ORANGE : Charity Stands to Benefit From Jail Time

The jail bars were a bit on the flimsy side, and the prison gruel looked more like a catered luncheon, but the calls to come up with bail were frantic enough to have come from a real lockup.

“If worst comes to worst, I’ll just write a check myself,” said Tom Hirsch, manager of brokerage Merrill Lynch’s Santa Ana office.

Hirsch and 80 other business people were rounded up Thursday by a faux sheriff and hauled off in a limo to the Player’s Club in Orange.

Once there, armed with phone lists and business cards, they were ordered to raise at least $500 each for the Muscular Dystrophy Assn. if they wanted to get out of jail cells made of streamers and black balloons.

“It’s so competitive out there and there are so many causes, we all have to be creative in fund-raising,” said Sandy Martinez, a district director for MDA.

The jailhouse gag has been used successfully on the East Coast for years, she said, helping to raise more than $1 million nationwide each year for muscular dystrophy, a generic term for about 40 genetic diseases that affect the muscles.

In Orange County, which has 1,200 people with the illnesses, association officials were hoping to raise $20,000 Thursday from the event, dubbed “Behind Bars for Good.”

Some prisoners got to work quickly, working frantically with donated cellular phones. Executives Richard R. Patton and Ray Gens of Guard-Systems Inc. in Santa Ana raised $1,500 within hours.

Their secret, Patton said, was “knowing the business people and knowing what you can get out of them--not more than they can afford and not less.”

But Clint Rees, a librarian at the Court of Appeal, had just $80 in pledges by lunchtime. His colleagues at the courthouse offered him free advice, counseling him to file a writ, but were less generous with their pledges.

“My co-workers are not co-helping me,” Rees said.

Georgia Gonzales, merchandise manager at a Target store, said she was startled by one potential donor who decided to let her “rot in jail.” But more beneficent colleagues came through, she said, and she managed to collect $500 by 1 p.m.

“It’s a fun way to fund raise,” she said.