A Family’s Journey of Hope

Shortly after 6 in the morning, the daily pageant of hope at Florence and Vermont begins.

The early October sky is still lightless. A few refugees from the night fidget along the stained sidewalks, murmuring pleas for handouts. But school buses have begun taking over the streets. From every direction come the purposeful huff of diesels and the squeal of brakes.

In front of Max’s Cleaners, small knots of tidy schoolkids have emerged from the darkness. They shift their weighty backpacks and chatter to one another. Ready for the day, they refute, without meaning to, all that the night’s stragglers embody.

At 6:25, School Bus No. 4614 pulls up to Max’s, and three high school girls board. It points its snub nose north on Normandie, west on Jefferson, north on Western, east on Pico, south on Normandie again, stopping five more times for passengers.

Inside, 4614 is dark and well-heated; the bus is a cocoon moving through a careworn and unpredictable South-Central Los Angeles landscape. By the time it turns west onto the Santa Monica Freeway, headed for the San Diego north, then the Ventura west, 22 girls and eight boys are aboard. In the milky light of the advancing day, they gab or stare or study. They fix and refix their hair.

The bus is bound for Birmingham High and Mulholland Middle schools in Van Nuys, 30-odd miles away. For those who boarded at Florence and Vermont, the trip will take 60 minutes.

For 12 of the 18 years that constituted his life, Eric Hoggatt was intimately familiar with such daily journeys. From first grade until the night before he died as a high school senior, he rode buses to the San Fernando Valley from South Los Angeles, sometimes from the corner of Florence and Vermont. He rode them, as he progressed through school, to Encino, Tarzana and Reseda.

As with the students on No. 4614, Eric and his family measured the long commutes less in miles or minutes than in expectations.

*

About 6,800 students migrate every day from South-Central to schools in the Valley. Their trips are powered by the energies and aspirations of their families, as much as by diesel fuel. The ultimate destination is a more promising existence than a childhood restricted to South-Central ordinarily portends.

There is a fare, however--a price that must be paid for the ride. It’s paid in the currency of domestic routines that often involve, for students as young as 7, extremely early mornings and long hours away from home, particularly when children are involved in athletics and other extracurricular activities. It’s paid also in a certain disconnection that can exist between parents and the distant schools their children attend.

The experience of many a South-Central family is reflected in that of Michael and Verna Hoggatt and their children. The Hoggatts embraced the inconveniences and disconnection as the sine qua non of a greater good. Over the years, they became a way of life.

The Hoggatts came to public attention after their son Eric, an 18-year-old football player at Reseda High School, died of an apparent brain hemorrhage suffered in a Sept. 12 game against Chatsworth High.

Eric was one of six Hoggatt children, all of whom have been educated, from elementary to high school, primarily in the Valley. The same is true of a niece and a nephew the Hoggatts are raising. Over the years, the children of the Hoggatt clan, now ages 8 to 23, have gone to schools in Encino, Tarzana, Canoga Park, Woodland Hills and Reseda.

Thousands of early mornings found young Hoggatts walking or being driven to dozens of South-Central intersections, including Florence and Vermont, to meet outbound school buses.

“For kindergarten, they went to school in the neighborhood, but after that I basically shipped them to the Valley,” says Verna Hoggatt. “I wanted them to explore. I didn’t want them to think there’s only one way. It’s a big world, and if there was opportunity, they were going to follow it.”

Sending children so far away to learn, however, can also mean that parents will remain at a psychological remove from their children’s schools. Taking care of garden-variety emergencies and attending parent-teacher meetings and sports events are much more difficult than if the schools were around the corner. Often parents have little opportunity to know and be known by school administrators and teachers.

This phenomenon clearly has played a role in the Hoggatts’ reaction to their son’s demise. They’ve filed a negligence claim against Reseda High School officials for not informing them after the game that Eric had complained of dizziness and tingling in his hands and feet during the contest, which the parents did not attend. Verna Hoggatt found her son dead in bed the following morning when she tried to wake him for school.

The image of Eric Hoggatt, blood possibly leaking into his brain cavity as he rode a late school bus home to a sleeping household at about 11 p.m., some 17 hours after leaving that morning, is a sobering one.

His death, however, doesn’t change the fact that the long bus trips have been a hopeful theme in the Hoggatt family’s biography.

*

The Hoggatt family had its inception on the streets of South-Central--on the sidewalk of West 110th Street near Vermont, where in 1973 young Michael Hoggatt encountered Verna Branch after visiting Verna’s sister’s house down the block.

Michael, a freight handler and Vietnam veteran, and Verna, who worked at a Taco Bell, liked one another immediately and soon began living together. Children came in rapid succession, both before and after their marriage in 1976. Tamika was born in 1973, Tasha in 1974, Nicole in 1976. Twin boys, Eric and Michael, came along two years later, and were followed by Julia four years after that.

Over the years, the family lived in three South-Central residences. At one point, the eight Hoggatts lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Century Boulevard. Verna’s solution to the overcrowding was to take the children out nearly every day. She took them to explore Palos Verdes, and enrolled them in every sort of activity she could think of. “I kept my kids busy,” Verna says. “They might get to watch a little ‘Sesame Street’ in the mornings, but I had them in swimming classes, acting lessons, charm school.”

