In Day of Caring, Many Help Spruce Up County

They arrived in this Watts neighborhood, grown-up knees crammed into the vinyl seats of two Bluebird school buses.

They grabbed some coffee, and with garden shears and paint rollers, set to fixing the ailing Watts/Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club on East 120th Street.

Some came from Brentwood, others from Sherman Oaks. Miguel Michel, 31, didn’t have as far to travel--he brought his family from Florence and Vermont avenues. He spends the week packing fish at Smoke and Fish Co. in Inglewood and normally wouldn’t choose to spend a Saturday doing manual labor.

But Michel decided to volunteer for United Way’s Day of Caring because he knows the sense of neglect, the anger and defeat that runs through the veins of South-Central. “People have lived here for so many years and gone through so many things, “ said Michel. “This makes the community know others care for them.”

It wasn’t much, but it was something, he said--a sentiment echoed by many, as volunteers fanned out across the county in two major campaigns to improve the Southland. An estimated 2,000 volunteers joined the United Way effort to paint, prune, rake and repair buildings across Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, in a statewide effort to clean up the coast, thousands of Angelenos trudged through the sand, picking up cigarette butts and Pepsi tabs, beach chairs and lobster traps. Under the crumbling headlands of San Pedro, several hundred trekked across Cabrillo Beach with trash bags and surgical gloves. By 1 p.m., save for seaweed and a random butt, the sand was clean.

Karen Mendoza, 14, came from East Los Angeles to meet her schoolmates for the beach cleanup. A freshman at an L.A. Unified magnet school in San Pedro, Mendoza is learning to surf. She says she’s sick of paddling her board into plastic bags.

“I’m in love with the beach and I want to see it clean,” she said.

As tankers headed into the shadow of Catalina and bodyboarding kids laughed in the shore break, the volunteers bagged 1,488 pounds of trash.

They weren’t able to haul out the rusted car engine wedged in the tidal rocks and they didn’t want to touch the industrial gas cylinder they found nearby, but the results were clear.

Back at the Boys and Girls Club in Watts, Martha Henderson of Sherman Oaks dug her hands into a bag of mulch and potted flowers with her trowel. Volunteers from United Way and the surrounding neighborhood also painted the building and a chain-link fence. They trimmed a jacaranda tree and replaced broken windows.

It might have been a fleeting gesture to the community, but it was needed repair for the club.

Roy Roberts, the director of the club, likened the effort to the recent renovation of his gymnasium.

“Just that little paint, that little work--the pride it generated for the young people, you can’t imagine,” said Roberts. “They called it the new gym. And we had a contest to see who got to use it first.”

Earlier in the morning, the United Way volunteers gathered for their assignments at Wilson High School in El Sereno. Darlena Price of North Hollywood came with her two nephews to paint bleachers at the school.

“It’s important that they do volunteer work for their college applications,” Price said.

In Van Nuys, 155 of these volunteers joined staff and students at Anatola Avenue Elementary School to paint classroom buildings and playgrounds, plant trees and groom gardens.

“Back in the old days they used to have barn-raisings and house-raisings,” said Principal Kiyo Fukumoto, as he stuffed trash into a plastic bag. “This is a school-raising. People from different parts of the community have come together to show their commitment to this school.”

Correspondent Karima A. Haynes contributed to this story.