Notable Achievers in Your Community : ‘Moms’ Opens Home, Heart to Ex-Prisoners

Tiny, a 21-year-old former prisoner with a new life and a new attitude, will board a bus bound for home in New York on Saturday. Jane McGlory will see to it.

“I’m going to be praying for him,” said McGlory, who since 1985 has run a group home in Pacoima for prisoners released from the California Youth Authority.

Tiny, a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx whose real name is Thomas Rosado, has lived in McGlory’s group home about four years. He moved to Palmdale from New York in 1987 with his mother and got into trouble for drug dealing, robbery and burglary. His mother died while he was serving time.

Now he calls McGlory “Moms,” like the other residents in the home.

“I look at her and all her family as relatives,” Rosado said.

McGlory started working with young men like Rosado 20 years ago after her son, William, died of a heroin overdose. He was 21.

William McGlory died at UCLA Medical Center, where he worked as a patient escort. He was found in a bathroom, his body jammed against the door, and the paraphernalia of heroin and morphine use on the floor. He had been out of the U.S. Army less than a month after serving in Vietnam.

Jane McGlory got the news just after noon on Thanksgiving Day, 1974.

“I dropped the phone,” said McGlory, who until then had no idea her son had an $80-a-day heroin habit. When she told the rest of the family, “It looked like time stood still. That was the hardest thing I have had to face in my life.”

But out of the pain of that moment, McGlory made this pledge: “As long as I live, I will work so that another parent would not feel the way I felt.”

So, she founded the Pacoima Community Gospel Choir and the Pacoima Community Youth Cultural Center, which offers tutoring and activities for teen-agers and young adults. The center works with the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley to put on an annual Thanksgiving dinner for the poor and homeless.

She started her first group home at a house she bought with $20,000 of the insurance money she received after her son’s death. That three-bedroom house on Dronfield Avenue is vacant for now and the group home is now across the street at another house McGlory purchased.

She says she is waiting for divine guidance as to what to do with the original house. Maybe she will turn it into a foster care home, she said. “I refuse to rent out this house. I always want this house to be something useful for humanity.”

Rosado said he had expected McGlory’s group home to be a “lock-down” place where McGlory would be just another cop issuing passes and controlling his life. But it was the love she offered, as well as the food she cooked, that helped turn him around.

“Her food was so good.” he said. Her fried chicken, sweet potatoes and “soul food,” as McGlory puts it, were his favorites.

McGlory worked as a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff for six years, and she said that training has taught her to recognize when one of the residents is trying to con her.

“I’m kind, but I don’t want them to mistake my kindness for stupidity,” she said.

Rosado finished his parole term July 15. It was “like getting rid of a headache . . . a huge relief,” he said. On Wednesday, McGlory bought him a one-way ticket back to New York, where a job working with his grandfather, a carpenter, awaits him.

“As long as I got me a little job to occupy me, I’ll be fine,” he said.

But McGlory is sending him off with a warning about drugs. “Once you do that one time, you’re in for trouble,” she said.

The two have promised to stay in touch.

“I love this lady,” Rosado said.

Personal Best is a weekly profile of an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. Please address prospective candidates to Personal Best, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, 91311. Or fax them to (818) 772-3338.