Where Rose Blooms

The light in her rustic mountain cabin flicks on at 3:50 a.m. The campers won’t wake up for another three hours.

Rose Urbina, 76, steps out into the dark forest, as she has each summer morning for four decades.

It’s a short walk to the kitchen, one in a collection of rust-dyed buildings that resembles an old logging camp in this Sierra Nevada basin. But the walk takes her a little longer these days.

Cans are harder to open. More and more, she relies on the teenagers for help.

This woman--whose bloodline traces to the Peraltas, one of the first Mexican and Spanish families to settle Orange County in the 1700s--says she just can’t do the things she could when she started here 41 years ago.

Still, she will put in a 15-hour day today as Pyles Boys Camp’s cook. And if the petroleum industry built this camp, Urbina has added the motherly love that has filled it.

This year Pyles marks its 50th year as a refuge, providing free camping experiences to underprivileged boys from six Southern California counties. More than 22,000 have passed through here and have enjoyed “Nana’s” cooking in the lively mess hall that fills with boys’ chatter around nine tables three times a day.

Family-style meals are a cornerstone in the camp founder’s philosophy. Robert Pyles, an oil executive from Huntington Beach, knew firsthand about impoverished boyhoods, and he knew that intact families and plenty to eat are things that many poor children lack.

When Urbina was hired as a cook in 1958, she, too, found a refuge. She was a single mom from Stanton trying to raise three kids on her own. She had a job during the school year, as a cook for Anaheim’s Savanna School District, but it wasn’t enough to get her through the summer. So she had to look for another job and found this one.

When school ended, she’d head for the mountains 240 miles north of Los Angeles, riding a mule the last seven miles into the camp, which wasn’t accessible by car until the early 1970s.

She retired from the Savanna district as director of food services in 1985 after 28 years, but never stopped coming to Pyles Camp, where the sometimes lonely silence of her home in Los Alamitos is replaced by cheers of “We love you, Nana.”

Her attachment to many of the boys who have passed through the camp is evident in frames on the tabletops of her home in Los Alamitos, full of pictures sent to her by former campers, pictures of their own children.

It’s hard to say whether she conquers her campers’ hearts with chicken, baked potatoes and pumpkin bread, or with the love she dishes out at least as generously. On a recent night, a group of boys from Bakersfield had flocked to her outside her cabin.

“She has the adoration of lots of people, and that’s a pretty powerful reason for her to keep coming back,” says Paul Leitzell, the camp’s executive director, himself a camper in the 1960s. “What 76-year-old person can count hundreds of people who are her friends?”

“I don’t want to think of when I can’t come,” she says, sitting on the bed in her small cabin full of memories of campers and kitchen helpers and their teddy bears. Voices from the past seem to call from a wood-carved plaque on her wall:

“Thank you for all the years, Nana.”

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The campers arrive in mid-June, but the first to taste Nana’s cooking each year are the 50 or so volunteers who come up on the second weekend in May to repair the winter damage, fire up the generator and open up the water lines.

For decades, most of these volunteers were employees of the oil industry, reflecting the camp’s traditional funding base. Its budget once came almost exclusively from oil companies and its employees from communities from Huntington Beach to Bakersfield, where the industry’s presence was strong. The camp’s board consisted mainly of oil executives who wanted the camp to be what they called it in their in-house publications: “The Heart of the Oil Industry.”

But Leitzell says things are changing as the camp comes to the end of its first 50 years and the oil industry is not quite the behemoth it once was. Now, with its budget up to half a million dollars a year, the camp wants to supplement its traditional backing with community- and alumni-based support.

Oil company people are still involved. But for the last couple of years, many of the approximately 500 volunteers involved with the camp year-round--helping with everything from fund-raising barbecues to reunions to the opening of the camp every spring--are electricians, plumbers and other folks from communities that the camp serves.

Indeed, donations from oil companies now make up just 12% of the camp budget, and donations from individuals connected to the industry account for less than half.

In the last few years the camp has begun reaching out to foundations and small businesses.

