Keeping 2 Worlds in Balance

The men’s locker room manager stands by the door with a respectful grin. He appears to be about 60 but is more than 10 years older, though he prefers not to say by how much.

He has a gray mustache, about the size of a golf tee, and a drizzle of gray beneath his bottom lip as well. He wears a black V-neck sweater over a maroon polo shirt, buttoned to the neck.

The hems of his black dress slacks brush the top of black leather shoes, fastidiously shined, and fall diagonally to his heels. His hands are clasped at his belt buckle and the stems of his reading glasses are laced through the fingers of his right hand.

His eyes, as deep and dark as a well, are cast slightly downward. For decades, he has worked for the rich and lived among the poor. While most of America seems to choose sides in moments of racial conflict and class confusion, Clifford Beulah has spent a lifetime straddling the line.

He looks more like a country club member than many of the members themselves, some of whom opt for shorts that are too short and socks that don’t match their shoes.

Until a young man with slicked-back hair who is wearing a pair of those too-short shorts strides in and announces impatiently to no one in particular: “I need a locker.” It is the locker room manager who smiles, pats the man’s shoulder and asks that the young man follow him to the back.

Obediently, the golfer falls in behind him. “Thanks,” he says to the well-dressed gentleman. “Thanks very much.”

He gets a nod and a half-wave in return, along with a locker and anything else he requires, whether it’s a new razor or a shoehorn. That is the way it is done at Los Coyotes Country Club in Buena Park, because that is how Clifford Beulah does it.

For 43 years, he has been standing in the same locker room, usually by the same door. If not there, then in the shoe room where many members barely pause as he cleans and shines their footwear, or in a back room where members gather to play cards while he delivers pot roast dinners and Manhattans.

There is a tinge of an older world here: an elderly black man serving a largely white membership decades after blacks broke the lines that restricted them to America’s back rooms.

But his career, Beulah says, is not about what he does, as much as about the relationships he’s forged while doing it. He will not look back on a mountain of golf shoes and dollar tips and think of them as his life’s work. He believes it has been more than that, just as a nurse’s career amounts to more than a stack of bandages.

“I’ve learned,” he says, “what to expect out of life.”

He has driven from his home on Bonsallo Street in Los Angeles, not far from the Coliseum, to Buena Park and Los Coyotes Drive and the million-dollar homes of club members who are barely stirring when he passes at 6 a.m.

Twice, 27 years apart, his home life was dangerously complicated by riots and fire. Yet at work, there were the usual Sunday foursomes and piped-in Sinatra.

Somewhere in the middle was Beulah. Though he grew up at a time when men often judged one another by skin color, Beulah engages people one at a time. His convictions have been tugged on and his senses torn, yet he remains almost impossibly unchanged.

He says he has learned to keep his eyes low, his opinions mostly to himself, and to accept people as, or if, they accept him. He has taken their tip money and, if they have offered, their kindness.

In return, he has loaned a few of those members 20 bucks when they were short on cash but held a full house. He has driven them back to their wives and children when the golf stories and the drinks had finally run dry. He has mopped up after their showers.

And eventually the black man who uses a neat blue smock to protect his clothing while he bends over their grass-caked shoes became something more than someone to serve them. He became their friend, and their brother, and a darned fine golf partner.

Learning to Cross Barriers With Ease

He carried a 9-handicap when he started working as a locker room manager. His golf swing was long, smooth and moderately reliable; golf great Billy Casper saw it once at a charity event and thereafter called Beulah “Silky.”

Clifford Beulah would hone his swing on the Los Coyotes driving range, early in the mornings or between bites of tuna sandwiches at lunch. Determined to discipline his body to maintain a firm balance, he would not wear spikes during practice no matter how damp the grass.

His life became a metaphor for the importance of balance--when his body grew old and fragile, when his beloved wife, Otie Vee, died two years ago. It was a skill he would come to rely on to cross social and economic barriers with unusual sophistication, teaming with CEOs on the golf course, then afterward knocking the mud off their shoes and fetching their towels.

Three years ago, when Beulah required quintuple heart bypass surgery, a doctor in his regular Sunday morning foursome recommended the surgeon. When he awoke from the procedure, the wife of club member Joe Kruss, who owns United Riggers and Erectors in Santa Fe Springs, was on the telephone.

“I want you to know one thing, Cliff,” Marcella Kruss told him. “I don’t want you to need for anything. Do you know what I mean, Cliff?”

“I do,” the men’s locker room manager said quietly.

