Engineer Finds Joy in People, Not Things

Carl McCraven worked in the 1950s, ‘60s and early 70s as an aerospace electrical engineer, but he really wanted to work with people.

The Rev. John Simmons, chief executive of the now-defunct Pacoima Memorial Lutheran Hospital, was glad he did.

He was also glad to have McCraven’s cool, engineer’s approach to problems.

“He didn’t get flustered,” Simmons said. “He thought through problems and thought through what he had to do to solve them.”

Simmons hired McCraven in 1972 as the hospital’s associate administrator. At the time, McCraven was serving as a volunteer member of the hospital’s board, and realized he was spending as much time on hospital business as working as an engineer for TRW and Lockheed. When it came time for a decision, he picked people over things.

“I believe that the best thing that can happen to a person is for their employment to be in a place they like to be,” said McCraven, 71, now executive director for Hillview Mental Health Center in Lake View Terrace. McCraven and his wife, Eva, Hillview’s assistant executive director, have four children and a grandchild.

Simmons credits McCraven with salvaging Hillview when he was able to separate the mental health facility from the hospital as it declared bankruptcy and closed in in 1986. For 25 years, the hospital--whose name had been changed to Lake View Medical Center--had served low-income residents of Lake View Terrace and Pacoima.

McCraven had been a board member since the hospital was created in the aftermath of a two-plane collision over a Pacoima schoolyard in 1957. The crash killed four, injured 74 and made the community aware of the need for a hospital.

“Many of those who lived in Pacoima thought Pacoima was a jewel that was going to be a wonderful place,” McCraven said. In the ‘50s it was one of the few places in the Valley where blacks--even middle-class professionals--were able to live. Although the segregation was not as blatant as in Mississippi or Washington, D.C., where he grew up, it was still “more of the same,” McCraven said.

As president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in the early 1960s, McCraven organized a march from Pacoima to the Van Nuys Civic Center to coincide with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington.

Although McCraven headed the NAACP Southern Area Conference and was a member of the national board in the early 1970s, he wasn’t a man to seek the spotlight, said Simmons, a civil rights activist himself who also was in the march to Van Nuys. “He didn’t push himself out in front,” Simmons said, “but you could always count on him.”

Quietly and persistently, McCraven built relationships with people, Simmons said. It is clear to him that McCraven had made a choice in his life when he left engineering.

“He decided he’d rather work with people,” Simmons said. “People have to decide between working with people and working with things and working with ideas.”

In 1994 under McCraven’s leadership, the mental health group opened Hillview Village, a $5.2-million complex on Van Nuys Boulevard for homeless adults with mental disabilities. A transitional housing program for the homeless is under development.

“I enjoy accomplishing things that are going to make things happen for people,” McCraven said.

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