Sightless Vendors Feel the Pressure of Competition : Labor: A 1936 federal program helped the blind open small businesses. Now, their livelihoods are being put in jeopardy.

It sounds more like a honky-tonk than a stuffy hall of justice.

But that’s the way things are when Bob Ringwald finds his way to the piano on the fourth floor of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles and pounds out a few ragtime tunes.

Lawyers walking through the hushed corridors stop in their tracks. Bored jurors put away their crossword puzzles. Court clerks forget about writs and motions for a moment.

It’s lunchtime, and Ringwald is serving up the usual: corned beef, turkey and pastrami--all spiced with a dash of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Sightless since childhood and a musician most of his adult life, Ringwald runs the Spring Street courthouse’s snack bar under provisions of a 1936 federal program designed to assist blind business operators.

But these days, maybe he ought to be singing the blues instead of playing ragtime on his lunchroom upright.

Inflation, recession, government downsizing, increased competition and congressional uncertainty are putting the livelihoods of people like Ringwald in jeopardy in a way the program’s New Deal-era creators never imagined.

The Randolph-Sheppard Act was the forerunner of modern-day affirmative action programs at its start. The legislation gave the visually impaired first crack at running sandwich and coffee stands, gift shops and cafeterias in places such as post offices and federal office buildings.

The law is now administered by states. It has been broadened in California to where 185 blind vendors now work in city and county offices as well as in state-owned buildings.

Ringwald is combining a love for music with a desire to succeed as he wraps up his quick concert, grabs the white cane resting on the piano bench and carefully heads across his lunchroom toward the cashier’s counter.

“Next customer!” he calls out, his fingers now racing across cash register keys.

He has memorized the sandwich prices on his menu--the braunschweiger concoction named after his wife, Adele, the turkey and cranberry-apple special named after his daughter, actress Molly Ringwald.

A lawyer paying for several take-out sandwiches tells Ringwald he has handed him a $50 bill. Ringwald passes the greenback over to one of his employees.

“Mary, check to see if the ink’s still wet,” he says with a laugh. Turning to the lawyer, Ringwald explains: “The last place I had I took in two $100 counterfeit bills in one day. . . . The food business is tough.”

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At lunch counters across the country run by the 3,500 blind Americans, it’s getting tougher, too.

“We have a lot of challenges, lots of legislative problems,” said Ray Washburn, president of Randolph-Sheppard Vendors of America, a blind-run group. Washburn operates a snack bar at an Oklahoma City federal building used by the Veterans Administration--an agency he says wants to take over its snack bars.

In Los Angeles, county officials are considering turning some of its blind-run facilities over to private contractors. At places such as the Hall of Administration, they have invited newcomers to sell gourmet sandwiches just outside the building’s doors.

Ralph Sanders, a Cal State Northridge-educated blind man who heads a Baltimore-based organization called Movement by the Blind for Services and Independence, said vendors are under attack from all directions.

“You’re seeing cutbacks being played out all over the country,” Sanders said. “Reducing government means smaller populations in government buildings and closed facilities, which means less income.”

Vendors fear that Congress may open food service concessions to those with other disabilities, eliminating more jobs for the blind. “We live on a very thin line. Some guys are already lucky to make $12,000 a year now. The next step could be welfare,” Sanders said.

There is disagreement over what the average blind vendor in California earns.

It’s about $30,000, according to Joe Smith, administrator of the state’s Business Enterprise Program--the office that oversees the Randolph-Sheppard Act for the Department of Rehabilitation. Smith used to operate a snack bar at San Francisco City Hall.

The income level is closer to $19,000, said Frank Rompal Jr., the vision-impaired operator of a 250-seat cafeteria and a smaller snack bar at the Ventura County Government Center. He is vice chairman of a vendors committee that advises the enterprise program.

And that sum has dropped drastically--”to maybe $700 a month”--for some vendors caught in a dispute with the state over snack bar locations, Rompal said.

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Until three months ago, about 75 vendors had compensated for declining income by managing more than one food service site. But when one disgruntled vendor pointed out that state guidelines prohibit long-term operation of secondary locations, officials cracked down.

“There will be vendors that will go bankrupt and have to go on welfare, food stamps and back on Social Security because their ability to make income is being taken away,” Rompal said.

State rehabilitation officials contend that that will not happen.

“We’re developing a policy that will allow vendors to have a secondary or satellite location,” said Russ Enyart, a rehabilitation department administrator.

Snack bar operators are assessed 6% of their gross revenues to pay for training new vendors and purchasing food service equipment.

