Learning the Right Bearing : Director Alfred Howard brings a love of cars and his strict military style to Toyota-Urban League auto training center. : Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news.
Alfred Howard talks about his first car with the fond smile of a doting dad: It was a broken-down ’51 Chevy, which he picked up in a gas station junk heap and pushed 20-plus blocks to his front yard.
It took months, but Howard got the clunker in working order by his 16th birthday. And when the cranky old engine turned over, he was hooked. He couldn’t keep his hands off cars.
Even when he joined the Army after graduating from college, Howard kept fixing dilapidated vehicles. He fought in Vietnam, commanded a helicopter squad in Korea and built hospitals in Germany. But he never strayed far from busted transmissions or conked-out air conditioners.
Howard’s back home now, in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district. He still barks out orders, and he still plays with cars. But he is no longer a Cold Warrior. He’s director of the Automotive Training Center. And his new enemy is unemployment.
The Los Angeles Urban League and Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. started the mechanic training center after the 1992 riots, and continue to endow it with a $600,000 annual budget.
In the past two years the center has taught more than 200 men and women to repair cars, tune engines, install stereos and sell auto parts. Howard boasts that more than 80% of the graduates have found jobs.
A retired lieutenant colonel with close-cropped hair and an upright stance, Howard knows how to inspire, cajole or intimidate his students into sticking with the free three-month training program.
“He was our drill sergeant and big brother,” said graduate Keith Moore, 27, now a mechanic for Tune-Up Masters in Los Angeles. “If you started drifting, he’d keep you on track, that’s for sure.”
Howard clearly loves his work. He is rebuilding a community he loves, helping a city he still believes in.
And he gets to tinker with cars to his heart’s content.
“Let me get a little oil off my hands,” he said early one morning, emerging from the spacious red and gray bays where hydraulic lifts hoist beat-up cars.
Settling at his desk with a cup of hot cocoa, Howard added: “The thing I love about this place is that the men who walk through these doors are unemployed or underemployed . . . and 90 days later, they walk out with a marketable skill.”
To ensure a high job placement rate, the center screens all applicants. Fewer than half pass the reading, math and aptitude tests. Interviews winnow the field further. Only three or four dozen students make the final cut each semester. Of those who enroll, 10% to 20% drop out. The rest quickly learn that Howard does not tolerate weak performances.
“ ‘I got a headache,’ ‘My dog died,’ whatever [the excuse], we’re not interested,” Howard said gruffly. “Folks that don’t measure up are out.”
Two absences and a student is expelled. A dirty uniform calls for a dressing-down. And Howard locks the doors at 7:30 a.m. sharp. Latecomers are out of luck.
“Needless to say, I was always on time there,” said graduate Thomas Crangle, 33.
Now an air-conditioning expert with Air Doc Plus in Los Angeles, Crangle faulted the center for focusing mainly on Toyota cars. “I needed a whole new training once I got out of school,” he said.
But the course did give him a good foundation--and crisp work habits, Crangle added proudly. When he arrived at his job a few minutes late one gloomy Monday, he did not need his boss to chastise him. Howard’s disapproving voice, he said, was already booming in his ears.
For all his toughness, Howard has a soft streak for his students. He understands them, he says, because they’re all “car guys.” Or gals. “He’s not at all mean,” said Felicia Greer, 23, one of the few female students. “He lets you know what’s up.”
In a coincidence that makes Howard grin, the Automotive Training Center is on the same Crenshaw Boulevard corner once occupied by Boyd Peterson’s Oldsmobile showroom. Howard used to drag his wife, Iona, to the showroom regularly to check out the latest Oldsmobiles.
“It was one of the few places that would actually let a young black man come in and sit in the cars,” he recalled.
It is not the safest neighborhood--barbed wire guards the parking lot--but Howard refuses to believe that it has changed all that much from those days.
He tells of strangers stooping to pluck litter from the sidewalks, of a neighbor calling to alert him when security lights burned out. Crenshaw Boulevard is not the desolate “inner city,” he says--it’s a thriving community. So is the Automotive Training Center, which serves students of all ages and ethnic groups. About 70% of the students are black and most of the others are Latino, with a few Asians and whites.
“The young guys I see [studying] here could be the sons of friends I went to school with, guys who went right to Douglas Aircraft or Hughes and are now unemployed,” Howard said. “To give them an opportunity . . . that’s got to give a good warm fuzzy.”
The feeling appears to be mutual. Instructors and students praise Howard as a role model and a teacher.
“He’s still very much in the Army mode, but I think students like it because half of them don’t have any discipline in their lives,” said Steven Bassett, who teaches about auto parts and air conditioning.
“He’d come in every morning with his chipper attitude and the military just coming out of his pores,” Moore said. “He was a father figure to most of the guys. A strong black man--just what we needed.”
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The Beat Today’s centerpiece focuses on a Crenshaw- area man who is helping rebuild his community by providing job training to unemployed men and women. For information on vacational training centers: Toyota Automotive Training Center: (213) 299-1633 Los Angeles Unified School District: (213) 625-3276
