A Love Story Enriched by Disasters

For Jean and Al Reynolds of Cowan Heights, it wasn’t the Christmas week they had expected. Arrival on the island of Guam at 3 a.m., after 27 hours without a bed. Up at 7:30 a.m., to begin the task of sorting through the damage of Guam’s typhoon.

Christmas itself was another 12-hour day as unpaid volunteers for the American Red Cross. They were staring at the same ordeal for their Jan. 2 wedding anniversary too--their 47th.

The Reynoldses wouldn’t have had it any other way. They were together.

“That’s the deal we have with the Red Cross,” Jean Reynolds said. “We don’t go unless it’s together.”

Valentine’s Day is a time for love stories. The Reynoldses’ romance began in California’s dust bowl days. It gains strength with every natural disaster they face. A hurricane in St. Croix. Floods in Texas or Georgia. The Northridge earthquake.

Here’s how their volunteer work began:

Six years ago, Al Reynolds, recently retired as a lumber company manager, was watching the Los Angeles riots on TV.

“I was familiar with many of the neighborhoods where everything was taking place,” he said. “I just thought maybe I could help.”

So he called the Orange County chapter of the American Red Cross. He was told thanks, but no thanks. A Red Cross official explained that it didn’t send people into the field without training.

So Al Reynolds signed up for training. He became a specialist in damage assessment and family services.

Jean Reynolds was still working as an administrator in special education with the Orange Unified School District. But she got caught up in her husband’s enthusiasm over some of the disasters in which he’d been called to help, like the Laguna Beach fire.

Then came the Northridge earthquake in January 1994. Jean explained:

“Al called from Northridge and said, ‘We need all the help we can get. Could you come up?’ ”

The Northridge crisis was so severe that the Red Cross permitted raw recruits, under close supervision. Jean, retired by then, took her Red Cross training soon after.

“For us, it’s payback time,” she said. “We had careers, we had raised three children. We just never had that much time for our community. Now we do.”

There’s no pay, just expenses. And you never know when the phone will ring and immediately change your life. The Reynoldses have been to nearly a dozen states, in addition to St. Croix and Guam, in their four years.

But they say with smiles that the rewards far outweigh the burden of being volunteers.

“For me, it’s the people,” Al Reynolds said. “Those that have lost homes or suffered injury, they are just so appreciative that we are there.”

There are the friendships too. At every disaster, the Reynoldses run into the same Red Cross volunteers from all over the country. Strong bonds have developed.

There are also some nice touches along the way. During that dismal Christmas Day in Guam two months ago, for example, Navy officials from the USS Niagara Falls in a nearby harbor invited the Red Cross volunteers to come aboard for dinner after their work was done. Quite a capper for the holiday.

I asked them how they first met.

Jean Reynolds began: “I was the oldest of six children in a little town in Arkansas. We were poor. We’re talking ‘Grapes of Wrath’ here.”

Her family moved to California at the end of the 1940s to find migrant farm work near Porterville. At age 15, Jean quit school to get a job as a carhop. Young Al Reynolds was a regular customer, pulling up in his ’41 Nash.

“It was the tight slacks,” he said, chuckling. “She walked past me and I knew I had to meet her. But it took me two days to get up the nerve to ask her out.”

They had much in common. Al was the oldest of five children; both had major responsibilities to their families.

“Any money I made went straight into the family pot, every nickel,” Jean said. “Same for Al. Some people today just don’t know how poor that poor can be.”

They had three children early after their marriage in 1951. But even so, Jean managed to return to school to get her high school diploma and go on to get a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree (at what was then Chapman College in Orange) in special education.

She credits her husband’s support with helping her through such a tough schedule of being a student and mother.

And Al Reynolds’ response: “That’s because she has always supported me. That’s what a great marriage takes, supporting each other.”

They had moved to Orange County in 1967, and joke that they couldn’t afford to live where they do if they had to buy at today’s prices.

By the way, the Reynoldses did manage to make it home in time for their 47th anniversary. The experience of the previous two weeks made it even more meaningful.

“Seeing what other people have gone through in some of these places makes us appreciate even more what we have,” Al Reynolds said. “And that we have each other.”

Jean piped in: “We don’t have to spend the day as volunteers actually working together. But when the work is done, we have to sleep together. That’s our rule.”

One more bonus to all this. Jean Reynolds said: “One of our daughters called recently. She’d been talking to our other children about our Red Cross work, and said, ‘Mom, we’re so very proud of what you and Dad are doing, that you didn’t just become couch potatoes in your retirement.’ ”

That phone call was pay enough.

Wrap-Up: Working disasters is not for everybody. But if you really feel you have what it takes to put in those kinds of hours under stressful conditions, you can call Carol DeMoss, the local Red Cross volunteer coordinator, at (714) 835-5381, Ext. 420. The next orientation class for volunteers is at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Red Cross headquarters in Santa Ana.

DeMoss told me: “When we have a major disaster, we can never get enough volunteers.”