When Many Hands Make Right Work

When Max Amaro, a 53-year-old single father of two, bought his house on a dirt road in El Modena a year ago, he knew it was a work in progress.

The roof leaked, the paint was peeling, and the fence was crumbling. He managed some projects by himself, which made him realize how difficult the rest would be.

But it was only a few hours’ work for the 200 volunteers who, divided into 21 teams, descended on Amaro’s neighborhood Saturday to help renovate three houses. The volunteers were part of an army of 18,400 people who donated an estimated $1.072 million in labor during the sixth annual Volunteer Connection Day, organized by the Volunteer Center of Greater Orange County.

“I had so much work to do, I didn’t even realize it,” Amaro said, taking a break from helping one crew remove a 30-inch-wide stump from the frontyard. “It’s great for me. I’m so happy about it. I didn’t realize how much help I needed. I don’t know how you can thank all these people.”

More than 90 projects were tackled in 23 cities, organizers said. The turnout dwarfed last year’s effort, which attracted about 12,000 volunteers.

In some places, the help came in a flood. About 200 volunteers had signed up to meet at the Yorba Linda community center to be deployed to a variety of sites for projects. More than 300 people showed up.

It was hard to tell who was happier--the organizers, people like Amaro or the volunteers themselves.

In Santa Ana, members of the Santiago Park Neighborhood Assn. used the day to work on a project to revive the city-owned Santiago Park, including installing a sprinkler system for a planned garden of indigenous California plants and converting a disintegrating parking lot into a playground.

“It’s a real community effort,” said Gerald Tiritilli, co-chair of the association’s park committee. Only the irrigation system was expected to be finished Saturday.

“We’d better,’ he said. “We don’t want to leave any empty trenches.”

Tiritilli described the park, with its one small baseball diamond and forest of trees and parrots, as an oasis in an area where the low moan from freeways is constant.

“It’s an old park, and you’ve got all these mature trees,” he said, adding that the design and the initial plantings were a project of the Depression-era Work Progress Administration. “It’s not a real high-use park. It’s a very passive kind of park. It’s the kind of park where you can just hang out.”

Back in El Modena, other volunteers were making a different kind of oasis: cleaning and grooming a yard on East Spring Street that was choked with weeds and debris.

“This is great,” said Fionna Brennan, one of about 30 volunteers from the Loyola Marymount Alumni Assn.

Brennan spent the morning cleaning the backyard of a family she never met. It was a mess when they began, shortly after 8 a.m., she said. An old shower unit and a freezer were stacked against a wooden fence, near a car axle buried under 3-foot chunks of cut-up tree trunk. But it took the volunteers only a few hours to move the debris to three trash containers parked in the street, and then trim the lawn and greenery back to more accepted suburban dimensions.

Brennan said she has volunteered before for projects such as Habitat for Humanity, in which volunteers work for weeks building or renovating homes for needy families. That carries its own rewards, she said, but they are delayed. On Saturday, the payoff was more immediate.

“It’s a one-day event--that’s the rewarding thing,” said Brennan, 29, of Costa Mesa, adding that she plans to sign up again next year. “Everybody should be out here. I think it’s better for our community.”

Inside, her crew leader, Tom Isenhour, 49, of Tustin, helped stir a cement compound that another volunteer spread over cracked kitchen tiles as a foundation for a fresh layer. Isenhour at first joked that he was there only because, as president of the Alumni Assn., he had to lead by example.

The small house and makeshift apartment behind the garage, he said, was home to as many as 15 people.

“You really forget at times how lucky you are until you’re face to face with this,” he said.”

Among the volunteers were about 65 members of the Laguna Beach chapter of the National Charity League. League mothers and daughters pitch in year-round to help with everything from neighborhood cleanups to ushering at charity events.

One of their projects Saturday was scraping paint from Amaro’s mailbox and painting it with flowers.

“They wouldn’t let us paint the Porta Potti,” said Rachael Linnemann, 14, of Laguna Beach, who was working with her friend Shannon Patton, 13.

“We wanted to help out some people, and we like painting,” Shannon said. “It’s good to go help people who are less fortunate.”

John Straub has made helping a large part of his life. A Naval hospital corpsman assigned to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, Straub spends nearly every weekend volunteering for one job or another, often for people who call him up simply because he earlier helped someone they know.

“I love to do it,” Straub said as he directed volunteers painting the slatted patio roof. And people like his help. “They find me. They call me. My name gets passed around. I help people save some money.”