They Keep on Truckin’ for a Worthy Cause

Richard Browder guides the big white truck with the familiar red shield of the Salvation Army through a Santa Monica alley, headed for Pacific Palisades and the afternoon’s first pickup. This time of year--when generosity gets a nudge from the prospect of an income tax deduction--is prime time for the group’s donation centers.

“We are handling 6,000 to 7,000 calls a day,” said Ed Abrams, director of the Salvation Army’s call center in Torrance, where seven days a week operators at banks of computers field calls.

Those calls yield 4,000 to 5,000 daily pickups by a fleet of several hundred trucks covering California, the Western territory and Honolulu. Donors offer barbecues and bookcases, wedding gowns and washing machines.

“This is Operator 41,” says Natalie Alcaraz. “Would you like to schedule a pickup?” Ruth in Long Beach wants to donate an electric mower, clothing and roll-down blinds. Alcaraz’s computer flashes the date of the next pickup in Ruth’s area.

A caller from Santa Monica has a TV. From Phoenix comes a call from a woman donating a cabinet sewing machine and a window air conditioner. A Los Angeles man has three davenports and a queen-size mattress and box spring. Thelma in Denver wants to donate clothing and Christmas decorations.

The popular image of the Salvation Army may be of bell ringers in bonnets, but this is strictly a high-tech operation. At the call center, computers feed into a master computer that sorts data by center and organizes truck routes. Computer screens in the pickup trucks give drivers information on each day’s route. Paper tickets with identical data are printed out at each center for drivers to give as receipts.

When Browder sets out from Santa Monica in his truck, he has names, addresses and telephone numbers--and what he can expect to pick up at each stop.

“The hardest thing we have to deal with is old, worn-out sofas,” he says, as we roll along Pacific Coast Highway. “People get angry with us--’What do you mean, the Salvation Army won’t take this?’ They’ll try to bribe me--’Just take it and get rid of it.’ ”

But the policy of the 31 thrift stores in greater Los Angeles is to move goods in and out of their stores quickly, and there’s no market for old sofas on which the family cat has been urinating, or for discarded toilets, Sheetrock, doors, or other flotsam and jetsam of home remodeling.

The bounty brought in at day’s end on Browder’s truck will be on the floor of the Santa Monica thrift store--or sent to the shops in Redondo Beach, Lawndale and Culver City--within two to three days. The Santa Monica store each year raises $3 million through sale of donations. In total, about $16.2 million is raised annually through sales and auctions at area thrift shops, together with recycling profits and vehicle donations, to totally support five Adult Rehabilitation Centers in L.A. County.

Browder has more than a passing interest in the six-month rehab program. Like a number of center personnel, he is a graduate, having found his way there in 1995 after “drinking a lot of good stuff away.”

As Browder maneuvers his truck onto a pleasant street in the Palisades, Sharon Pregerson is at her door. She shows Browder and helper Nathan Vandewetering in; a handsome desk is ready for pickup. Anything else? they ask. Well, Pregerson says, “I’m embarrassed for you to see my garage” but . . .

The garage yields a gas barbecue and a computer desk. Pregerson is happy to support the Salvation Army, mentioning that when her husband, federal Judge Dean Pregerson, headed the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission, the Salvation Army came through big for those left homeless by the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Browder thanks her, hands her a receipt--”for your taxes”--and we’re off. “Real good stuff,” he says, as we pull away. That desk will go into the Santa Monica store’s boutique, which sells higher-end items.

Our second stop, an apartment on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, is, in Salvation Army parlance, a “66.” Pickup aborted. The donor has left a note with instructions to buzz the building manager, but the manager claims no knowledge of the arrangement. Browder leaves a notice. Typically, one in five calls is a bust.

At our third stop, a nearby condo, a large brown dog charges to the door as Browder rings the bell. “Take the dog!” says a young man answering the door. The pickup slip lists only a refrigerator, but Ryan McMillen adds a lamp and three bags of clothing.

An actor, he explains that he has just relocated from West Hollywood and “you discover all these things you didn’t know you had. You could have a garage sale, but you don’t want to have a lot of strangers in your house.” Besides, “this way it will go to someone who needs it, and it’s going to be affordable to them.”

Back in the truck, Browder observes, “That was a good one.”

The stop at O My Sole’, a shoe store at Third Street Promenade, is somewhat disappointing--one carton of used shoes. But the store is a regular donor--and every little bit helps. “We’ll sell those shoes at auction,” he says, by the carton.

A stop at Collis Associates in a Santa Monica Boulevard high-rise yields a wood file cabinet and some framed Ansel Adams posters, which will sell quickly. Mary Ann Link, whose day job is as executive assistant at Collis, has a soft spot for the Salvation Army. She’s an actor and haunts the thrift shop for costumes.

Jockeying with a UPS truck for a parking spot in the alley, Browder pulls up to another office building. His computer printout tells him to go to the office of the manager, who will take him to a recently vacated suite to pick up a refrigerator.

