Grief, True Grit Lead to Memorial for Slain Son : Education: Since mother opened a South-Central youth center, it has become a haven from crime, gangs.

Al Wooten Jr. was killed in a drive-by shooting and his relatives wanted revenge. His young cousins talked at the funeral of tracking down the gunman and killing him. His uncle began parking his car near the scene of the shooting, scanning the street, searching for clues.

At a family meeting a few weeks after the funeral, Wooten’s mother told a roomful of angry relatives that she did not want to avenge her son’s memory. She wanted to honor it.

Myrtle Faye Rumph emptied her savings account and in 1990 opened a youth center in a small storefront office on a busy South-Central Los Angeles thoroughfare. She named it the Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center. The next year, when she ran out of money, she sold her house to get the money to keep the center going.

When Rumph opened the center five years ago, she had no government funding, no grants, no donations. She had no students, no teachers, no classrooms. All she had was a vision of how she wanted to memorialize her boy.

Five years after its opening, the center is a success story in a grim neighborhood where success is hard to come by. It is a thriving place with well-appointed offices, a library, a computer learning center and a recreation room. Rumph has eight paid employees, 15 volunteer tutors and about 125 youths enrolled.

The center is an alternative to the streets, a place where children can play in safety, a refuge from the gangs and the kind of danger that ended her son’s life. But she also has created a place where they can learn, get help with their homework and obtain the tutoring and individual attention that is not available in overcrowded public schools.

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For someone who has single-handedly created a tutoring and educational center with $200,000 in annual funding, Rumph has an unlikely manner and scholastic background. She is a slight, shy woman who was forced to drop out of high school in her junior year to help her family pay the bills. She later came to Los Angeles as a single mother with $5 in her pocket and moved into a South-Central housing project with her three children.

Rumph’s story is a testament to what can be accomplished by one very determined mother.

“I wanted to set this center up, and I didn’t want to wait around for the city, the county or the state to give me the money to do it,” Rumph said. “It’s up to black people to change our own destiny. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

The center is near 91st Street and Western Avenue, on a grim commercial strip lined with boarded-up storefronts and small businesses protected by huge metal gates. After the public schools let out on weekday afternoons, youths from 8 to 18 arrive by bicycle, on foot and on buses. They stream through the security doors, toss their books on desks in the library and do their homework.

Rumph used to tutor the children, but the center has grown so successful that she is often stuck in her office, forced to handle administrative, personnel and fund-raising chores. But it is amid the tumult of the center, among the children, where she is happiest.

When Rumph, 64, wanders about the center in her long dresses and white beaded sweaters, she has a quiet authority. Children hang on her arms, hug her, compete for her attention.

On a recent afternoon, students are finishing their homework while program director Clifford Sanchez monitors their work. A burly former college basketball player, Sanchez is an intimidating figure and a stern disciplinarian. Nobody is giggling, talking or passing notes. When students stray from their work, he calls them into his office and, in blunt language, lets them know there will be no messing around while he is on duty.

In another part of the center, volunteer Mary Talley works on reading with a young girl who was a crack baby and now has learning disabilities. In the conference room, her husband, Richard Talley, a retired electrical engineer, teaches reading class to older youths. In the middle of the session, one youth who dropped out of the 11th grade turns to Talley and blurts out something that has been troubling him: “Do you have any idea where I can get some work? I’ve been lookin’ and lookin’ and can’t find any kind of job.”

When Talley’s students take a break from their reading assignment, they discuss movies. Talley tells them he is mystified why robbers in a recent movie wore white face paint instead of masks. One student, who has served time in jail for robbery, explains that paint can serve the same purpose as a mask--it provides a disguise. But while a mask can cut down on your peripheral vision, paint will not. Talley thanks the student for his incisive answer, and the class returns to their reading.

On other days at the center, volunteers teach classes such as African American history, introduction to computers, mathematics, study skills and, as a respite from academics, drum corps and choir. After class, students watch television, shoot pool or play video games. The boys play basketball in the parking lot behind the center, and the girls jump rope.

On weekends, some get their first glimpse of life outside South-Central. There are field trips to museums and amusement parks. They see plays and operas. They take day trips to the mountains, the beach and to Santa Catalina Island.

On Sundays, the one day the center is closed, students hop the fence, shoot hoops and have picnics on the asphalt. On weekdays, when the center closes at 6 p.m., Rumph always has a tough time closing the doors. Instead of returning home, children hide in the bathroom, under sofas and in the parking lot.

There is tension at home, where money is often scarce. There is danger on the street. There are gang conflicts in the public schools. At the center, they can just be kids.

On the walls behind the center, there is gang graffiti, but the center is untouched. It is revered in the neighborhood. The center gleams from a fresh coat of paint, there is new carpeting, and a planter in front is filled with impatiens. Over the front door is a picture of young black students in caps and gowns.