In 1982, the Hoggatts bought their first house, a yellow stucco three-bedroom bungalow on Denker Avenue, in a neighborhood of single-family homes. The children still had to share bedrooms to fit in the place, but the house had a garden and a yard, where dad Michael could raise pigeons.

Three years later, the family sold the house and bought the current residence, a fourplex not far from Florence and the Harbor Freeway, a well-tended and heavily secured building with an iron fence in front and a crisp American flag flying above a tidy yard.

The new place had a great deal more space and the prospect of a little rental income. It was where the children would jostle through their teen years, and where one of them would go to sleep one night and never wake.

*

In raising their children, Michael and Verna Hoggatt stressed a few fundamentals: Be open, honest and responsible; love yourself so that you can love others; look into things yourself rather than rely on what others say.

“But school was always the No. 1 priority,” Verna says. “Without education you can’t go anywhere. I used to tell them, ‘You can be an educated bum, but you’ve got to be educated.’ ”

For Michael Hoggatt, a proper education meant getting out of South-Central schools and into those in the Valley.

“L.A. schools suck,” he says. “A lot of stuff goes on at L.A. schools that doesn’t happen out in the Valley. Our kids never ditched school. We never had to worry about drugs or drinking or nothing like that, either. We didn’t have a whole lot to worry us, really, when they was going to school.”

Michael made good money as a union trucker, and the Hoggatts weren’t shy about spending it on school-related things. They bought a computer. They lavished the children with back-to-school outfits. They rewarded good grades with monetary bonuses.

To underline the specialness of the first day of school each year, Verna rose extra early and prepared a large breakfast for the family, summoning them to the table with a little bell.

The logistics of combining education with domesticity were far from simple.

In 1991, for example, Tamika was a senior at Palisades High in Pacific Palisades, after having studied at Taft and El Camino Real high schools in Woodland Hills. Tasha was a sophomore at Bravo Medical Magnet High School in East Los Angeles, having transferred from Reseda High. Nicole was an eighth-grader at Portola Middle School in Tarzana, where twins Michael and Eric attended sixth grade. Julia was in fourth grade at Lanai Road Elementary in Encino.

Meanwhile, cousin Felicia Hoggatt, who had lived with the family since infancy, was a student at Loren Miller Elementary School in South-Central. Nekaia Brown, a nephew the Hoggatts also were raising, attended day care at nearby 95th Street School.

Children’s alarm clocks began going off at 5 a.m., and the competition would begin for the house’s sole bathroom. The children typically showered the night before--all except for Tamika, who rose first so as to bathe in the morning.

Most days, the children fixed breakfast for themselves, usually oatmeal or other cereal, but none of the sugary kind that Verna looked down on.

“In the morning, it wasn’t nothing organized; it was a madhouse,” says Michael Hoggatt. “Everybody was trying to eat and get ready at the same time. So, it was kind of like half of them were in the bathroom and half of them were eating. You had an hour to get ready for school, and you figure 10 or 15 minutes of that was just getting to the bus stop.”

Despite the pandemonium, the atmosphere on those mornings was low on surliness and sibling spats. For Verna it was an article of faith that children who were busy did not fall into patterns of feuding. “They had a lot of energy,” Verna says. “And, oh, there was the occasional, ‘Hey, you’re wearing my shoes!’ and ‘You’ve got my jacket!’ But that was about all.”

Fed and dressed, the Hoggatt children then had to catch four school buses at four bus stops between 6:10 and 6:30 a.m. Tamika had to get to Florence and Normandie, six blocks west of the family home. Tasha had to get to Florence and Beverly, three blocks east. Nicole and the twins to one corner of Florence and Vermont, four blocks west, and Julia to another corner of the same intersection. Moreover, cousins Felicia and Nekaia had to be walked or driven to their schools in South-Central.

Around midafternoon, Verna typically began preparing dinner, aiming to serve the food between 6 and 6:30 p.m., by which time her brood could usually be counted on to reassemble from their far-flung schools. The plan, often foiled by transportation exigencies, was to eat together as a family, the table to be cleared and the dishes washed by whatever children were on the duty roster for that week.

Often, high schoolers could make it home by about 5 p.m. Anything from bad driving conditions to drill-team practice to interscholastic athletic events, however, could push their return to 8 or 9 at night, and sometimes later. The special late school buses took a particularly long time getting back because they made many more stops, and had to brook rush-hour traffic. From high school in Woodland Hills, the 6 p.m. bus would not get Tamika home until about 8 p.m.

As often as not, family members ended up eating in shifts, late diners sharing the big glass-top dining table with early diners already well into the evening’s homework.

*

No one was awake when Eric got home in the last half-hour of Sept. 12. He fetched a house key from a sleepy aunt, Cheryl Hoggatt, who lives in a rear unit of the Hoggatt place, let himself into the family apartment and returned the key. He telephoned his friend, Richard Jackson, a teammate who lived in the Valley, and congratulated him on the good game he had played.

