To Serve and Sacrifice

As an illegal immigrant with seven young sons, a poor command of English and a heroin addict for an estranged wife, garbage collector Jose Vargas wouldn’t have been anyone’s idea of cop material.

But through hard work and a lot of sacrifice--not least by his children, who seldom saw him--Vargas survived the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Academy, squared his citizenship status, got hired as a Stanton police officer and, in 1975, joined Santa Ana police, becoming one of the nation’s first Latino community affairs officers. In 1977, Parade magazine named him one of the country’s 10 officers of the year.

Now 63, the former Guadalajara street urchin has received more than 400 commendations during a 30-year career. Today, he is arguably the most recognizable face of law enforcement for millions of Southern California Latinos because of his frequent public service spots on Spanish-language television stations.

Vargas also can poke fun at himself.

“I don’t know of another officer who has been commended more,” he said. “I also don’t know of another officer in America who can say he served time in a federal jail.”

Yet success exacted a heavy price.

Vargas’ determination to succeed--whether as trash man, rhubarb picker or police officer--kept him from his children and broke up a few marriages. Because he worked long hours, nights and weekends, his oldest son, Joe, then 15, became a surrogate parent to the others after his mother left.

Though the boys swore they wouldn’t become like their father, today three are police officers, two are ministers, one is a factory supervisor, and the youngest finished a stint in the U.S. Army.

“Dad missed out seeing his sons grow up,” said Santa Ana police Lt. Ken Vargas, 37 and the third oldest. “ Thank God, it eventually paid off for all of us, but it came at a cost too.”

Jose Vargas even pushed a younger sister, a sheltered churchgoer working at a Christian radio station, into police work. Today, Lucy Prouse, 52, is a Riverside County sheriff’s sergeant. And Vargas--now semiretired though he often puts in 40 hours a week--is on his fourth marriage--to Leticia, a 41-year-old former lingerie model who is now a lay Methodist minister.

The tale of this Santa Ana cop is an improbable one. But Jose Vargas has never seen a mountain that could not be moved.

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Jose Vargas’ father died when he was 12, making him the man of the house as the eldest of six children. His elderly grandfather taught him a code he has lived by since: “A man’s most important obligation is to provide for his family.”

“I sold newspapers on the streets of Guadalajara, shined shoes and made rosaries. I did everything I could, legally and illegally, to make money to buy food for my mother and brothers and sisters.”

At 15, he tried to enter the United States at Tijuana. He was a scraggly Mexican kid who tried to tug at a border agent’s heart strings.

“I told him my brothers and sisters were fatherless. I asked him to let me enter the United States to work, so I could help my family,” Vargas recalled. “He grabbed my shoulders and shoved me back to Tijuana.”

Fifteen attempts, numerous arrests, jail stints and deportations later, Vargas jumped off a train near Beach Boulevard in Buena Park. The year was 1952. It was the last time he arrived as an ilegal.

“I heard a couple of women speaking Spanish nearby and asked them if they knew where I could find a job. They directed me to a farm near La Habra, where my first job was picking beets at 60 cents an hour.”

Soon, he rented a room in Buena Park. He took an immediate shine to the owner’s sister, Phyllis Maldonado. He tagged the 4-foot, 9-inch girl “Shorty.”

“I was 12 the first time I saw Jose--I was doing laundry, and he followed me to the laundry room,” recalled his former wife, now Phyllis Bouknight, who remarried 21 years ago and now counsels gang members in the central California town of Selma. “He scared me to death, but I ran away with him when I was 15.”

When they began having children, she said he “buckled down to become a real hard worker.”

Her family didn’t think much of the poor Mexican.

However, “he was an overachiever, even in the fields,” said Bouknight, now 58. “One year, he was picking peaches in Parlier. Before you knew it, he was made a foreman.”

Vargas eventually got a job driving a trash truck for an Anaheim disposal company. Operating a truck with multiple gears and levers was a heady experience for an immigrant who had done only menial labor.

“I felt like a jet pilot . . . like I had finally arrived,” he said. “But I made the same mistake that many of us make. . . . We arrive hoping for a roof over our heads and food on the table. We find both, and that’s as far as we get. We don’t strive for anything more. I had settled down to driving a trash truck for the rest of my life.”

His kids remember those days fondly.

“Dad would bring all kinds of neat stuff home from the dump,” said Joe Vargas, 42. “I had boxes full of comic books. . . . Where do you think we got most of our furniture then?”

Vargas was still in the country illegally. A sympathetic boss hired an attorney to help him legalize his status when la migra came looking for him at work. Vargas had to drive to the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana to get his green card, a relatively easy matter for the spouse of a legal U.S. resident.

“I drove my 1950 lowrider Chevy down there and got my green card. The [border] inspector looked at it and said, ‘Welcome to the U.S.’ It was the first time I had entered through the front door. I was so amazed that I drove for a while, turned around and headed back to Mexico--just so I could cross again with my new green card.”

