90-Year-Old Translates Job Into Joy

It’s the height of the vacation season. But don’t ask Armida Bay where she’s going for her summer holiday.

For the 55th year in a row, Bay isn’t taking any time off from work.

“I like my job,” said Bay, 90. “I’m a homebody.”

Home for Bay is the courthouse. Since 1942 she has worked as a Los Angeles court interpreter, translating questions and answers for Spanish-speaking defendants accused of everything from murder to running red lights.

These days she is at the downtown Traffic Court, helping as many as 60 Spanish-speaking motorists a day as they enter pleas, pay fines or schedule trial dates.

She works from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. She hasn’t called in sick since last year.

Those she helps don’t realize she’s old enough to be a great-great-great-grandmother. Neither do those she works with.

Other court employees were jolted last week when Bay casually mentioned that she was celebrating her birthday and showed a note of congratulations sent from the White House.

“I asked how old she was and at first she wouldn’t tell me. Then she told me the year she was born and I did the math. I couldn’t believe it,” said court Deputy Rick Gylfie.

Prosecutors at the South Hill Street courthouse were the most surprised. And some of them have had Bay at their elbow for decades.

“She looks and acts the same as when I started here” in the 1970s, said Stephen Totten, a deputy city attorney.

Ellen Sarmiento, supervising prosecutor for the South Hill Street courthouse, said Bay has a unique empathy with others: “She really connects with people she translates for.”

Dan F. Jeffries, assistant supervising attorney there, had pegged Bay as about 70. She has seemed frozen at that age all 11 years he has known her, he said.

“The defendants love her. The judges love her. Everybody here turns to her for advice,” Jeffries said.

Bay never gives legal advice, of course.

In court, interpreters translate conversations between defendants, lawyers and court personnel. But they are often called upon to explain the judicial process--and to allay fears that some newcomers to this country may have about the legal system.

The 450 or so interpreters working in Los Angeles County courtrooms each day are considered self-employed independent contractors. The county pays $230 a day for their services, but they forgo such benefits as paid vacations.

There is no age limit for interpreters, although they must keep up to date on language changes and dialects. County court interpreters handle about 90 languages, although Spanish, Korean and 23 others are the most common.

Michael Cline, assistant manager of the courts’ Litigation Support Office in charge of interpreter services, said foreign language translators have to satisfy defendants, defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges alike to win regular courtroom assignments.

Bay’s abilities have never been questioned, Cline said.

“Mentally you have to be on top of things. And physically it can be very demanding,” he said. Bay is “obviously a woman you can respect, and a role model for senior citizens.”

As a young woman, Bay dreamed of being a lawyer. She started law school twice, but dropped out both times. She worked after that as a legal secretary for a local lawyer before going to work for the Federal Court in 1942 for $4 a day.

She was plucked from the secretarial pool a short time later when a defendant failed to bring his own translator with him to court and officials had to scurry to find someone in the courthouse to interpret.

She married federal prosecutor Sylvan Bay and was made a full-time Spanish interpreter when the government began providing translators. She took a job in Superior Court in 1947 when the county offered her an interpreter’s job at $6 a day. She switched to Municipal Court in 1955.

Bay raised two daughters, paying 50 cents-per-day child-care costs while continuing to work. Her husband died in 1970, the year the South Hill Street Traffic Court opened and Bay moved there.

She lived in a MacArthur Park-area apartment until about a year ago, when she moved in with grandson Chris Pitts and his wife, Kori Auseth, of West Los Angeles. Bay primarily works in Commissioner Beverly Mosley’s busy traffic violation arraignment court.

“Armida helps maintain courtroom composure,” Mosley said. “She’s very grandmotherly to defendants, taking time to comfort people who may be a little mystified by the process.”

Bay also helps soothe families when defendants are taken into custody in courtroom. “That’s a big help to me,” Mosley said. “She’s extraordinary.”

In Traffic Court, Bay said she has “heard every excuse in the book” and repeated every one, word for word, to the judge.

She said she never takes cases she works on personally--although she acknowledged that “my happiest moment is when I win a case.”

Some verdicts have amazed her, however.

One is the first Superior Court case she worked on--a 1947 criminal case involving a man accused of lewd conduct with a goat. His attorney got the defendant off by persuading the jury that the man was too poor to have been wearing the expensive clothing authorities found goat hair on.

“Sometimes you ask yourself how the jury could possibly decide the way they do,” Bay said. “There are some very good lawyers out there.”

Bay said she has modeled her retirement plans after those of famed Los Angeles criminal lawyer Gladys Towles Root, who went to law school with Sylvan Bay.

“She always said, ‘I’m going to die in the courthouse’ and she did too. She was in a Pomona courtroom defending two brothers accused in a rape case when she died of a heart attack.” And Root was a mere youngster--only 77.