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Life of Sacrifice, Dedication Begins to Pay Off for Activist : South-Central: Leon Watkins gets recognition, and a regular paycheck, after years of helping community’s young people.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Evelyn Watkins remembers the call like some rude midnight awakening: It was their banker on the phone, and he wasn’t happy. She and her husband, Leon, had fallen an entire year behind in the mortgage on their South-Central home.

And now, the couple and their four children had just two weeks--14 days--to vacate the tiny dream home they had owned for more than 14 years.

The unnerving deadline rekindled old arguments that raged after the kids went to bed, Evelyn recalls: Why couldn’t Leon get a regular paying job like everybody else? He was spending so much time worrying about everyone else’s children--manning the crisis line he ran absolutely free from the basement of a neighborhood center and spending countless weekends devising plans to help straighten out local gang members. Maybe the family activist should start concentrating on his own family, she said, and start playing breadwinner for once.

But Watkins wouldn’t budge: This wasn’t about money, he said. This was about his own personal commitment to South-Central, salary or no salary.

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Today, Watkins’ stubborn persistence--working 80-hour weeks on community issues without pay for more than a decade, relying on friends and even strangers to help pay the mortgage--has finally paid off: He has landed a salaried job with a private program for at-risk teen-agers.

In the process, he has gained a national reputation among Republican lawmakers in Washington and Sacramento as a rare species of inner-city activist: a man who believes volunteer efforts to redeem children are more important to a community’s rebirth than traditional government programs.

Over the years, Watkins has met with then-President Ronald Reagan, toured the L.A. riot zone with a grim-faced George Bush and recently joined a coalition of community leaders to persuade House Speaker Newt Gingrich that urban areas should be spared from widespread budget cuts.

For Watkins, who prides himself on being “the grassiest of the grass-roots,” his good fortune is vindication that you can do people good without business cards.

“When I die,” he says, “I just want it noted that I tried to help, that I gave what I got, everything I could.”

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People have noticed. In his South-Central neighborhood, the 300-pound, 49-year-old grandfather is known just as Big Man, a no-nonsense nickname bestowed by local street gang members for his lumbering, heavyset frame. Watkins fits in with troubled kids because he was once one of them.

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At the well-kept offices of the Los Angeles Cities in Schools Inc., a private partnership with no government funding where he is executive director, the former alcoholic and drug user gives children his message:

The Big Man believes in them.

His intervention program, aimed at preventing kids from dropping out of school, each year culls 30 troubled students from nearby Markham Middle School in Watts and tutors them in classwork and surviving in a world of street violence.

Through Catalina Island camp-outs, film-industry excursions and counseling, Watkins shows them how to look beyond the concrete-wall boundaries of the inner city.

“What these kids learn is that if they don’t see a broader vision of the planet, they’re bound to look at the ghetto and say, ‘I guess that’s all there is for me.’ ”

The offices where he works are new and freshly painted. Watkins helped build them from the ground up on a vacant lot. No graffiti mars them.

On a recent day, Watkins walked into an after-school gathering of troubled teen-agers who listened to his soft-spoken words in hushed respect.

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“Give yourselves a hand,” Watkins told them. “What you’re doing here today is a good thing. I’m depending on all of you to succeed, now.”

He knows there are roadblocks ahead--like the graffiti at the corner of Central Avenue and Imperial Highway in Watts. Spray-painted across the side of an abandoned fast-food chicken joint, the words trouble him: “The system is waging war on the people. The people must wage war on it.”

The graffiti message, Watkins insists, calls for a wrongheaded revolution, the rioting of the past. “That’s not what this community wants,” he says. “People don’t want that kind of war.”

Watkins is convinced South-Central is ready for his kind of war: a war to change children’s behavior, to make them more conscious of personal responsibility, a war against the attitude that says you have to disrespect a woman to be a man. It’s an attack on the perverse message peddled by too many black music videos that doing drugs and womanizing are cool, and that holding down a steady job is plain stupid, he explains.

Years ago, in one of these personal battles, Watkins hung wanted posters of certain offenders in a neighborhood, saying he was trying to get youths to think about the consequences of their actions. “Show them a good example and they can take it from there,” he says.

