benchmarks of hope

Born of rough backgrounds and trouble, the benches are solid, smooth pine. Carved from remnants of a convent, they are Mission style with a hint of Mexican colonial, suitable for gardens or indoor decor.

Buyers would probably prefer the benches in their homes to the people who built them.

Had they not found a nun and an architect with faith, the Benchmakers of Taller San Jose might now be costing taxpayers the usual 20 grand apiece for annual prison upkeep.

Instead, they are building a business and, they hope, building themselves a future.

Most of the artisans did not dream half so big. Some are teenage parents or recovering drug addicts; several have done jail time.

Cesar Ornelas was a gangbanger from Anaheim whose number was up: He was being stalked by a rival gang. To get home unharmed, he would creep down his alley or jump fences yard after yard. He feared his family would be killed.

“I was the next one, pretty much, on the list. They would roam around my neighborhood at night, looking for me,” says Ornelas, 21.

For three years, he essentially hid inside his house to avoid the tentacles of gang life. This after twice being beaten bloody for trying to leave it behind. Unable to go out for fear of attracting gunfire, no school or job to fill each day, he cleaned constantly, stayed busy with chores, he says.

When he eventually emerged, it was to attend Taller San Jose, which in Spanish means Workshop of St. Joseph.

His mother and sister had brought him a flier on Taller; its classes for high school equivalency diplomas drew him out.

Sister Eileen McNerney recalls Ornelas’ demeanor when he arrived 15 months ago at the Taller building at Broadway and Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana.

“He was physically and mentally disintegrating,” says McNerney, director of Taller San Jose. “He didn’t speak for the first three months he was here.”

With each custom bench that Ornelas worked on, she says, his silence slowly lifted.

Once he thought dishwashing was the best job he could get. Now he dreams of construction or carpentry. He believes he might have a future. He still looks surprised to hear himself say it.

“Back then I didn’t know I could do better,” says Ornelas, grinning about newfound chances that others, he realizes, take for granted.

“This has opened my eyes. I see I’m somebody. I could be somebody.”

Simple but powerful words to the hopeless.

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Every bench is unique, signed and accompanied by a photograph and biography of its maker. Prices range from $450 to $650. The bench style, size and finish (walnut or painted) are chosen by the buyer.

All are hand-finished and made with wood joinery--no nails, braces or other hardware are used.

The wood, 40 years old, comes from the doors and shutters of the now renovated motherhouse for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, the order whose nuns shepherd the Taller program.

Taller (pronounced tie-YAIR) aims to sell 100 of its benches by year’s end.

Already the benches have homes at an Italian restaurant in Tustin, Rueben Martinez’s bookstore in downtown Santa Ana and the budding artists colony called Santora Arts Complex nearby on Broadway.

The bench-making program, just over a year old, is part of a larger learning center run on an annual budget of $300,000 by a staff of eight, six of whom are full time. Of the eight, four are nuns with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.

Participants must speak English because, the reasoning goes, most good jobs require it.

About 100 Latinos, 18 to 25 years old, come to the learning center to earn their high school equivalency diplomas and gain computer programming and work skills. Currently, there are nine apprentices in the bench-making program.

The bench-makers’ skills are admired enough in these nascent months to be considered for other projects. Last week, a call came in about the possibility of their making the frame for a portrait--Ronald Reagan’s portrait--that will adorn the new federal courthouse a few blocks from the workshop.

It takes two or three weeks for the group to make five benches.

The salvaged wood is cut to size, and the bench makers sand the wood, fit the pieces, stain the completed benches and, finally, carve original designs on the backrest. Then, the decorative detail--fruit, flowers, ivy--is carved or painted.

“I do all the arms here and the cutting,” says Jose Pajares, 20, as he runs chunks of wood through a table saw.

“Each of us is good at something. Cesar does all the staining, and he seems to be good at that. I seem to be good at cutting. Raul does all the sanding.”

Across the sawdust-sprinkled room, master carpenter Jose Gomez is sculpting a bas relief across a broad piece of wood that will ultimately become the front of Taller’s entryway desk.

Gomez, 37, is on staff to guide his nine apprentices in carpentry; as they master the foundation of bench making, the apprentices will get to do more of the finishing and decorative work.

One must first demonstrate the motivation to be reliable and learn a business to participate in bench making. Pajares attended high school equivalency degree classes for four months, on time, never missing a day, before teachers felt confident that he was serious about turning his life around.

In its effort to prepare these young people for better jobs in the employment world, Taller has the bench makers learn and perfect their work until they get it right. Only then do they advance to new challenges. Regular assessments are done to monitor progress before a bench maker is promoted to a new stage of work. The aim is to teach them the value of establishing goals and the rewards of achieving them. Some bench makers will eventually earn the right to go on Taller’s payroll, although only one has been involved long enough to near that goal.

McNerney says that most of Taller’s students can’t afford to be out of the work force for more than a year, so the part-time pay for bench makers will make it easier for participants to attend Taller’s classes at the same time.

Taller takes a full-circle approach to its effort at helping people become self-reliant.

“The basic plan is to get kids and totally surround them, so they spend a lot of time here and have the ability to change,” says Dominic Walsh, Taller’s associate director.

