Jobs Program Graduate Grateful for 2nd Chance

Robert White recalls the years he spent searching to find the bottom of a down-and-out life that had him sleeping in cardboard boxes in alleys, scrounging for food in trash bins and waiting for his next high.

But hitting rock bottom wasn’t easy, especially in the murky troubled waters of his life.

Looking back, White, now 46, often wonders how he ever managed to turn his life around. He has been sober for eight years. He has his own apartment and works as a cook at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica.

He is also the pride of the St. Joseph Center’s food service job training program in Venice, which Saturday gave him a special-recognition award.

“This is great,” said White, a soft-spoken man with an engaging smile. “I never thought of myself as a success story. I just wanted to get back my life, to get back into society.”

It was 6 a.m. on Christmas morning in 1988 when White began charting his journey back. He said he was sitting on a bus bench in Hollywood, thinking about how he never managed to get over his wife’s death from breast cancer. He thought about the two daughters he had lost contact with, and about the promising job as a school plant manager that vanished in an alcohol- and drug-induced haze.

“I thought about what Christmas used to be like in my family,” he recalled. “Then in the back of my mind was this voice: ‘What are you doing to yourself?’ I knew there was a better life.”

Through persistence, he managed to find space in a homeless shelter in West Hollywood. He started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, reunited with his daughters and began searching for work.

The shelter referred him to the St. Joseph Center, where he was among the first in a new program offering training in the culinary arts. Soon, he parlayed an internship at Saint John’s into a full-time job. Today, he is the hospital’s morning grill cook, whose specialties include burritos, omelets and other breakfast dishes.

“I love my job and I love the people I work with,” he said. “I’m getting real satisfaction in just coming to work, and being back in society.”

Being close to his two daughters and four grandchildren has also brought him joy.

“There was a time when my family didn’t know whether I was dead or alive,” he said.

“When I lost my wife, I had tried to cover it up with drugs and alcohol. Now my daughters are giving me strength. My children are proud of me, and that is where I get my greatest gratification, from my kids.”

Rhonda Meister, the executive director of the St. Joseph Center, said White’s efforts to “stabilize his life and pursue his goals and dreams” serve as a lesson to all, regardless of economic status.

In that sense, she said, “there is little difference between those who are successful in life and those who are homeless and poor.”

Steve Ramirez, the center’s development officer, said that in a big city like Los Angeles, it is often the small successes that really count.

“It gives us an opportunity to build a community in a small-town way,” he said. “That is something we need to do.”

For White, the goal is to keep on moving ahead with his life. Sometimes, his journey takes him back past the bus bench where his turnaround began that Christmas morning in 1988.

“The first time I went by it, it made me think about how difficult my life had been, but now when I go by that point, I see a starting point. Something meaningful happened there. I changed.”