Club to Celebrate Legacy of Service
John Brewster is hoping that National Boys and Girls Club Week will bring home many of the estimated 60,000 alumni of the Santa Ana clubhouse on Highland Avenue.
Brewster, executive director of the club that serves 3,500 Santa Ana youth, doesn’t know how many of the club’s alumni are still in Orange County, but hopes those who are out there can return to serve as board members, donors and especially as volunteers.
“Getting the alumni involved is a win-win situation,” Brewster said. “Kids can talk to adults who have been helped by the club. Alumni get to be a part of the excitement that comes from kids having a place that lets them discover what they’re good at.”
One alumnus sure to come home is Larry Sorensen. Hidden away with other personal treasures in his Tustin home is a card from 1957, the year the club opened, that reads “Larry Sorensen, Santa Ana Boys Club, No. 1.”
Sorensen, 54, recalls waiting hours in the predawn cold to become the club’s first member. He had to be. “I think it’s partly because my whole family built the club,” he said. And partly because his father took him to the club.
Sorensen’s father did the plastering on the building, his grandfather and uncle did the brickwork and his great-uncle painted the club’s hardwood finish. His mother even helped raise money for the flagpole.
His favorite club activities were basketball and shop classes, which eventually guided him to follow in his father’s footsteps in the plastering business. Working for the E.F. Brady Construction Co., his most recent handiwork can be seen in the new additions to Universal Studio’s CityWalk unveiled Wednesday.
“[The club] was a real fun place to go. It got me involved in extracurricular activities,” Sorensen said.
A 1999 Louis Harris poll showed that 77% of alumni nationwide said that the clubs kept them out of trouble as kids, and over 50% said the clubs saved their lives. In large Latino communities such as Santa Ana, 86% said their club was the only place to go after school.
Among them is Miguel Valencia.
“The neighborhood that I lived in, if you were by yourself you’d be picked on by the older teens,” Valencia remembers. “A lot of kids didn’t get out of the neighborhood I lived in. They’re either dead or in jail. It definitely saved my life.”
Valencia first came to the Santa Ana Club in 1974 as 7-year-old, when annual membership dues were $1 and the popular activities were wood shop and pine wood derbies.
Today annual memberships are up to $12--although kids pay it in quarterly installments--and favorite activities center around art, dance, nutrition and sports.
Valencia, who wanted to become a volunteer, earned his green card and began working in Costa Mesa. After four years as a volunteer he decided he wanted to devote his life to the kids and got a full-time position at the Santa Ana Club in 1992 and has been there ever since.
“The people that used to work at the club really made a difference in my life,” Valencia said. “All I knew was Santa Ana. They showed me a bigger picture. That there’s more to life than Santa Ana and gangs. There’s a lot more things to do in this world. And I was hoping to do the same for kids today.”
Chris Ceballos can be reached at (714) 966-7440.