ROOM SERVICE
Los Angeles, your room is ready.
Big enough to embrace the fears of a dying child. Cozy enough so there’s just no room.
Hardwood floors, sink-into-a-dream couches, and pillows that feel like teddy bears.
Vaulted ceilings and stone fireplace and a tongue-dropping view, across two mountain peaks to a postcard they don’t sell in hospitals.
Your room, Los Angeles, all 1,250 square feet of it, is the combination family room and den of Andrea Jaeger’s newly opened Silver Lining Ranch for children battling terminal illnesses.
Its doors swung wide last week, and soon your vision was filled with the clomping of feet that were young again, and shrieks of those who had forgotten how to laugh.
It’s the centerpiece of the house, and you paid for it, with coins and dollars and endowments dropped on Jaeger’s doorstep since we first reported this story three summers ago.
Remember? Jaeger does.
“City of Angels Gathering Room sponsored by the people of Los Angeles,” reads the sign outside the door.
There are 20 rooms in the ranch, and none other is sponsored by a city, because no city has been so generous.
Your room. Our room.
“The kids’ room,” said Jaeger, the former teen tennis star who has spent 10 years and her life savings making this happen. “The City of Angels room is where they bond. This is where they feel at home.”
Wish you could have been here last weekend for the grand opening, Los Angeles.
There were no ribbons cut or speeches made. That is adult stuff. These kids’ lives are constantly pumped full of adult stuff.
The 18,000-square-foot ranch house made its dramatically simple debut when 20 children from around the country--among them five from Los Angeles, along with a nurse--walked through the door and were hugged.
Your room was christened a couple of days later, after most of the children had fallen asleep in their upstairs rooms with dragons and planets on the walls.
One of them sneaked downstairs. It was Melinda Carlson of Denver, a veteran of several previous four- and five-day sessions.
During one other visit, Carlson was so ravaged by Hodgkin’s disease, her skin was the approximate color of broccoli. Then she beat the illness, relapsed, beat it again, then . . . At 19 and on the verge of a drama career, she had relapsed again. She had returned to the camp. It was fun, but suddenly it was also very scary.
Carlson found Jaeger sitting in the City of Angels room.
“Can I talk?” she said.
Jaeger, who virtually never sleeps during the sessions, offered her one of the huge easy chairs that intentionally seats three.
Together, they talked, and cried, and talked, about loss and love and how could a kid with cancer ever grow up?
“Here, it all comes down,” said Carlson later. “Here, we all know what it is like to face death.”
And to understand that in the reflection, they remain themselves.
Two days after her talk with Jaeger, Carlson wowed the camp by performing a one-woman act from the musical “Rent” during a hilariously amateur talent night.
Carlson looked around the City of Angels room later that night as it overflowed with the laughter of board games and squeal of hugs, and sighed.
“This is the ultimate home,” Carlson said.
Wish you were here, Los Angeles, because many of you were here in spirit three years ago when news of Jaeger’s mission first broke.
Remember? Jaeger was living in the basement of a ramshackle chalet, trying to recapture her lost childhood while giving others a childhood that illness was trying to steal. She and some old tennis buddies were running the camps out of an aging hotel, playing basketball in the pool, eating pizza in the hallways, decorating pottery in a windowless meeting room.
“Guardian Angel,” read the headline of The Times story on Aug. 18, 1996.
It detailed Jaeger’s outlandish goal of building a permanent home for sick children, even though she and partner Heidi Bookout were so poor at the time, they couldn’t even get an American Express card.
There were seemingly other places like this, but Jaeger promised that hers would be different.
The numbers would always be small--15 to 20 kids--and the counselors would always be a small group of close friends who would give the kids their home phone numbers and encourage them to stay in touch.
It wasn’t about an escape, it was about an entry, into a family, of children just like them, through long days of rafting and horseback riding and just being kids.
“I was different all my life, I know what it’s like,” Jaeger said at the time. “I never had a peer group. Neither do these kids. Until they get here.”
A wealthy Aspen woman donated the land before her death, giving Jaeger a physical foundation.
When the Los Angeles response to the “Guardian Angel” story reached several hundred thousand dollars, Jaeger had another inspirational foundation.
Three years and hundreds of fund-raising trips later, it has become a $6-million facility that includes everything from game rooms to a meditation room to a full kitchen filled with Tweety Bird glasses and a giant cartoon-covered cookie jar the kids are encouraged to raid.
The address, because you always ask, is 1490 Ute Ave., Aspen, Colo. 81611.
The annual operating budget, in case you were wondering, is $2.2 million.
Jaeger is still trying to raise enough just to cover the rest of this year, but she’s not looking for another Los Angeles handout.
Instead, she wants Los Angeles to look over here, at its room, and enjoy.
The pension check sent by the woman from West Covina? That can be found in that leather couch on which Amber Boydte, 16, is reclining, wearing her dolphin necklace.
When she was given two weeks to live because of a rare cancer that attacks all parts of the body, she told her mother to cremate her and spread her ashes over the ocean, so she could be protected by the dolphins.
That was a year ago. During the fireworks Sunday, she cried at the memory, and was stunned to find others hugging her and crying with her. She fingers the necklace and smiles and looks out at the mountains.
“Other people, when they find out you have cancer, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t touch you!’ ” she says. “Here, they touch you.”
The piggy-bank savings from that grade schooler in Long Beach? That money can be found in the denim easy chair on which Emily Scherwitz sits, aching from the effects of ovarian cancer, yet smiling because here she is not sick, she is 16.
“Here, they treat you like a human being, not like a cancer kid with no hair,” she says, looking up at the steel wildlife sculpture winding around the giant wall, raising her arms to the endless sky, laughing. “This is the best place on Earth.”
And those quarters taped together by the elderly man from Glendale? They are in that fat ottoman being hugged by Jessica Villalpando, a wide-eyed 10-year-old from Baldwin Park suffering from leukemia.
She steps behind the microphone at the talent show with a message.
“There are different kinds of cancer, and lots of people get scared,” she says. “Some people die from it . . . “
She begins weeping, huge tears that stain her gray T-shirt. Jaeger steps up, wraps an arm around her, whispers to her, and Jessica continues.
” . . . but I’m glad I lived through it.”
Later that night Jessica dances into the City of Angels room, her shaggy-haired shadow bouncing off the wall, light and shapeless and forever.
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Dinner Benefit on Aug. 11
A dinner benefiting the Silver Lining Ranch will be held, for the third consecutive year, in conjunction with the Acura Tennis Classic women’s event at the Manhattan Tennis Club in Manhattan Beach. The dinner, sponsored by Acura, IMG and The Times, is set for Wednesday, Aug. 11, starting at 5 p.m. Celebrity guests and top female players will attend, and there will be silent and live auctions. A dinner ticket will include admission to that evening’s play as well. Details: (310) 545-3200.
Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.
