Grand Parents

In the midafternoon, the Chinatown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library is not a quiet place. Newspapers rustle, Chinese newspapers, thumbed by old men who do not look up as schoolkids rush by, some shoving for a place by the computers where the urgent Morse of a video game is being tapped out.

Backpacks brush against chairs as others keep moving, past the old men, past the preteen girls sauntering in secretively smiling trios, through the crosscurrent of two languages that murmurs and swells to high-pitched singsong splashings in the back of the library. In the children’s room.

There, at a low, round table, Jeanette Young is reading. Surrounded by shining dark heads bent over sheets of pink paper that busy hands are turning into little baskets.

“What is soft?” she reads.

“Pillows,” comes the answer.

“Pillows are soft,” says a grown-up voice and six little voices, and Young turns the page.

Soon there is another book, with many pretty animals, and the children find their way around “walrus,” and “peacock,” stumble briefly over “baffle” but quickly recover. The three boys in the group weary of the baskets and construct paper airplanes. The next book is the numerical tale of an old man, with his odd habit knickknacking, and everyone reads along.

The boys wander away, and Young reads a story about a blind man. Soon the girls are engaged in a conversation with Young about guide dogs and what it would be like to be blind. Mothers hover in the background but do not disturb. Young, with her dangly earrings and short hair angled against the warm friendliness of her face, looks like the coolest grandma a kid could ever have. And this is her time.

Program Has Bloomed Over 10-Year Period

Across the city, in the still sunlit after-school hours, children swarm around people like Young, volunteers in the Grandparents and Books program. The program is 10 years old. Its family tree began with three branches and 46 volunteers and has bloomed to 67 branches and hundreds of volunteers. Funded primarily by grants and gifts, it has spawned look-alike programs around the country as well as its own local offshoot, the Read to Me Program, which began aiding parents of preschoolers in libraries across the county late last year.

If the numbers are impressive, the individuals are more so. The requisite commitment is not for the philanthropically dilettante. Grandparents must attend three three-hour training sessions conducted by the L.A. Public Library’s Children Services staff, through which they learn how to read aloud effectively and use multimedia--puppets, flannel boards, storytelling--to hook their audience. Most recruits commit to a two-hour session each week.

And then, of course, they have to face the children. The toughest, least predictable, most critical audience there is. Children don’t sugarcoat it. Children don’t have time for schmoozing or air kissing or optimistic word of mouth. Children want quality, they want quantity, and they want it now.

And the grandparents deliver. Reading is only part of the job description. Many of the children are filling the time between the end of school and the end of their parents’ workdays, and so attention must be paid. Grandma or Grandpa must hear about the school day, about who said what and pushed whom, about what was made or lost or seen. Grandma or Grandpa must dole out stories and gentle discipline and answers to the non sequitur interrogations of the elementary school set. They must find the tales that will please the age ranges, they must encourage the struggling older readers to practice on the babies, they must notice when the job is well done.

Not an inconsiderable task. But then the benefits are good, doled out generously in the only universal currency--the smiles and thank-yous of children.

Back With Kids After Long Teaching Career

Having taught first grade for 32 years, working with children was actually not high on Young’s retirement wish list--she’d paid her dues.

“I wanted to be a docent in one of the state parks,” she says, laughing. “Because I love hiking. But I wrote them and never heard back.”

Instead, she began working with the English conversation group at the Chinatown library and was soon asked whether she would be interested in working with the kids. That was nine years ago; she’s been showing up once a week ever since, reading to children, predominantly Asian, many of whose parents speak little or no English.

“We have everything--Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese,” says Young, 68. “A good portion are immigrants, so they’re just learning English.”

“It’s a bit strange, how it happened,” she says. “I don’t speak Chinese, I didn’t grow up in Chinatown, and although my parents were active in the Chinese community, I never was. I grew up in Koreatown, I taught mostly in Venice. And I’m not a grandma. I don’t have any children.”

“But here I am,” she says. “Grandma Jeanette.”

A Brain Tumor Changed His Approach to Life

Helping children was not a retirement goal of Bob Boluc’s either; in fact, retirement was not a goal. But in 1989, upon returning from a business trip, Boluc, then 51, had a grand mal seizure, and tests revealed a tumor lurking in his brain.

As he recuperated from the many subsequent surgical and radiological treatments, Boluc experienced what he calls a “paradigm shift.” Having relinquished his corporate sales training business, Boluc was in search of something to do, something life-affirming.

“I had become enamored of success,” he says, “and that came crashing down. One of my doctors told me I had only four months to live. I had to make some decisions. And I have a lovely wife who suggested I get out of the house.”

Boluc saw an advertisement for Grandparents and Books in the paper, attended a training session and “fell in love.”

“I viewed the program at first with trepidation,” he says. “The [Pacific Palisades branch of the] library is near a school, and the onslaught of kids at 2:30 was a bit of a shock.”

Especially for a person with partial eyesight; surgery had destroyed about one-quarter of his left peripheral vision. But Boluc had always loved to read, especially to his own children, now fully grown, so he compensated.

“By tilting my head properly, I can still read quite well,” he says. “And no one notices.”

His work in sales training gave him a bit of an edge, at least in the creative area.

“I want to attract the kids, rather than dictate to them,” he says, “so at first I would sit with a stuffed animal on my lap reading to it, until the kids came over to see what was going on.”

After seven years, he will name no preferred tales, finding it more effective to let the children choose what they want to hear.

“Often, the little ones will come right over, and I’ll start to read to them, and then the older brother or sister, who hadn’t been interested, will stroll over, and next thing I know they’re reading over my shoulder.”

The obvious benefit is his relationship with the children, who call him Grandpa Bob. He speaks of them a bit wistfully--he and his wife moved recently to Venice, and the pressures of relocation and a few medical setbacks have kept him from finding a nearby library that has the Grandparents and Books program.

Meanwhile, he has found that service tends to beget service. While attending a course for brain trauma patients, Boluc was asked whether he would be willing to help another student, a younger man who was functionally illiterate.

“It’s ironic,” Boluc says. “When I started reading to the children, I thought that was going to be the extent of my reading life. Now here I am teaching someone how to read.”

An Avid Reader Finds Her Own Way to Share

June Brandon, 65, uses her Grandparents and Books skills as a storyteller at the new Getty Museum, where she brings such formidable personalities as Hercules and Louis XIV down to a kid’s eye view, through tales and theatrics. She arrived at that particular wind-swept Westside hilltop by way of Crenshaw High School, where she taught physical education for 30 years. An avid reader, she had spent a lot of time at the Angeles Mesa branch library, and after she retired, she asked the librarian whether there was anything she could do.

Six years later, she’s still reading every Monday afternoon.

“The library is just across the street from the elementary school, which has no library, so we do voluminous business,” Brandon says. “The kids just love the books.”

And Brandon just loves the kids, many of whom she has watched grow from lisping preschoolers to bouncy, bright third- and fourth-graders, their self-confidence due, in some part, to her attentions.

One child in particular personifies the benefits of the program. A tall child, of whom adults had had unrealistic expectations.

“I was amazed when I was told the child’s age,” Brandon says, careful not to divulge any identity. “People just expected this child to read like an eighth-grader, rather than a fourth-grader, which this child was. So we went easier and went over some phonics, and soon this child was checking out books and making great strides.”

These children, many of whom are lost in overcrowded classrooms, soak up individual attention like so many dry sponges.

“We are so quick to classify people,” Brandon says, “to put them in a particular bag instead of giving them the status they deserve.”

But she can offer something.

“I can give them a little time,” she says, “one on one.”