Beulah and Joe Kruss, 80, play nearly every Sunday morning at 7:20, along with Dr. John Laing and either Warren Klauer or Bill Doyle--all members of the club. Beulah has seen their children grow, the lines in their faces deepen, and their drives shorten by 50 yards.

On Sunday mornings, or at their homes for dinner, they are Joe and John and Warren and Bill. But most days of the week, Clifford Beulah calls them “Mister.”

“Cliff,” Kruss would say in the locker room, “the name is ‘Joe.’ ”

“Not when you’re here at the club,” Beulah would answer, and Kruss eventually gave up the fight.

Work Ethic Acquired Early

Beulah was born in Little Rock, Ark., the son of a dairy farm worker. His mother died when he was 3. He was raised by his grandparents, Frank and Allie Robinson.

Frank Robinson was a caretaker at an estate in Pulaski Heights, a Little Rock neighborhood Beulah still calls “the big, rich district.”

As a youngster, Clifford mowed lawns for 50 cents and caddied at the local golf course, where he earned enough in a week to get a haircut and his clothes cleaned.

He attributes his work ethic--legendary at Los Coyotes, where some of his shifts have lasted 36 or more hours--to his grandfather.

“[Cliff] is the old school--didn’t have the attitude thing,” says Peter Pino, who is in his second stint as Los Coyotes’ general manager after opening the club as a bartender. “He had a work ethic. You wish you had a hundred more like him.”

Beulah came to a job interview wearing a suit and tie and hat, just as his grandfather had taught him, and he was hired immediately.

Placed in the locker room, Beulah’s fast smile and down-to-earth personality quickly made him a favorite. He didn’t gripe when card games lasted until morning, or when he was sent to the all-night diner at the bottom of the hill for sandwiches at 3 a.m.

In every setting, Beulah sensed where the social line would be drawn, whether he was the help or a friend, four-ball partner or confidant.

If that sounds too convenient for the members, Clifford Beulah says he never questioned it. The next morning, every morning it seemed, he would be back at the door, politely greeting the same men with whom he might have had a post-round beer the night before.

“It’s something, I guess, that’s in you--to know this, to recognize where the line is,” he says. “I’ve been in the service business for a lot of years. I know about the line. I know when to get on and where to get off at.

“You know what to say and when to say it. I always was careful about what I said around people. I could go someplace with them and they would know they weren’t going to be embarrassed. I would go to the golf course with them, and they would know that I was not going to get drunk. I would drink with them, but I was not going to get drunk and make an ass out of myself.”

Old Neighborhood a Source of Sadness

It’s a fair bet that none of the members at Los Coyotes have ever been to Bonsallo Avenue, near the corner of Slauson Avenue and Figueroa Street.

Clifford Beulah’s three-bedroom home, which he bought for $11,000 in 1960, sits in the middle of the block. It is beige with four blue cement steps leading to a small front porch. The lawn is tidy and a garden hose is coiled neatly around a water spigot. It is the only lot on the block that is not completely enclosed by a tall fence, though thick steel bars guard every window.

Beulah hates the bars.

His late wife, Otie Vee, insisted on them in the fall of 1965, in the days following the Watts riots. After all, she asked him, wasn’t she the one who was home alone while the people at Los Coyotes got their ashtrays emptied?

The old neighborhood saddens him.

Most of his friends have moved or died.

He misses Luke, the man who used to live next door. Luke smoked cigars, though never in the house. When Beulah arrived home late from work, he would often find Luke on the back stoop, smoking. Beulah would lean against the fence and say hello.

“Sometimes I’d stand there for 30 or 40 minutes talking to him,” he says. “He liked sports and he liked to play dominoes. My wife used to beat the socks off him and he could not stand it.”

He looks for excuses to stay away. He spends a lot of time with a friend in Pomona.

A woman across Bonsallo Avenue waters his lawn and occasionally plants some flowers.

Luke died several years ago, and Luke’s wife died shortly afterward. They were good people, Beulah says, and too rare anymore in a community where there are bars over all of the windows.

“The bars, they make me mad,” he says. “The minute I pull up to the house I get angry about it, just because there they are. The bars.”

Riots Upset Balance Between His Worlds

Clifford Beulah is sitting in the main dining room at Los Coyotes, sorting through his worlds. As he does, women in large golf hats stroll past and pat his shoulder or kiss his cheek, chatting loudly about how sweet he is or about his wonderful golf game.

“Be sure to put in there that everyone loves him,” one says.