Then Eric went to his bedroom. The room, off the large family kitchen, was small and contained an exercise bike and an old barbell that Eric worked out with religiously. Eric loved orderliness. Ordinarily, he was neat about his clothing, but this night he stripped to his boxer shorts and either threw or crammed his clothes behind the twin bed.

The next morning, his brother Michael stole into the room to replace a pair of Eric’s shoes he’d worn the previous day. Eric didn’t stir.

Verna got up around 5:20 a.m. About 15 minutes later, she went to Eric’s room, figuring that, after last night’s game, he was sleepier than usual and needed rousing. “Eric, pick it up, pick it up,” she called. A little later, when he still hadn’t risen, she returned and shook him. Eric had fallen asleep on his stomach, his face to the wall, so Verna rolled him onto his back.

Eric’s fingers were curled, and his thumbs sticking straight out. His eyes were shut.

“Peaceful,” Verna recalls. “He just died this way”--she closes her eyes. “He wasn’t in no stress.”

Eric’s father wasn’t at home. Now the owner-operator of a semi tractor-trailer, he’d just driven a load of Nestle’s chocolate from Los Angeles to Denver and had gone from there to Dodge City, Kan., to pick up a consignment of meat for delivery to Bangor, Maine.

That morning he went to a Dodge City shipping office to inquire about the trailer he was supposed to pick up and was told that he should call his fleet manager right away.

After learning of his son’s death, Michael got into his rig and drove straight to Los Angeles, covering 1,500 miles in 23 hours, stopping only to fuel the truck with diesel, and himself with caffeine-rich Mountain Dew.

*

Inevitably, Eric’s death has tilted the Hoggatt family’s perspective several degrees from its once comfortable axis. Family members speak with emotion and bitterness of Reseda High School officialdom’s failure to notify them early of Eric’s symptoms, and of what they see as subsequent insensitivity to their grief. If their claim against the school and the Los Angeles Unified School District is denied, they say they will file a lawsuit.

The changed perspective, however, does not alter the Hoggatt children’s view of how they’ve benefited from the educations the long bus rides have made possible.

“We were so used to going to school in the Valley that we didn’t want to go to schools here,” says 21-year-old Tasha Hoggatt Edwards, who has completed two years at a private Lutheran college in Nebraska, and expects to earn a bachelor’s degree in French and Spanish from Iowa State University. “They didn’t offer the level of education here. The neighborhood is so bad and the schools are so far behind. In the Valley we had so much more opportunity to take college prep and AP [advanced placement] classes.”

Tamika Hoggatt, who works as a model and a singer in a local reggae band, and is about halfway to a bachelor’s degree in business at Santa Monica College, says she “always felt like the schools in the Valley were cleaner. Their books are newer. There are good teachers here, but they’re always short of something. El Camino was in an area where there were lots of people from well-to-do families. They attended PTA meetings and were very involved with the schools.”

By the time the third Hoggatt child, Nicole, was of school age, getting on the bus seemed as natural as getting up in the morning. “When I was little and my mother and I would walk my sisters to get the bus, I always wanted to get on with them,” says Nicole, who is 19 and carries a 3.1 grade-point average at Cal State Los Angeles, where she majors in communications. “I liked it. Riding the bus was fun.”

The majority of the Hoggatt children’s friendships were formed at school. Their neighborhood friends tend to be other young people who also rode school buses to the Valley and other distant spots.

The detachment of such students from their neighborhoods and neighborhood schools concerns those who believe the best hope of inner-city areas like South-Central is the retention of home-grown talent and motivation.

“If local schools could access those kinds of parents and kids, that then becomes a model for success,” says Howard Lappin who, as principal, has presided over the transformation of Foshay Learning Center in South-Central into a highly regarded school. “Those parents are saying, ‘Education is the most important thing in our lives.’ And if you develop a core of kids from those kinds of families, it rubs off on the other kids.”

The Hoggatt children, however, say part of the special value of their Valley educations was the experience with ethnically and socio-economically diverse classmates, which probably would not have been the case in South-Central. Moreover, they say, the lessons they learned were sometimes unexpected.

“My mother always exposed us to everything she could,” says Tamika, “but going to those schools took my mind to a different level. You see kids with big houses and rich parents, but they have problems like other kids do. At first I thought, ‘How could they have problems? They turn 16 and get a fresh new Acura, right off the lot.’ It’s an eye-opener. You think the grass is greener on the other side, and it’s not. We all need the same kinds of attention, someone who cares. It’s not the money, but the love.”

At 7:20 in the morning, School Bus No. 4614 departs the Ventura Freeway via northbound Balboa Boulevard. As if by too-convenient symbolic arrangement, it immediately traverses a spacious, green landscape, made up of the Balboa Sports Center, Balboa Golf Course and Valley Sod Farms Inc. The scene flowing by seems several orders of reality distant from the forlorn shops and banged-up, yard-less, security-bar-corseted dwellings of where the journey began.

No. 4614 turns west on Victory and noses into a line of buses alongside Birmingham High School at 7:25. Exactly an hour has passed since the bus stopped in the dark at Florence and Vermont. When its talkative human cargo re-shoulders its packs and troops out, the day has already gone fully bright.