After his fourth son was born, Vargas decided he needed a better job. He chose police work.

“I had enough contact with la migra and the police,” he said, grinning. “I knew I could do the job. I had also been ridiculed by them, so I promised myself that if I became a police officer, I would treat people with dignity and respect.”

He studied English at night and in five years earned his high school diploma, at 30. Three years later, he finished a police science course and was nearing what was then the age ceiling for new police recruits.

“It was time to do or die,” said Vargas, who carried his diploma everywhere in his lunch bucket. He saw a Stanton employee putting up a sign to recruit police officers as he drove by in his trash truck.

He parked the truck, filled out an application and a few weeks later--wearing his first tie, salvaged from the dump and dry cleaned--took a battery of tests. At the final interview with the police chief and other city officials, a panel member said, “ ‘You speak funny. How long have you been a citizen?’ ” Vargas recalled.

When he said he wasn’t, he was told to return when he became one.

“I studied for the citizenship test. Let me tell you, I knew the names of Jorge Washington’s dog and Lincoln’s mother-in-law. I knew everything about American history,” he said.

After acing the citizenship test a few months later, Vargas entered the L.A. County Sheriff’s Academy as a recruit for Stanton police.

“He’s always been a risk-taker, but I didn’t think it was possible for him to become an officer,” Prouse said of her brother. “He had seven kids. His marriage was on the rocks. . . . Considering his English skill and other things, I thought that working as a trash man was more suitable for him.”

Vargas remembers it differently.

“I was ready for the academy, but the academy wasn’t ready for me.”

Dale Buchinger, a retired Anaheim officer, still remembers going through the academy with Vargas.

“You had to work hard to understand his accent,” Buchinger said. “The first time he opened his mouth, [the instructors] swarmed all over him. ‘Who are you? Where did you come from? Who in the world hired you?’ But after three or four weeks they left him alone. Jose is a very intelligent man. He did just fine.”

Vargas chuckles when he talks about his academy days.

“Every time I made a mistake, my entire platoon had to do push-ups. They were spending more time on the ground than in the vertical position.”

Finish the academy he did, and he immediately went to work in Stanton. One problem: A beginning officer’s pay barely paid the bills. So he kept working as a trash collector on weekends and off-duty hours for two years, even recycling found goods.

Vargas insists that he never experienced overt discrimination from other officers but that there were “some who have shown me resentment.”

“I’ve always been proud of who I am, but some officers didn’t accept me, maybe because of my accent or because of my work with the community. One officer actually told me, ‘We must have scraped the bottom of the barrel when we hired you,’ ” he recalled.

“The first time I used the police radio, somebody from another department called the dispatcher on the telephone to report that a civilian with a heavy accent was using the radio in a Stanton police car,” Vargas said, laughing.

On the family front, Vargas and Bouknight say the marriage was all but over when he entered the academy. Even though she lived with him from age 15 and married him at 18, she never fell in love with Vargas.

“I had a lot of affection for him, but I never loved him. It’s just that he was so good to me and was the first person who ever showed any concern for my welfare,” she said.

His concern was prompted in part by Bouknight’s heroin addiction, which she attributed to “immaturity and the type of friends I hung around with.” Eventually, she left Vargas and the children. She said she has been off drugs for the 25 years and, with her current husband, finished raising her three youngest sons by Vargas.

Ken Vargas said his mother left when he was in the third grade. He didn’t see her again for four years.

“We didn’t have a mom, and Dad was struggling,” he said. “Truthfully, he wasn’t around much. . . . There were times when we’d only see him every two weeks or so. We’d bump into him in the hallway of our home.”

Joe Vargas remembers learning to make lasagna and accompanying his brothers to parent-teacher conferences.

“Some of my brothers are upset about the past, but we’re better persons for it,” Joe Vargas said. “We owe a lot to both my parents. As for Dad, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that man.”

Ken Vargas vowed he would never to go into law enforcement. So did Joe and brother No. 6, Phillip Vargas. Later, they began to appreciate the importance of his job.

“My father opened a lot of doors for Latino cops,” said Joe Vargas, now a sergeant and spokesman for the Anaheim police. Phillip Vargas, 29, recently became a patrol officer in Anaheim.

“I’m proud of what my dad has done, making the community a part of the city,” Ken Vargas said. “It hasn’t been easy to get Latinos, especially immigrants, to trust the police. . . . I practice my dad’s philosophy here at the [Santa Ana city] jail I run. Every prisoner here is given the dignity and respect of a human being.”

But while Ken Vargas believes even the “brief moments we had with dad were effective and lasting,” he hopes to do better by his own son and daughter.

So do his six brothers, who between them have 18 more kids.

The old man gets misty-eyed when he talks about how his children managed without him. He also brags that his grandchildren are “a cross-section of America.”

“My daughters-in-law include an American Indian, an Asian, whites and Hispanics. My grandchildren are every shade of color.

“We are an American family. The Americanos have a saying, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ And right now, all is well.”