HEARTS OF THE CITY / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news : Resowing Seeds of Hope at Juvenile Hall

Suzanne called me the other day.

She wants to go back to Juvenile Hall.

I didn’t remember her at first. It had been six, seven years.

“Suzanne from ‘3’s Company,’ ” she said.

Now I remembered.

Suzanne Gray is a woman from West Covina in her mid-50s who is forever driven by her youth as a runaway, prostitute, street punk and juvenile inmate.

Back in 1978 she started visiting kids in juvenile institutions, a freelance counselor telling the youngsters to hang in there, to believe that there was hope for a new life on the outside. She talked to them with the salty philosophy and credibility of someone who had been behind bars.

Gradually, she built a network of other adults who filed into Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey and Central Juvenile Hall in East Los Angeles to offer motivational chats with incarcerated boys and girls.

Some of the counselors were convicted criminals who had been referred to Gray by judges as part of “community service” sentences. Gray became a counselor to many of them. She turned her home phone into a 24-hour hotline and kept it running with some modest private grants. She had made a profession out of heart-to-heart chats.

By 1986 the Board of Supervisors honored Gray’s work with incarcerated teens by naming her one of five “distinguished volunteers” among the 40,000 people who assisted county programs.

By the time I ran into her, Gray had been on her self-styled mission for 11 years. I marveled at the way she strode through the halls of Los Padrinos like she owned them, the master key to the place in her hand.

“Once you’ve been locked up, you never forget the way the door sounds when it slams behind you,” she said, and what should have been a line from a corny prison movie sounded real.

But a couple of years later the mission stalled. Already a victim of emphysema (yet still a defiant chain-smoker), she was felled by pancreatitis. The jail visits stopped, the volunteers drifted away.

That’s what prompted her phone call the other day. Gray wants back in to jail. She wants to rebuild a network of volunteers. She wants to pursue that audacious idea that you can change kids.

“I want to find out what happened to everybody I worked with, and I want to applaud them,” she said. “And then I want to do it again. I can’t do it alone. I’ve got to keep the candle of hope going.”

She is going to call the candle by another name this time.

“Janie Appleseed,” she said. “All I am is a seed planter. I want to name the corporation Janie Appleseed’s Orchards of Hope.”

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The Beat

Today’s lead story focuses on Suzanne Gray, who is trying to revive a network of streetwise volunteers to counsel incarcerated boys and girls.

For information on volunteering: (909) 595-8694