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An average of 40 children show up every day. Most are from single-family homes, or live with grandparents, or stay in foster homes. Some were born in jail, and a few were crack babies. Some are good students, but many are far behind in school. A few can barely read. All the students are black, but Rumph recently hired a Latino youth counselor in the hopes of attracting Latino students.

Some volunteers, such as the Talleys, are white and drive in from the suburbs. Others, such as Tommy McConnell, are black professionals who volunteer after work.

McConnell grew up in South-Central, graduated from UC Berkeley and teaches math at the center twice a week. McConnell, a first-grade teacher at a nearby elementary school, tries to convince the young boys--many of whom aspire to be professional athletes--that education is the true way out of poverty.

“The only positive African American role models some of these young boys see in the media are professional athletes,” McConnell said. “I want to show them that I am a young black man who has achieved something through education. I want to show them that they can do the same.”

Before the center opened, Donna Nelson was afraid to let her children out of the house. There had been five drive-by shootings on her street; her house and car were peppered with bullet holes.

“The parks are controlled by gangbangers, so the center is all our kids have,” she said. “My four kids are there every day after school and all day Saturday. When they’re at the center, I don’t have to worry. I know they’ll be safe for at least a few hours.”

One of Nelson’s sons was 14 when the center opened, but she says it was too late to save him from the streets. He spent a few afternoons a week hanging out with the neighborhood gangbangers and a few afternoons at the center. He now is in state prison serving a sentence for armed robbery.

But another son was 12 when the center opened and he still was impressionable enough to listen to Rumph and her volunteers. He is now a senior in high school and is preparing for college.

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For Rumph, the center fulfills a lifelong dream of becoming a teacher. One of 12 children, she had to drop out of school in Dallas because her family could not afford the bus fare to the segregated high school across town. She picked up a job washing glasses at a restaurant and married young.

She left her abusive husband when she was 24 and took the bus to Los Angeles. Her father, a sharecropper and preacher, told his children not to accept handouts, so she never considered welfare. She put her children in day care and found an apartment in a housing project and a job making salads at a department store tearoom. At night, after the children were asleep, she took in ironing and studied for her high school diploma.

She married again, to Harris Rumph, a truck driver who eventually opened a furniture moving company. She ran his office and kept the books. The oldest of her three children, Al, the child who Rumph felt was the most intelligent and had the most potential, picked up a crack habit and spent time in prison and time on the streets, homeless. But during the year before his death, he was off drugs, enrolled in a job-training program and had an apartment and a girlfriend.

One night as he was walking to his girlfriend’s house, he was shot in a drive-by. Police figured it was a case of mistaken identity because Al was too old for gangs. He was 35 at the time and never had been involved with gangs.

Rumph was too devastated to think of revenge. At work, she could not even answer the phone. She would just sit at her desk and cry. One afternoon, to keep herself occupied, she took a group of children from her church on a field trip to a black history exhibit.

“These kids were so desperate for love and affection,” Rumph recalled. “Many were hungry. We took them to McDonald’s, and one little boy ate three hamburgers and tried to hide the rest of his food so he could take it to his mother. Some of the kids were as young as 3, but not one mother was waiting for them when we got back. At the end of that day, I realized what my work was.”

She rented a storefront office next to her husband’s moving business and plunked down $400 for the first month’s rent. Friends helped paint and relatives donated books and games and desks. From home, Rumph brought her television and whatever else was needed.

Her first students were four young boys her husband found spray-painting graffiti in the alley behind the center. One of the boys, Jason Wilborne, who was 11 at the time, was spray-painting “CLG”--Cartoonland Gangsters, the signature of his tagging crew. Wilborne, now 16, still spends most afternoons at the center. Many of the kids he used to tag with, kids who were not interested in coming to the center with him, quit school and moved on from the tagging crew to the neighborhood Crip faction.

“I want to be a computer programmer now, and the center got me going on it,” Wilborne said. “I learned about computers here, and the tutors really helped me improve my reading. If it wasn’t for this place, I’d be running the streets. Just like a lot of my old friends.”

As word of the center spread through the neighborhood, Wilborne was joined by dozens of other youngsters. Rumph began spending all day there and had no more time to run her husband’s office. When the recession cut into her husband’s business, they began having trouble coming up with the center’s rent. They decided to sell their house to get out of debt and keep the center going.

During the riots in 1992, many of the buildings on her block were torched, but the center was untouched. The publicity Rumph received after the riots led to numerous donations and large grants. The center receives no federal funding and is supported by donations from individuals, businesses, including the Kellogg Co. and Rhino Records, and grants from charitable foundations such as the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the California Wellness Foundation.

Rumph was able to move from the cramped storefront to a suite of offices across the street, which she remodeled recently.

Her relatives still are tormented because police have not arrested her son’s killer. Rumph, however, has achieved peace of mind.

“This man might have killed my son, but he didn’t kill his name,” she said. “As long as the center is here, his name will live on. This center is my answer to the man who killed my son.”