Platform : On Friends: Help in My ‘Darkest Hour’

O.J. Simpson has Al Cowlings. Rodgers had Hammerstein. Eleanor Roosevelt had Lorena Hickok. Everyone needs a good friend. TRIN YARBOROUGH interviewed the following people about the most powerful thing ever done for them in the name of friendship.

FRANK GARNER

Lynwood

I’d been back from Vietnam several years before it started: first a rash, then more serious symptoms. For a time I couldn’t walk. I needed radiation and four operations, and got a kind of skin cancer. All of it from when I was in Vietnam patrolling through foliage that the U.S. government had sprayed with the chemical Agent Orange. For at least 10 years the government denied Agent Orange had made me sick but in October, l993, they admitted it and put me on 100% disability.

I’d been a telephone technician for 15 years. I’d always been super-active, never sick. As things got worse, I had to quit. I went into a bad depression. My wife, Betty--we’ve been married 27 years--was my backbone. She hadn’t worked in 15 years, but as soon as I got sick she found a full-time job. My daughters helped too.

My friends from work helped pull me through. DeMorris Wilson, a secretary at Pacific Bell, collected money for a barbecue where 25 or so people came to my house and cleaned up my yard, cut trees, everything. Three other special friends from my tech crew--we were called the Four Stooges--have been terrific. Kenny Williams and Jose Mejias have called every day. They bring gifts, cheer me up, offer to do anything I need. Jimmy Aldridge calls and drives me anywhere I want to go. When I was depressed, crying all the time, he came by constantly to talk to and encourage me.

HAIGAN CHEA

Vista

I was 15 when I arrived in the United States and had lived through a lifetime of terrible experiences. I was living in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over.

I arrived in 1979 with seven of my relatives. Three Cambodian families crowded together in a three-bedroom house in Long Beach agreed to sponsor us and let us move into their living room. These were the families of Savann Sep, Yim Chay and Nelson Neang. I will always be very grateful to them.

I could not speak English and had only a few years of schooling. Do you know what it is like to be in a strange land, surrounded by strangers, and then one person becomes the center of your life for a while because of his kindness? For me this was Robert DeCordes, my English teacher. Robert cared, and his listening was like therapy.

He encouraged me to enroll in electronics at Lakewood High School where he was then teaching (I am now an electrical engineer). One day a rumor went around school that the Ku Klux Klan would come and hurt non-whites. We were all very afraid. I went to Robert and he explained how America is a land of all immigrants, and helped me calm down.

In recent years I have paid from my own pocket and worked to help found and organize the United Cambodian Students of America. Knowing how much it means to be helped, I am very glad that I have the opportunity and capability to help others.

THUY NGUYEN REED

San Pedro

One night after I had been in the United States only seven months and could hardly speak English, I was so unhappy that I left my American husband without telling anyone. I had exactly $27, and bought a bus ticket to Amarillo, Tex., where I had one Vietnamese friend.

After I had lived in Amarillo several months I realized I was pregnant. The father was someone I hardly knew.

I was very desperate. I had no one to turn to, especially not my Vietnamese friends because I felt they would find me shameful. If I had wanted an abortion it was too late, and I had no money to pay for the child’s birth and no way to support it. Finally, I contacted my mother-in-law, Mary Ann Reed, of Redondo Beach. When I told her my situation, although she knew it was not her son’s baby, still she asked no questions and gave me no disrespect. She only said: “Come on out here, Baby.”

My husband had re-enlisted and was not in the country. But Mrs. Reed and her husband and three other children let me live with them until the baby was born. I gave birth to a happy little girl, now 16.

My husband and I divorced, and he remarried. After all these years he is like a relative. And the rest of the Reeds have been like a family to my daughter and myself. I will always love Mary Ann.

CONSTANCE SEDLECEK

Redondo Beach

I was 17 and three months pregnant when my boyfriend and I moved into a motel in Bend, Ore., owned by Frank Ziegler. There was physical abuse in my home so I couldn’t stay there.

My boyfriend was 18, on drugs and in and out of jail. We had no money for rent so I offered to clean rooms to pay.

Frank was more than 70 years old, a big guy who’d been a lumberjack and had been through a lot of life’s trials. One day he saw a hole in the motel room wall where my boyfriend had slammed my head up against it. Frank told my boyfriend that I could stay as long as I wanted, but that if he ever hit me again he’d throw him out. He often talked to me, too, telling me that someday I’d realize my boyfriend was wrong for me. My boyfriend did hit me again and Frank threw him out.

When my baby was born I developed blood clots in my lungs and heart and had to stay in the hospital six weeks. Frank paid for a lot of my expenses. He never wanted a thing back from me. He believes in doing the right thing and tried to teach that to me.

My little girl is six now and he is her godfather. I call him on Father’s Day. I’ll always remember how he came into my life at its darkest hour and believed in me and helped me.