Decades Later, a Girl’s Determined Words Are a Reality

It would be easy to miss the tiny house on Reagan Street. Set back from the street and shrouded by trees, it’s the kind you walk on by. If you do stop, a sleepy cat barely acknowledges you at the front gate, and a languid springer spaniel seems equally ho-hum about visitors. It’s a quiet house on a quiet street in Los Alamitos, and you’d never expect that one of Orange County’s most inspiring stories took root here.

The house belongs to Myldred Jones, now 86 and fit as a fiddle except for spinal surgery last fall that has left her in a hard plastic wrap-around suit of armor to keep her spine straight. She calls it her “breastplate of righteousness” and laughs. It’ll come off someday, and life will return to normal.

It’s a life that has taken on special meaning the past 18 years--at a point in most people’s lives where they’re looking back on what they’ve done instead of gazing forward. Not so with Jones, who in her late 60s wanted to update her will because she didn’t think she would live much longer.

Not that anything was wrong with her. “I was about 67 and decided I wasn’t going to live very long,” she says. Unmarried and with no children, she asked her attorney to revise her will so that her assets would be used after her death to start a shelter for runaway and troubled teenagers.

He had a better idea: start the shelter herself.

The result was the Casa Youth Shelter, which claims to have taken in 7,600 teens since Jones founded it in 1978. I had heard about the shelter for years and of its white-haired matriarch, and wondered how and why someone in her late 60s had started a shelter for teenagers.

Is there a starting point for the story, I asked Jones as we talked in the living room of her house next door to the shelter. A retired Naval officer, she’s an eclectic, learned woman who still loves to read the Washington Post and occasionally sounds a bit like Katharine Hepburn.

She thinks there is. She remembers being a little girl, maybe 7 or 8, and taking the streetcar with her mother into Los Angeles to visit another little girl at Juvenile Hall. Jones remembers being horrified at seeing children in rooms with barred doors and windows. “I still get goose bumps thinking about it,” she says. “When we were leaving, I said to my mother, ‘Someday when I’m grown up, they are not going to put children in rooms like that.’ ”

Sixty years later, she got a chance to put her sentiment into practice. She sold her Rossmoor home and bought a house being converted to a senior citizens’ convalescent home. The idea was no more grand than to provide troubled teenagers a place to stay for a week or two if they couldn’t go home.

Since then, Casa has received lots of recognition and Jones has been honored many times.

“One of the things she is to all kids is that grandmother that so many of them never had the opportunity to get to be with,” says Casa’s executive director, Luciann Maulhardt. “Her presence, it’s such a feeling in this house.” The shelter residents understand, Maulhardt says, that “this is the house that Myldred started,” and they respect her for that.

Financial uncertainty marked the shelter’s early days. So much so that Jones’s lifelong faith (she considered becoming a nun after retiring from the Navy) was tested.

“I remember one time standing in my kitchen,” Jones says, “and pounding on the stove, saying, ‘God, if you want Casa to be here, show me, do something. I can’t do this by myself.’ ”

The crisis involved a staffer who was considering quitting because there was no money to pay her. Within minutes of her heavenly plea, Jones says, the staffer came over and said she would stay on, even without pay.

You don’t open a teen shelter expecting every day to be a great one. Jones says the success rate at the shelter is overwhelmingly high, but that even the failures don’t get her down for long. Seeing families reunited or watching once-forlorn teenagers return as productive young adults make up for the disappointments, she says.

We talked about the funny twists that life takes, how a young girl’s impressions of Juvenile Hall re-formed 60 years later. That must give you great personal satisfaction, I say.

“I’d have to say yes,” she replies. “And although I do have regrets of things that happened in my life, they have influenced and colored my life. As a whole life lived, I could have done much more. I don’t think I’ve done much harm, although along the way I know I’ve hurt some people. I realize if I’d done some things differently, people would have been happier. There have been missed opportunities. But you can’t dwell on that. I think I’ve done what God wanted me to do.”

And the prognosis for her health? Any recurrent thoughts like those of 20 years ago, that time is running out?

“My health is excellent,” she says, laughing. “I’m going to live into the 21st century. I’m going to have a New Year’s Eve party to usher in the century.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.