Where Past Is Present : Care Center Aids Alzheimer’s Clients--and Families

“You’re looking good,” says Marjorie Martin, extending a wrinkled hand. “Been a long time.”

No matter that Martin, 82, is greeting someone she’s never met before. She acts as though she were talking to an old acquaintance, and perhaps in her mind, she is.

It is sometimes hard to sort out reality in the tall-ceilinged room at 4703 Crenshaw Blvd. For the elderly who gather there every weekday, many of them with Alzheimer’s disease, the past can overrule the present.

Martin describes herself as her father’s baby, a favored child who accompanies him everywhere. Winston Felix clutches a pink balloon as though he were 7, not 74.

Indeed, Deborah Kidd, one of the staff at this adult day care program, says her job is not that different from watching over children. “Except with kids, you can tell them something and they’ll do it . . . not them,” she says, nodding warmly at her charges. “They’re used to things their way.”

Still, they seem good-natured as they spend the day playing games, singing and doing a few mild exercises.

At one point Aimee Callegari, who oversees the program for People Coordinated Services of Southern California, leads a trivia game. She reads the first half of a saying. Her listeners have to finish it. Sometimes silence is the answer, sometimes a chorus.

Just about everyone knows the end to “Early to bed.”

“Early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise,” they chant surely. After all, if there was ever an early-to-bed crowd, this is it. One woman allowed that she retired at 5:30 the evening before.

Sometimes, in what Callegari calls “sundowning,” her clients want to go home and end the day at noon.

The day care program, funded with grants from the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Assn. and the Frederick N. Mellinger Alzheimer’s Fund, is offered as much as a respite for those at home as a social group for the clients.

Willetta Fletcher, for one, drops her husband Thurman Fletcher off for part of the day so she can run errands. Before, she said, “I couldn’t get out of the house. I couldn’t go to the store.”

Her husband is a handsome man with a far-off gaze. He ignores most of the activities, preferring instead to march slowly and silently back and forth, back and forth across the room. His steps are tiny, a couple of inches at a time, but he is almost always moving. And so it has always been, his wife says.

He is a man who went back to school to study gerontology after he retired and then volunteered in the field. “He was busy, busy,” Willetta Fletcher said.

Alzheimer’s is an incurable degenerative brain illness that destroys the memory, cognitive abilities and judgment. The Alzheimer’s association, which this month is observing National Alzheimer’s Disease Month, estimates there are 120,000 people with the ailment in Los Angeles County. About 73,000 people over the age of 55 could benefit from adult day care but only 2,500 are enrolled in such programs, said Rochelle Williams, education and outreach coordinator for the organization’s county chapter.

Families often don’t know about the centers and they are also scattered haphazardly across the basin.

Williams said her agency decided to award a three-year grant to People Coordinated to operate a program in south Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, when the association realized the area was bereft of them.

Now 24 clients use the Crenshaw center, some coming every weekday, some for just a few hours a week. They play bingo, they stare at nothing in particular, they chide each other and help each other. They forget. And they remember.