Call Her Granny : Granada Hills High Monitor, 81, Has Heard It All and Is Heard by All

There are many reasons why Lillian Lewis--short-tempered, but quick to smile--should not be spending her golden years patrolling the corridors of Granada Hills High School, browbeating teen-agers who ditch class.

There is her age, 81, which Lewis says, “doesn’t let me get around like I used to.” There are the ailments--from diabetes to heart problems to failing eyesight--that leave her squinting to read the student ID cards that kids stick in her face as they enter the school gate.

There is the nearly 80-mile-round-trip commute from her South-Central Los Angeles home. There is the low pay: about $500 a month. And then there are the students, who alternately give her hugs and give her heck.

But the woman they call “Granny” gives it right back.

As one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s cadre of adult helpers, she sits every school day at a doorway desk checking hall passes and IDs, and directing visitors to offices and classrooms. She is paid for only three hours, but voluntarily works a full day.

After 17 years on the job, Lewis can recite all manner of student excuses: “My alarm didn’t go off.” “The dog ate my ID.” “My mother didn’t have gas, so she had to get some from the lawn mower. . . . “

And she says, “They’re going to have to get up real early in the morning to beat me.”

That’s not likely. Granny, who has a touch of insomnia, rises each day at 2:30 a.m., fixes breakfast and sometimes takes a nap before hitching a ride on the 6 a.m. school bus to Granada Hills, arriving before 7 a.m.

Dealing with throngs of youths is nothing new for Lewis. She has four children, 78 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandson.

“I tell everyone there’s not too much involving children I haven’t seen,” she says. “I treat them just like my own kids.”

*

She is a throwback, she admits, to a more conservative time, when boys wore their hair short and girls did not dare show their bellybuttons in public. Occasionally, she just shakes her head at the passing parade of tight jeans, pierced noses and skimpy shorts.

Lewis has adjusted to the times, though, and sees her work as a welcome alternative to being “left at home, looking at the TV, twiddling my fingers, waiting to die.”

She was introduced to Granada Hills High in 1977 when her youngest daughter enrolled at the school. At 64, Lewis had recently retired from a dishwashing job at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in West Los Angeles and had plenty of time on her hands.

Concerned about her daughter’s safety so far from home, she decided to drive the girl to school herself. Rather than spend hours commuting from South-Central, Lewis would wait in her car until school was dismissed, passing the time balancing her checkbook, writing letters and napping.

One day, the principal asked if she wanted a job. “I’ve been here ever since,” she notes, stationed there at the doorway desk, making her the school’s gatekeeper against the scourges of drugs, gangs and guns, the kind of trouble she knew about only through the movies when she was a teen-ager attending high school in Louisville, Ky.

On a recent morning, Granny is in vintage form, taking on truants, class-ditchers and loiterers.

“Why are you coming to school so late?” she asks a student who showed up after 10 a.m., between second and third periods.

“I slept late,” the girl responds snidely, not wanting the hassle of explaining anything to Granny.

Granny fumes. Her voice breaks, then rises to shouting level. “I can make you . . . get you (a) detention if you keep up that attitude,” she says. “Now where’s your ID?”

The student shifts from foot to foot. “I don’t have it,” she says, her own voice rising. “It got washed in the washing machine.”

“What do you mean it got washed?” Granny retorts. “How do I know you’re a student here?”

Now her voice resonates all the way to the attendance office, and outside to the patio. Heads peek out of offices. Students come to see who is the latest victim. Teachers walk by and smile. The campus police officer grins.

“You don’t have to scream at me,” says the student, near tears.

Finally, she agrees to produce a book with her name in it to prove she is, indeed, a student.

When she leaves, Granny laughs off the confrontation. “When you talk nice and soft, they ignore you,” she explains. “They get more hell from me than they get from their own parents.”

In the past, Lewis has mixed it up with parents too. She has been called “rude” and worse.

Lewis ponders this for a moment. “I am sometimes,” she says. “They think I’m rude because I raise my voice. But all the kids love me. They’re not going to miss their teacher, but they’re gonna miss Granny.”

She pulls out a set of key chains students have given her. Then she shows what she calls the “board of education,” a paddle she has fashioned out of two wood rulers held together with rubber bands. If her booming voice fails to intimidate, the board--or a broom--does the trick.

It’s a joke, of course. But when she reaches for it, students know she means business and scramble to class.

“She can embarrass you,” says senior Emily O’Kelly. “No one wants to mess with Granny.”

Emily is the fourth O’Kelly that Lewis has watched graduate from Granada Hills High. Emily’s oldest brother used to make her sweet potato pie.

Some, however, are less than amused at Lewis’ relationship with students. In particular, one staff member told Lewis that she should not allow the youngsters to call her “Granny” because it could be viewed as a negative stereotype of a black matriarch.

Granny understands the objection, but “I like the word Granny ,” she says. “I am a granny, and I’m proud of that.”

*

In the beginning, Lewis concedes, the name coined by students might well have been used as a put-down. “When I first came here, the kids would say, ‘Granny, go home.’ . . . It didn’t bother me.”

She interrupts herself to speak at hall-clearing volume to a student: “What you doing boy, take off that hat!”

Another student, a girl, boldly attempts to walk past her, out the door. “Hey, Granny.”

“Where you goin’, Megan?”

“Granny, you don’t have to be responsible for me,” Megan answers.

When the gatekeeper is unmoved, Megan, who wants to slip off campus for a fast-food lunch, tries a different tack to assure Granny she will be back.

“I’ll leave you my house keys. I’ll bring you some Burger King,” she says.

When that doesn’t work, either, the girl pleads, “Granny, I don’t feel like hopping the gate, my car’s right there anyway.”

Lewis listens as several students discuss the dangers of fence-climbing. Emily tells the story of the former student who got her ring stuck and ripped her finger off.

No one remembers when, or if, that actually happened. And Lewis pretends to ignore the youth’s chatter. But then she shows her softer side and lets Megan leave . . . through the front door.