Tested, Again

It has been three years since gunfire routinely tore through Dorothy Rush’s home, and many more years since the poverty and illness of her childhood.

The 63-year-old mayor has, by any measure, walked a difficult road. Known for her fight against gang violence, she has been targeted by neighborhood criminals. She has survived floods and tuberculosis. Now she faces a particularly rough spot: debilitating illness and bankruptcy.

Rush and her husband, Larry, 65, recently filed for Chapter 7 protection because of physical disabilities.

She suffers from a painful muscle condition that often causes her to walk with a cane. He is recovering from a complicated triple-bypass heart surgery and an arm surgery that has left him unemployed and unable to work.

“This is just one of life’s temporary setbacks,” Rush said. “It’s rough right now, but it’s not going to last. We’ve lived through worse.”

Rush’s hardships began in Springfield, Mass., where she was the fifth of six children in an indigent family.

Her father, who suffered from spinal tuberculosis, spent much of his life in hospitals, she said.

She was 4 when the Springfield River overflowed and her family’s second-story apartment flooded, leaving them homeless for the first time. A year later, the scene repeated itself and they were homeless once more.

“I remember that one in 1939,” Rush said. “These big gas drums, the kind that you used to heat stoves in those days, were floating in the living room.”

When the family moved, she said, “It was easy . . . since we had nothing, absolutely nothing. Everything floated away, including the refrigerator.”

Her family settled in Manhattan, N.Y., and qualified for welfare benefits. Between hospital stays, her father worked as an elevator operator and doorman at the El Dorado Towers hotel near Central Park.

Then, in 1945, an 11-year-old Rush, then Dorothy Pierce, was struck with tuberculosis.

“If you got tuberculosis in those days, you were sent away to a sanitarium,” said Rush, who went to a hospital in Farmingdale, N.J.

“I hated it,” she said. “I thought my family sent me there because they hated me. I thought they gave me away and I’d never come home.” Her parents never visited, she said, because they couldn’t afford the trip. After a year and a half, she was cured and returned home.

As a teenager, Rush baby-sat to earn money for the family. Rush’s mother made everyone’s clothes from old pillowcases, curtains and scraps of material and became a creative cook of meatless meals.

Rush said she dropped out of high school after the 10th grade because of poor health. “I was just always tired and feeling sick,” she said.

On Christmas Day 1956, Rush wed. Seven years later, the couple moved to La Habra where Rush, who worked as a teacher’s aide and dressmaker, and her husband, an exterminator, raised four daughters.

They were content, she said, until March 1992, when Rush organized a Neighborhood Watch program, the first of three community groups she started in an attempt to clean up her Grace-Pacific neighborhood. Almost immediately, her home was shot at several times and vandalized with graffiti.

Over the next three years, Rush became increasingly active in the campaign, and her home continued to be the target of gunfire. Bullets pierced the walls and windows. In 1994, cinder blocks crashed through the bedroom window, bruising Rush’s back and grazing her cat.

Later, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through another window, and gunfire sprayed the front of the house. Though she feared for her life, she held her ground, a move that propelled her to a seat on the City Council.

“I was not elected to sit back in fear but to stand up for what I believe in,” Rush said at an April 1995 council meeting after her home was shot at for the ninth time.

Today, her neighborhood is quiet. Children play outside, and duck-and-cover drills no longer are practiced at her house.

“We didn’t get up and run, and we’ve gotten a lot of respect simply because we didn’t turn tail,” Larry Rush said. “If you stand up for what you believe in, pretty soon, your neighbors stand up and you can make a difference. Dorothy is making a difference.”

Martha Padilla, a longtime resident, said many in the city identify with Rush because of her struggles.

“She is a great person with a lot of guts and determination,” Padilla said. “She’s just one of us.”