTEERS : Lending a Hand--and a Heart

Eleanor Walz had two hours to dump a lifetime of belongings into boxes and move them from her Santa Monica apartment condemned because of earthquake damage.

The task seemed impossible for the diminutive 81-year-old, who doesn’t drive and has no relatives nearby.

So when a platoon of strangers wearing orange safety vests and green hard hats--the distinctive clothing worn by volunteers with the Los Angeles Conservation Corps--filled her apartment along the 1100 block of 6th Street to help move her out, Walz was overcome with emotion.

“I have no one,” Walz said, as the group packed her household. “What would I do? I’d go out of my mind.”

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps directed moving efforts all over post-quake Los Angeles, particularly targeting elderly and disabled victims in Santa Monica and Northridge.

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps worked with the Urban Corps of San Diego, the Conservation Corps of Long Beach and the United Way of San Diego to help more than 1,200 earthquake victims retrieve belongings from apartments and houses damaged in the Jan. 17 quake.

Some victims contacted the Los Angeles corps after learning through government agencies and flyers passed out at shelters that the group was volunteering its services.

Leslie Bourne, a Los Angeles Conservation Corps training coordinator who lives in Venice, headed the endeavor in Santa Monica, overseen by the city’s police and fire departments.

“There was a huge need in Santa Monica, but all our crews were in Northridge,” she said. “I wanted to be a catalyst for people coming together. So we got a crew in Santa Monica. We did a lot of hand holding. It was very personal. People were calling us ‘the angels.’ ”

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a nonprofit private organization founded in 1986 by Mickey Kantor, who is now the U.S. trade representative, is composed of 130 people ages 18 to 23. Corps members are paid minimum wage from grants and city funds. When disasters hit, corps members spring to action, often without being asked to help and without receiving pay from the communities they aid.

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They did more than move boxes from ravaged residences such as Walz’s, where rotting food reeked from the refrigerator and dust from cracked plaster settled like baby powder over the couch and coffee table.

Indeed, the volunteer movers in many cases helped displaced victims collect their thoughts as they sifted through their shaken homes.

“Are these your glasses, Eleanor,” asked Linwood Paul, a trainer for the Conservation Corps who recently helped Walz sort her belongings as other volunteers packed boxes. “I’ll put them in your purse, OK?”

“I want to know if you’re taking any medication,” he queried gently. “Do you keep it in the refrigerator?”

“Do you have any important papers?” asked Melinda Sills, a volunteer from San Diego. “A will, tax returns? Here, would you like a drink of water?”

“All of this is important,” muttered Walz. “The will is in a safety deposit box . . . the key?”

“What about these shoes,” Sills asked.

“Of course,” she said with a sigh, “my shoes.”

It was a tough way to move out, but without assistance from the volunteers, including a homeless man, a student from San Diego and youths from Long Beach, all would have been lost for many like Walz.

Sills, a student and waitress, arrived with the Urban Corps of San Diego three days after the temblor hit.

“Once you get involved with people like Eleanor, your heart gets caught up and says you can’t go,” she said. “She’s alone and she had no one to help her. I just pictured her as one in a thousand. After that, I went home, got money and drove back.”

When four volunteers arrived at the apartment of Kveta Uher to help her move out of her badly damaged apartment at 4th Street and Montana Avenue, the 70-year-old woman from Czechoslovakia was nearly hysterical.

For a couple of hours, the movers packed Uher’s Czechoslovakian crystal and straw dolls, dozens of American flags, piles of shoes and a signed photograph of President and Mrs. Bush. They labeled the boxes, offering Uher coffee, bananas and kind words when the experience paled her.

At one point, Uher threw away stacks of her diaries. Volunteer Liv Torgerson observed what Uher had done and said: “You don’t want to throw those away. Those are your memories.” Torgerson pulled them out of the trash and packed them.

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Such moments forged new friendships. Uher, who is staying with a former employer and has no relatives here, later received telephone calls from Torgerson and others who helped her, inquiring about her emotional well-being and her progress in finding a new apartment.

“They really did care, comfort me and give me courage,” Uher said. “Every kind word made me feel like crying. I love them. I wish there was something that I could do for them. If I get an apartment, I will make dinner for them.”

Steve Bonk, 40, a homeless man who beds down regularly under lifeguard station No. 6 on Santa Monica Beach, responded to a flyer recruiting volunteers and helped out for more than a week.

“It’s made me feel very, very good because even though these people are temporarily homeless, I feel for them,” said Bonk, who stayed with the other volunteers at the Presbyterian Conference Center in Pacific Palisades while he volunteered. “I know what they are going through.”

He added: “The most touching part for me was when we were all leaving Kveta and I gave her a big hug. And she said, ‘I haven’t been hugged in so long.’ ”