Schoolgirl’s Long-Ago Snub Still Resonates

As a worker remembers the Great Depression or a soldier recalls World War II, Sarah Radillo never forgot the time she took a drink of water at her grammar school in Villa Park. Though long ago, the memory remains vivid--and still stings.

It was sweltering that day in Orange County during the 1930s. A queue of children had formed behind Sarah at the drinking fountain. She took her turn and stepped aside. Then she noticed something was wrong.

The other children did not move. Nobody stepped forward to the fountain. They all just stood still, despite their thirst.

Nobody wanted to put their lips to the faucet where Sarah’s had just been. Nobody dared to drink after the Mexican girl.

“How could I forget that?” said Sarah, who later moved to a segregated school for Mexicans in the El Modena area near Orange. “I was totally humiliated.”

But just as depression leads to recovery, and war to peace, the incident has a hopeful ending.

Sarah was telling me the story Wednesday morning at Hof’s Hut, a restaurant near her North Tustin home, but light years away from those days of direct discrimination. It was her 72nd birthday, and she had celebrated with an early round of golf.

“Well, congratulations,” said an old family friend who sat with us.

The gentleman’s name is Larry Means, her husband’s former employer. It was Larry who had set up this breakfast interview, convinced that people should hear the story of Alberto and Sarah Radillo, two dropouts who had inspired him with their hard work and family togetherness.

These two families--Means and Radillo--have been intertwined for more than half a century. Larry, 58, was just a boy when Al first came to work as a laborer for his family’s Santa Ana construction company, Means and Ulrich.

Until it closed in 1988, it was one of the county’s most successful, building projects such as Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian and Santa Ana Valley High School.

Al was hired about 1947, the year he married Sarah. He stayed with the same company the rest of his life, more than four decades. Just before he died of cancer in 1991, he helped the firm close its doors for good, a victim of recession.

An Unlikely Friendship

Larry remembers young Al as a real go-getter. The boy learned his work ethic from this optimistic, energetic man who used to spread manure in the orange groves to help his single mother raise her children.

Larry’s father, Verne Means, was “an excellent pencil-pusher,” the guy who estimated costs of construction jobs. But Al Radillo was the guy who taught Larry how to push a shovel.

“I can still use a shovel better than a broom today,” chuckles Larry, who sweeps up trash with the tool normally used to dig ditches. “People around my neighborhood must think I’m nuts. But it’s an art you have to learn. These kinds of skills all came from Al.”

Theirs was an unlikely friendship in the post-World War II period, a time when Mexicans began rebelling against the strict segregation of their children in Orange County schools.

It defied prevailing prejudices. It ignored barriers between uptown prosperity and barrio poverty, between white employer and ethnic worker, between the old Santa Ana establishment and the offspring of immigrants.

Yet it lasted a lifetime.

“I still miss him,” said Larry. “He was a real friend to me.”

This year, Larry and Sarah established the Alberto V. Radillo Memorial Scholarship for needy Latina students at Santa Ana College.

The Radillos’ eldest daughter, Arline Greene of Rancho Santa Fe, donated $10,000 to the fund. In May, eight women received the first $250 grants to buy books, ironically in the name of a man who dropped out of school in the seventh grade.

But it’s a fitting legacy for the father of four and a founding member of the Gemini Club, a pioneer effort in Orange County to raise scholarship funds for Latinos.

“I wanted to come up with some way to honor Al, to tell students who he was and what he stood for,” said Larry, a former member of the Orange County Grand Jury who is active in Santa Ana civic affairs.

Nine years after Al’s death, the scholarship effort has brought the two families even closer together. While screening the 35 applicants, Larry heard for the first time the story of Sarah as the spurned schoolgirl at the drinking fountain.

During interviews with the applicants, some expressed how hard it was to stay in school, to overcome financial and social barriers. Sarah tried to encourage them. So she shared her painful early experience at the predominantly white school where she was among a handful of Mexican students.

As the children stood at the fountain frozen with racism, Sarah recalled, one girl suddenly broke ranks. She was the richest girl in the school, the one who lived in a beautiful house on the hill with 22 rooms, as she wrote in a class assignment.

Sarah had seen the big house only from the outside when the school bus stopped on its daily route. Now, this rich white girl was about to stand up for the poor Mexican whose family lived in a house with no electricity.

The girl stepped confidently to the fountain and took the next drink. The rest of the students followed.

“She was not taught discrimination,” recalled Sarah. “She just treated you normal.”

The story stunned Larry.

“We just all sat there with our mouths hanging open,” he said. “I never heard such stories before. I never opened my eyes to the fact that there was such discrimination in the education system when they were young. I never saw it.”

Sarah, also raised by a single mother who worked in the fields and packinghouses, went through other educational tribulations.

She saw the separate and unequal facilities for Mexican students at El Modena. There was an adjoining campus for white students that had a library, one the Mexicans could briefly visit but not borrow from.

Sarah lasted two weeks at Orange High School before she became a casualty of class differences. While the white students wore expensive Angora sweaters, Sarah owned just just two blouses and two skirts that she had to wear, wash, and wear again.

“I did that for two weeks, then I figured I better go to work,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t belong, my clothing was just too poor.”

The freshman dropout went to work in the packinghouses until she married Al. They met at a dance hall--one reserved for Mexicans on certain nights--that drew residents from various small barrios--Delhi, Artesia, Logan, El Modena and Santa Anita, Al’s old neighborhood in west Santa Ana.

Larry praises Sarah for putting her own children on the path to higher education. And he admires Al for providing scholarships for other children through the Gemini Club at a time when there was little organized help for Latinos.

“I think deep down, Al wished he would have had the opportunities,” he said. “There’s no telling where his abilities would have taken him if he had had the education.”

Sarah gives credit to people like the owners of Means and Ulrich, who looked beyond bias to see them as human beings.

“Maybe that’s why things changed,” she said, glancing at Larry.

Then Sarah went home to look for a picture of that little girl who was not afraid to drink from the same fountain after her.

If only she could remember her name.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com