“We want to reintroduce ourselves to the communities that we serve,” Leitzell says. “We’ve been an active player in your community. We’ve been in L.A. County for 50 years. Who knows us?”

One thing the camp will not do is request public funding, which, Leitzell says, would go against its long tradition of private charity and “local dollars for local boys.”

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Pyles Camp gives two weeks in the wilderness each year to about 500 at-risk 12- to 14-year-old boys selected by school or law enforcement officials who believe the camping experience will influence the boys in a positive way.

Camping isn’t all of it, though. A follow-up program each winter includes educational and career-oriented field trips, and a scholarship program distributes up to $40,000 annually to camp alumni.

Robert Pyles grew up poor with nine brothers and sisters, and worked his way up in the oil industry from “mop boy” in the Kern County oil fields to mid-level executive.

When he founded the camp in 1949, he was working with Southwest Exploration Co. (which eventually merged with Shell) in Huntington Beach, where Pyles Camp had its first office on Beach Boulevard.

In the early days of the camp, Pyles reached out to community leaders, including a young LAPD officer and future mayor named Tom Bradley, who selected some of the first campers from the mostly Mexican American Chavez Ravine neighborhood--later the site of Dodger Stadium.

The close-knit nature of the camp hooked Nana.

“Everyone was so nice,” she recalls. “Like people you had known for a long time.”

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Nana was born in 1923 in the Santa Ana Canyon, in what today is Anaheim but then was a place called Prado, on the outskirts of the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana.

The rancho had been granted by the Spanish king in 1810 to two soldiers: Jose Antonio Yorba and his nephew Juan Pablo Peralta, Nana’s maternal great-great-grandfather. The Peraltas and Yorbas were among the first families to explore California after the Portola and De Anza expeditions by Mexican and Spanish soldiers from Sonora, Mexico, in 1769 and 1776.

Nana learned of Pyles Camp in 1957 after she separated from her husband and was struggling to support their children--Linda, Barbara and Jimmy. She’d heard about the camp from one of Pyles’ oil workers, Eddie Calderon, who helped choose kids for the camp from one of the Savanna schools where Nana worked.

She came to the camp for the first time in 1958, leaving her daughters with their grandmother up north in Morgan Hill, where the girls worked picking strawberries and prunes to help buy their school clothes.

Nana took Jimmy with her to the camp. They rode in on a mule, carrying just a few clothes. Nana had to adjust to the cooking conditions: There was electricity only for a couple of hours in the evening; refrigeration consisted basically of a tall wooden box with a cloth hung along one side, kept wet so the wind blowing through it would keep the vegetables inside fresh.

The following summer, Nana did not come to the camp because she did not want to leave her daughters behind again. Instead, she worked at the camp’s office in Huntington Beach, cleaning up paint splatters resulting from construction.

Pyles saw her and asked: “Why aren’t you up at the camp?”

“I don’t want to leave my kids,” she said.

“Well, take ‘em with you.”

The next year, Nana did. The kids spent the rest of their summer childhoods in the mountains, where the girls set the tables and Jimmy passed out fishing equipment.

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Nana remembers that Pyles “didn’t want any kid to go hungry. He always told me, ‘Feed them. And feed them good.’ So what else could I do?”

She doesn’t know how much longer she can carry out those orders. But she can’t imagine what her summers would be like at home. Her own children grew up and formed their own families years ago. Her oldest, Linda, died of cancer in 1987 at age 43.

Ask her why she’d miss the camp and she can’t tell you, exactly. But one pleasant afternoon, after one of her special chicken lunches, from a distance, behind the whispers of the wind, 60 campers in the mess hall could be heard singing, like thousands of others have sung to her before:

Nana, Nana. Listen while we sing to you.

Nana, Nana, you’re a part of Pyles Camp too.

Anyone can make a bed. And anyone can sweep.

But it takes our Nana to make the things we eat.

So, Nana. Nana, listen

While we sing to you.

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Jose Cardenas can be reached by e-mail at Jose.Cardenas@latimes.com.