“People listen to Leon,” said Dr. James Mays, a cardiologist and veteran South-Central community activist. “He’s not part of the fat-cat fraternity that cries out for all the attention. Leon sticks to business. He has been confronted by gang members with sociopathic personalities, looked them eyeball to eyeball, not wavering. He has a presence in size and character that tends to mesmerize.”

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Watkins has not always been such a positive role model.

The Peoria, Ill., native was for 18 years a functioning alcoholic and drug addict who still managed to become president of his class at Pepperdine University while he and his wife raised four kids. Back then, Watkins was guzzling a fifth of whiskey a day. Smoking pot. Snorting lines.

Then the Big Man found God. One summer night in 1978, he suffered a breakdown while perched on a curb outside some drug bash--crying into his beer, blubbering big tears to his confused cronies, asking them what the hell he was doing with his life.

He quit cold turkey, his spiritual discovery launching him on another course: For much of the next 15 years--until he was hired by Los Angeles Cities in Schools in 1993--Watkins labored in obscurity on his projects, usually without pay, while Evelyn worked to pay the bills.

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Call him stubborn. Call him a fool. A lot of people did. But Watkins’ vision stayed intact. That was how he met Robert Woodson, president of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a conservative think tank.

Watkins attended a speech given by Woodson on community activism in which Woodson stressed that answers to urban problems would not come from Harvard but from the Harlems of this world.

From the back of the room, Watkins raised his hand and began talking about the role of children in the community’s future.

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“Immediately,” Woodson recalled, “I knew this man knew what he was talking about. He had tapped into the inner strength of kids themselves.”

After the meeting, Woodson sought out Watkins and asked for his business card. Watkins didn’t have one. Instead, he wrote his name and number on a piece of paper ripped from a brown lunch bag.

There was no money for business cards because there was no money at all. On his own in the early 1980s, Watkins put his head together with businessmen and disenfranchised local gang members to form the San Pedro Street Businessmen’s Assn., which put gang kids to work in an effort to curtail crime in the tense neighborhood.

Beginning in the mid-’80s, from the stark basement of the Brotherhood Crusade headquarters on Slauson Avenue, he ran the Family Helpline, a volunteer counseling service he manned mostly by himself day after day, waiting for the phone to ring.

In eight years he answered hundreds and perhaps thousands of family crisis calls from pregnant daughters and welfare mothers, heroin-addicted sons, alcoholic fathers who beat their families, star high-school athletes embarrassed to admit they couldn’t read.

Watkins has always employed an entrepreneurial spirit for solutions to community problems. Rather than hitting kids over the heads with the Bible, he hits them with free-enterprise schemes, insisting that traditional government handouts hurt more than help. At the onset of the city’s graffiti wars, for example, he encouraged gang members to create and sell their own graffiti T-shirts, rather than scrawl on walls.

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Evelyn Watkins still winces at the financial strain of those days.

“But Leon never worried about it,” she recalls. “It used to make me so mad, the way he could just sit there and say ‘Don’t worry, baby, something will come through.’ But it always did.”

Like the time Watkins met a fellow activist at a meeting and explained the problems with his mortgage: The man wrote Watkins a check for the full amount.

Others have helped his cause. “Leon is a dedicated man who has given up a lot in his life,” said Morgan Doughton, a Reagan Administration staffer who over the years gave Watkins more than $20,000. “He’s carrying out a very personal commitment--it’s a religious life he’s living without parading a collar. He works quietly, inspiring people to help themselves, fulfilling his dream.”

Now Watkins has another community get-rich scheme: trying to persuade local businesses to offer discount coupons to kids who do well in school. If children are helping out the family cause, he says, their parents might take added interest in their academic life.

His image is now included in sidewalk memorials at Will Rogers Park known as the Promenade of Prominence. Walking along the “black community’s Walk of Stars,” the Big Man is proud to point out that his plaque sits next to that of attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.

“It makes me proud to know when I’m gone my grand kids can see this,” he says.

He pauses, watching two young girls ride over his image on bicycles, then continues, without a trace of sarcasm: “It’s good to know that plaque will still be there, so kids can roll over it like that.”

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