Helping Children Get Off to a Good Start

Some of the luckiest kids in the San Fernando Valley live on the 100 block of West Elmwood Avenue.

The tiny cul-de-sac once riddled with gangs is now a haven for about 100 families complete with medians filled with roses, freshly painted apartments and the Elmwood Achievement Center.

At the center, caring mentors wait in the afternoons to teach children on the block how to read, memorize their multiplication tables and learn a little bit about the world beyond their street.

Fae Golcon, 85, is one of those mentors. Every Monday and Thursday afternoon, the Toluca Lake resident drives her Ford Taurus to meet 11-year-old Carol Torres at the center. Golcon usually stuffs a surprise for Carol inside her handbag, such as A.A. Milne’s 1924 classic “When We Were Very Young” or a box of pastels and some drawing paper.

“When I first met Carol, she wasn’t very spirited,” Golcon said. “I just want to help her have a spark.”

The Elmwood Achievement Center opened in the spring of 1996 as part of a $6.5-million city refurbishment of the once-dangerous block just off the Golden State Freeway. Now the gangs are gone, replaced by families.

About 15 children from the block meet their mentors at the achievement center twice a week starting at 3 p.m. Another 50 or so kids can stop by on their own to finish their homework. When the center closes at 6 p.m., the kids sign out on a clipboard and walk the few yards home.

This week, Golcon and Carol worked on looking up words, such as “wickedness” and “exquisite” in a dictionary.

“A year ago,” Golcon bragged, “Carol didn’t even know what a dictionary was.”

The two sail through the assignment, but math slows the afternoon’s progress. Carol--in a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt--frowns as she pulls out a math quiz from her white school notebook. Her teacher has scrawled an “F” on the top margin. Carol and Golcon work for nearly an hour correcting the answers.

When Carol starts to yawn and her attention wanders, Golcon suggests they read. Carol smiles.

“The greatest thing Fae has done for me,” she said, “is teach me how to read . . . I want to be a teacher someday too.”

Golcon became a mentor about a year ago. She was widowed a few years ago and had been looking for volunteer work to make friends her own age. Instead, a local senior center matched her up with the achievement center.

This is not the first time Golcon has been called on to help a child. Forty years ago she and her husband took in an 8-year-old Mexican boy whose legs had been severely burned after a freak accident with gasoline. The boy’s mother was trying to raise him on her own, but was struggling.

By the time Golcon and her husband took him in, the boy had not been properly toilet trained and frequently stole from grocery stores and from the handbags of some of her friends.

After two years of stability and enrichment--like arts classes--the boy was transformed. But regrettably, Golcon said, his mother asked that he be returned to Mexico. Years later, Golcon and her husband tried again to help the boy--now a man of 18. But it was too late, she said. He was abusing drugs and no longer interested in the art he once loved. “No matter what we did for him,” Golcon said, “it didn’t work out, because he had a bad beginning.”

While Golcon is uncertain about Carol’s life before they met, she knows that it’s not too late to make an impact.

In time, she hopes to share more with Carol--like stories about when she and her husband toured Europe for a year and a half in a Volkswagen camper, or when she was single, living on Sunset Strip and working in the burgeoning television business.

But for right now, she said, the two have to buckle down to the basics, and that means reading, writing and arithmetic. The rest, Golcon hopes, will come in time.

For information on becoming a mentor at the Elmwood Achievement Center, call Julie Barber at (818) 840-9559.

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