But some snack bars are not modern enough to suit Los Angeles County leaders, who have revealed that they may drastically modify their 40-year association with blind vendors when the contract ends in July. Vendors pay rent totaling 8% of their sales to the county.

Claus Marx, division manager for the county’s leasing and space management office, declined to discuss negotiations. But he stressed: “The old blue-plate special isn’t acceptable anymore--it’s a competitive business.”

Blind merchants blame county policies for keeping snack bars behind the times.

Harry Begin, the operator of the Ronald Reagan Building cafeteria who is involved with the negotiations, said the county has balked at letting blind vendors upgrade by adding things such as vending machine products and copier and fax services.

“They say, ‘No, you can’t do that--it’s not in your contract,’ ” said Begin, a Granada Hills resident who was a European hotelier before his eyesight began failing 10 years ago.

“Our only clout is our service,” Begin said. “We’re in danger of becoming 185 welfare recipients--not all of us, but some of us.”

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These days, blind snack bar operators nationwide look with envy at Wesley Whitelaw and Zohrab Bedikian.

That is because the pair sell coffee, doughnuts and sandwiches at the Criminal Courts Building in Downtown Los Angeles, where the O.J. Simpson murder trial is under way. “It must be a gold mine,” said one vendor from the East.

It’s more like the shaft, according to Whitelaw, who has worked on the fifth floor since the courthouse opened in 1973.

“High-profile cases tend to take business away,” Whitelaw said. “Security tightens in the building, so fewer people come in. And I believe they push as many cases as they can out to other buildings when there’s a big trial on.”

Whitelaw has experienced it all--the Hillside Strangler case, the Night Stalker trial, the time a customer collapsed with a heart attack at the coffee machine and a rush of 350 jurors from a nearby assembly room “stepped over her to get their cream and sugar.”

The worst days are when courthouse employees set up tables outside his snack bar and sell their own doughnuts or burritos. Employees call their sales “charity” fund-raisers, said the partially sighted Whitelaw, who commutes from Mission Viejo by Metrolink and Amtrak trains.

Up on the 13th floor, Bedikian, who catches a ride every morning from Van Nuys, winces each noontime. That is when outside salespeople visit the 12th floor to sell gourmet sandwiches, salads and drinks to a hundred or so reporters and television technicians stationed there for the Simpson trial coverage.

“It happens right under my nose. They come in with ice coolers,” said Bedikian--who previously operated snack bars in Glendale and Van Nuys. “I pay rent and $216 a month in utilities. Down there, they pay nothing.”

A private food service firm operates the Criminal Courts Building’s cafeteria--in part because of logistic problems: Its dining room is on the first floor, but its kitchen is on the sixth.

Blind operators run other large-scale dining sites for the county, however. Mark Lindsey manages two--a 265-seat cafeteria at the county Sanitation Districts headquarters in Whittier and a 120-seat facility at the Women’s Hospital east of Downtown. County officials have talked of taking the hospital cafeteria away from him.

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Lindsey--who lifts weights in the unused garage of his Colton home in hopes of competing in a tandem bicycling event in the 1996 Olympics--said he tries to keep food prices low.

“You don’t want to get greedy and chase customers out,” he said.

Lindsey lures customers by baking cookies and turnovers that can be smelled outside the cafeteria. He doesn’t eat them, though: Fig newtons from the cafeteria candy shelf are the only deviation from his Olympic training regimen of rice, chicken, bagels and fruit.

Blind vendors who have space in state and federal buildings are given a freer rein in running their businesses.

At the Reagan Building, Eve Baxter improved business by turning her snack shop into a contract post office.

“I’d be sitting on a curb crying if it wasn’t for this program,” said Baxter--a Santa Monica resident who taught English at Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley until her eyesight failed.

Back at the federal courthouse, Bob Ringwald is calling up inventory lists on a computer he has programmed to “talk” to him--verbalizing word for word what pops up on its screen.

Ringwald ran the Great Pacific Jazz Band before starting snack bar work in 1984. Daughter Molly Ringwald began her show business career at age 4 singing with the band.

These days, the North Hollywood resident dreams of retiring to the Pacific Northwest and opening a bed-and-breakfast when he’s finished at the courthouse. First, though, there is work to be done.

Court officials won’t let him boost business by selling Lotto tickets--it’s too undignified, they say. But they are willing to let him sell espresso coffee near first-floor elevators, and Ringwald is having the plans drawn up.

For now, he breaks up his 14-hour workdays with informal piano concerts aimed at drawing customers. After all, he points out, “if you’re in a courtroom all day, do you want to come here, or get out in the sunshine and walk around?”