The Granny Patrol : Schools: At 81, Lillian Lewis works daily as a Granada Hills High hall monitor. Students give her hugs or give her hell, but she takes it all in stride.

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 to get around like I used to.” There is a panoply of ailments--from diabetes to heart problems to failing eyesight--which leaves her squinting to read the student ID cards stuck in her face at the school gate.

There is the nearly 80-mile round trip from her South-Central home near 59th Street and Vermont Avenue. 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 Los Angeles Unified School District’s 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 said she has heard all manner of excuses, from the classic to the inspired: “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” are but a few, she said.

“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 naps before hitching a ride on the 6 a.m. school bus to Granada Hills, arriving to work 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, a multigenerational family that provides her with the kid credentials needed to handle the students at Granada Hills High.

“You know, I tell everyone there’s not too much involving children I haven’t seen,” Lewis said. “I treat them just like my own kids. I enjoy every minute of it.”

She is a throwback, she admits, to a more conservative time, when boys wore their hair short and girls didn’t 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. She continues to work, she said, to fend off boredom: “I don’t want to be left at home, looking at the TV, twiddling my fingers, waiting to die.”

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

Concerned about her daughter’s safety so far away 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, napping.

One day, the principal asked if she wanted a job. “And I’ve been here ever since,” she said, referring to her desk by the doorway.

She relishes her position as the school’s gatekeeper against the scourges of drugs, gangs and guns, the kind of trouble that she only knew about through the movies when she attended high school in Louisville, Ky.

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

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

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

Granny fumes. Her voice breaks, then rises sharply to shouting level. “And I can make you later--get you detention if you keep up that attitude.”

“Now where’s your ID?”

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

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

Now, her voice resonates from the front door, into the attendance office and outside onto the patio. Heads pop 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 hapless student, now 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 a bit. “When you talk nice and soft, they ignore you,” she explained. “They get more hell from me than they get from their own parents.”

In the past, Lewis has mixed it up with parents too. Once, she remembers, a mother called her “a rude bitch.”

The unflappable Lewis pondered this for a moment. “I am sometimes,” she said “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 for her collection.

Then she shows what she calls “the board of education,” a paddle she has fashioned out of two old-fashioned wood rulers held together with rubber bands. If her booming voice fails to intimidate, she said, the board of education, or a broom, does the trick.

The board, of course, is a joke, she said. But when she reaches for it, students know she means business and scramble to class.

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

Emily is the fourth O’Kelly whom Lewis has watched grow up at Granada Hills over the years. The oldest brother of the lot used to make sweet potato pie for her.

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

Granny understands the objection, but believes there is no harm.

“I like the word ‘Granny,’ ” she said. “I am a granny, and I’m proud of that.”

In the beginning, though, Lewis concedes, the name was coined by the students and 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, and speaks at hall-clearing volume.

“What you doing, boy? Take off that hat!”

A girl boldly attempts to walk past, out the door. “Hey, Granny.”

“Where you goin’, Megan?”

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

The gatekeeper is unmoved. Megan, who wants to slip away for an off-campus, fast-food lunch, tries a different tack to assure Granny she’ll be back.

“I’ll leave you my house keys. I’ll bring you some Burger King.” Finally, 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 while climbing the fence, and ripped her finger off.

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

“My happiest times are sitting here with these kids,” she says. “Laughing and talking.”