“We want to expose them to their own arts and styles of their culture, but also American culture and work ethics,” McNerney said. “The importance of arriving on time, performing jobs in an assigned amount of time, working in teams, following through--the stuff they need to survive at a business.”

Gazing at his progress chart, Raul Martinez, hair buzzed short and baggy pants a lingering reminder of his tough past, beams like a grade-schooler. Martinez has just earned a bulletin board marker for passing the writing portion of his high school equivalency degree test.

“I never thought I would do half this much,” says Martinez, who says he was kicked out of two school districts before dropping out, and has been arrested but has not done jail time. He thanks his probation officer for directing him to Taller. “It helps to spend a lot of time here because it keeps me from wandering off with friends and being tempted. Whatever we do here, it’s positive.”

Martinez is looking ahead to community college, then a four-year college and a career as “a movie producer, or even a middle-class job, like engineer,” he adds, to the amusement of his middle-class mentors.

Students say unexpected lessons come from the mentors: the Sisters of St. Joseph, staff and Walsh, an architect who lives in the neighborhood.

The pairing of students with mentors, Martinez said, is a lifesaver.

Twice now, he says, he has been tempted to attend parties hosted by friends from his troubled past. Both times, he says, Walsh has led him through a pro-and-con dialogue that ended with him choosing to stay home. At both parties, people were shot.

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The concept of Taller seems so promising, one might wonder why it sprouted only 18 months ago. But then, not every program has such patron saints.

Four Sisters of St. Joseph who moved to Santa Ana in recent years saw youths adrift, jobless and uneducated, with only a dead end in sight. Could they offer a detour, the sisters wondered?

Among them was McNerney. To the Sisters of St. Joseph, she made a plea to form a center where young Latinas and Latinos could earn their high school diplomas and some job skills.

The Sisters of St. Joseph committed $200,000 to the idea of Taller San Jose, but McNerney figured she would need to match that amount for the program to get by. If a building were donated, her fund-raising work would be cut in half.

About that time, mutual friends in St. Joseph’s parish introduced the nun to the architect.

McNerney had heard that Walsh, a transplanted New Yorker, was good with kids on the street. She knew he had been drafted into a volunteer project at the church schoolyard and was employing neighborhood teens to help him do the construction.

In December 1993, the two teamed up. Walsh did a search for government-owned buildings near downtown Santa Ana. They found a 70-year-old, rundown county building, considered surplus property, which the city of Santa Ana agreed to buy at a discounted price. Escrow was delayed for 10 months by the county’s bankruptcy quagmire. The city now leases the structure to Taller for $800 a month.

“When I got the building,” Walsh says, “I didn’t know what the heck I would do with it.”

In September 1995, the program opened. Taller’s first participants paid their “tuition” by rehabilitating the 9,000-square-foot, two-story building.

“We decorated the building with art from their heritage--Mexican, Native American--because we want them to feel proud of that too,” McNerney says.

Unemployment in Santa Ana is around 7%, compared with 3% countywide, says state Assemblyman Jim Morrissey (R-Anaheim), whose district includes three-quarters of Santa Ana.

“Everything they’re doing is great, and it’s helping the young adults in the community. It helps them get a job and get ahead in the world, and there’s a great need for that in the Santa Ana area.”

Morrissey’s success in getting the Louisiana Pacific timber company to donate a substantial amount of wood has been a great help, Walsh says. The bench makers need more pine or hardwood to continue working--the shutters and doors of the abbey are almost gone.

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The workshop is in a gang-neutral neighborhood, one reason the building was chosen. Nobody has to tread through turf of their former enemies. It is, students say, an island of safety.

The sisters do not tolerate drugs or gang references. There is not a tattoo in sight; they’re either covered or removed.

Nuns and other volunteers teach classes most mornings. Parenting, anger diffusion and job-interview skills are among topics Sister Rebecca Rodriguez broaches in life-skills courses.

One of the more advanced bench makers, Pajares of Santa Ana, had been in and out of jail seven or eight times.

He had to watch the life drain out of a friend beside him as they walked home from school, the bullets powering out of a passing car, to face some hard truths.

Not only was he going nowhere, but he was also going rapidly in reverse. He’d stolen cars, doing 30 days here and there in Orange County Jail, before being convicted for helping mug someone.

For that, Pajares spent a year behind bars, his longest stint. He was facing the possibility of a three-strikes sentence if convicted again, “of going to prison for 80 years. I wanted a better life for my kids than that,” says the father of a boy and girl.

He never told the gang he was bailing, “because that is not a wise choice. You get out, but you get out almost dead. They jump you out. They all jump you and beat you,” Pajares says. “So I just tell them I have to work all day, then I get home and want to play with my kids.”

They still accuse him of “ranking out,” but so be it.

“I feel pretty good about myself. It feels pretty good to say that.”

McNerney doesn’t often hear these “diamonds in the rough” speak about their new hopes and their past mistakes with such reflection.

“I think I fall in love with them, but they start to love themselves,” she says. “And that’s so good, because I think they know this is the last nest they’re going to leave.”

* Taller San Jose is at 801 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 92701. (714) 543-5105.