Only twice has Beulah been unable to travel so effortlessly from one world to the other, when one life was literally barricaded from the other. That was during the Watts and L.A. riots in 1965 and 1992.

He chose not to risk breaking curfews and therefore didn’t return to Bonsallo Avenue during the riots. He slept on a couch in the country club locker room or rented a room at a nearby hotel.

Both times, Otie Vee guarded the house at night with a loaded shotgun. “She wasn’t afraid,” he says.

He drove back to his neighborhood in the mornings. If the police allowed him through, he would rejoin Otie Vee for a few hours. If not, he would return to Buena Park and the timid questions at Los Coyotes: Was his family safe? Was his home in danger?

Both times, violence skipped his block, like tornadoes that touched down, jumped and landed again in some other unfortunate neighborhood. However, it did not miss entirely. Nearby, people bled and they died, people Beulah knew.

Working at the country club, it was as if he had passed into a different world. Though much of the help was black, for a long time there were no black members. Club officials say there are “about five” black members now, along with “a large Asian presence.”

Beulah would overhear some of the club members in the card room talk about the riots. He would hear them use harsh, racist terms for his friends in the neighborhood who didn’t deserve it. But he kept his head down, finished the shoes, delivered the drinks. “I did my job,” he says.

At home, a friend heard his despair over the looting and the killing and the arson, his criticism of it, and told him, “You say that because you’re down there with all the white people all the time.”

“People panicked,” Beulah says. He talked to his neighbor, Luke, about civil rights, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And to Otie Vee about Rodney King and the acquittals in Simi Valley of the police who had beaten King. Beulah believed these things were best hashed out in the backyard, through the blue smoke of Luke’s cigar.

During those times when his worlds spun close enough to almost collide, Beulah said he never struggled with the line. He simply pulled on his white dress shirt, with the collar and cuffs as white and stiff as wedding invitations, and went to work.

He worked for as long as they asked and then he returned home, hoping that he would find it as he had left it.

In the supermarket down the hill in Buena Park, where Clifford Beulah shopped for locker-room supplies, he would see country club members.

“Some would turn around and go in the other direction,” Beulah says, laughing. “But that doesn’t bother me. That’s their problem. Let them live with that. I’m not going to miss one wink of sleep about it.”

He has many friends here, a handful of whom would offer to drive him to the supermarket and back, and to help with the bags. They were the ones who in times of turmoil asked sympathetic questions about his family, his home.

On those days, they were Joe and John and Warren and Bill, even in that locker room.

‘I Put Myself Aside’

His friendships at the club have survived the tumult, and the job has provided him with enough in salary and tips--he doesn’t like to say how much--to raise his family, including a daughter. Beulah paid for the little house on Bonsallo Avenue with country club money, without ever feeling as if he had sold out, or betrayed his community or chosen the country club over a moral or social cause.

“I put myself aside and let the job dictate what I do, one way or the other,” Beulah says. “I may be the only guy here that has never used up his vacation time.”

“I promise you that,” Los Coyotes pro Brad Shupe says. “We bug him. To have him take a week off is an absolute miracle.”

Beulah breathes responsibility for clean shoes and ashtrays and rental lockers. It is what he does. He believes to leave such work undone, or poorly done, would undermine 43 years of service.

“I think that the guys should have someone here to take care of them,” he says.

Besides, the time he would like to take off would be around the holidays, an important time for those in the service business to be on the job.

“It’s one of those things that will keep you, especially when you’re depending on this,” Clifford Beulah says, brushing his right thumb across his fore and middle fingers.

“This” is the money--his tips.

“The job is demanding enough of you, and all of the rest of the things that go along with it,” he says. “Either you’re going to make it or you’re not going to make it. And you’re not going to make it if you’re gone.”

Beulah took his job before the Los Coyotes clubhouse was completed, before there was asphalt in the parking lot. It is in perfect symmetry then, that club owners Ida and Chuck McAuley have plans to demolish the old clubhouse and replace it with a gorgeous, Spanish-style structure of 61,000 square feet, probably in 2002.

No one but Beulah will ever run the old locker room. He will have outlasted the building and many of the people in it.

“People come back all the time,” Shupe says. “Maybe they haven’t been here in 20 years, but they all want to know, ‘Is Clifford still here?’ ”

He is. Standing by the door, probably, waiting for them, glad to see them, in whatever role they’ll have him.

“My life is right here,” Beulah says with a smile. “All my friends are here. I’m going to be right here until I die.”