The suite, once occupied by entertainment lawyers, looks like a fraternity house the morning after--empty pizza boxes, a half-full bottle of wine. Browder and Vandewetering empty the refrigerator of its contents (mostly condiments) and nudge it away from the wall. Trouble. The water supply to the ice maker must be shut off, and the building’s maintenance man can’t figure it out. Another “66.” The truck will return another day.

The final stop is the Santa Monica Police Department, where Browder collects about 10 bagfuls, some of it items once collected as evidence, most of it clothing left by prisoners.

This day, there have been no “yoo-hoo tickets,” or unscheduled pickups. “Lots of times,” Browder says, “people see this truck and say, ‘Yoo-hoo! Can you take this?’ ”

Browder’s day is done at about 4:30. Back at the dock, behind the Santa Monica thrift store at 10th Street and Olympic Boulevard, a late shift will unload and sort until 8 p.m.

Tomorrow, he’ll be on the road again. This time of year, he says, “they call me ‘Two-Truck Richard.’ ” It’s not unusual for him to make 28 stops, filling his truck and calling for an empty one to rendezvous with him.

This operation is “kind of like a bumblebee,” observes Capt. Art Storey, administrator of the Adult Rehabilitation Center in Santa Monica. The residential facility is part of a crowded maze that includes the thrift store and boutique, loading dock and sorting cages. “Aerodynamically, the bumblebee can’t fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know it.”

Likewise, the Santa Monica center, its 81 employees and the 50 men in the residential rehab program--who have work therapy assignments that include sorting clothing and unloading trucks--don’t know that you’re not supposed to raise $3 million a year from people’s castoffs.

Most of the men in adult rehab (this center has no women residents) are in their early 30s and battling alcohol or drug abuse. Work therapy is an important facet of the program. “It would be cheaper to hire people to fill these jobs,” Storey said, “but that’s not what this is all about.”

Nothing salvageable is wasted. Clothes that don’t sell in the store are baled and sold to a rag dealer. Broken jewelry is sold for scrap metal. Nothing is dumped, says Storey, “until we’ve tried everything we can think of.” Still, the center has a hauling bill of $100,000 a year for the unsellable items. Some people think the Salvation Army exists to clean out their garages.

Because its pickup area includes such affluent areas as Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Malibu, the Santa Monica center gets such big-ticket items as cars and mobile homes. A-list film stars and athletes are among the donors.

It’s the job of Tom Finn, another program graduate, to keep the sorters sorting (they hang 1,000 garments a day), oversee the daily auction of items at the center that didn’t sell in the store, and placate donors left in the cold due to a glitch such as a truck breakdown.

“You never know what’s going to come in on those trucks,” Finn says. It could be a $10,000 crystal chandelier, some framed JFK doodlings, an Armani suit with the original tag in place. Once, a live possum jumped out of a bag. A loaded gun was in another load.

The center fields hysterical calls from people who have left garage door openers, pagers and car keys in pockets of clothing. One good Samaritan found $300 in a shirt she’d bought, kept the shirt and returned the money, which went to a Salvation Army program.

Today, underpriced treasures are rare. On the center’s staff are evaluators armed with books on antiques, jewelry and collectibles to price boutique items. Anna Jiminez, 11 years on the staff, knows “anything ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘20s--that’s really popular. Costume jewelry from the ‘30s goes really, really fast. Carpets sell really good, especially Oriental and Pakistani.”

Among the items the Salvation Army doesn’t take: magazines, metal office desks, medical supplies and metal coat hangers.

Some items fall into a gray area, accepted or rejected at the driver’s discretion. Noting the $45 price tag on an almost new stair climber at the thrift shop, a Salvation Army officer observed, “Somebody bought this and didn’t use it. People are going to wonder, ‘Should we buy it and not use it?’ ”

The effect of the economy on thrift-shop donations and sales isn’t entirely predictable. “[Shops in] affluent areas often do better in poor economic times,” said Salvation Army Lt. Howard Bennett. “In a poor area, if people can’t afford to replace it, they aren’t going to give it away.”

Prices are adjusted to reflect economic times. And the Salvation Army keeps an eye on discount stores such as Target and Ross Dress for Less, so as to undersell them.

Thrift-store buying is cyclical, Bennett observed. “Right now, it’s chic to be cheap.”

Beverly Beyette can be reached by e-mail at beverly.beyette@latimes.com.

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Have a Donation? You Can Call These Groups

Charitable organizations that will pick up donations in the Los Angeles area include:

* Salvation Army, (800) 95-TRUCK.

* Goodwill Industries, (323) 223-1211, Ext. 302. For donation of a large number of computers only, (323) 223-1211, Ext. 294

* United Cancer Research Society, (800) 443-4224.

* Vietnam Veterans of America, (800) 775-VETS.

* American Veterans, (800) 795-8387.

* Disabled American Veterans, (800) 435-7328.

* Clare Foundation, (310) 314-6237.

* Boys & Girls Club of Venice, (310) 391-6301.

Each organization places some restrictions on what it will pick up. For example, some are not equipped to take large household items and appliances. Some do not accept items in need of repair or reupholstering, or items such as mattresses or magazines. Donors may obtain this information by calling the above numbers.