Inspired to Give

A year ago, it seemed as if the helping hand Glenn Langer was extending to students in one of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods had finally reached too far.

The retired UCLA medical professor had created a series of unusual scholarships for junior high school pupils to help pave the way for them to get into college.

Langer was dipping into his pension to pay for books, calculators, mentoring expenses and field trips for 29 Lennox Middle School pupils. He was also underwriting high school tuition and other costs for those who wanted to go on to private or special magnet schools.

He had mapped out the scholarship plan in 1996. The idea was to use his retirement nest egg as seed money that would entice big charitable foundations into making the Lennox scholarships a permanent, annual thing.

Trouble was, only a few of his personal friends and officials at Hughes Electronics in El Segundo stepped forward to help.

By last October, Langer was tapped out after committing $235,000 of his life’s savings to the scholarships. He reluctantly told Lennox teachers that the 1999 scholarships would probably be the last.

A story in The Times detailed how the 71-year-old had tried in vain to find permanent funding. It also told of how Lennox’s pint-sized scholars who live beneath the approach to Los Angeles International Airport were benefiting from the program’s tutoring and field trips to museums and theaters.

That’s when newspaper readers decided to lend their own hand.

This week, Langer returned to Lennox Middle School to see 25 new seventh-graders accept six-year scholarships sponsored by Times readers. Because of their generosity, the scholarship program is being expanded to junior high schools in four other poor neighborhoods.

“It’s incredible,” Langer said Thursday. “This time last year I’d been turned down by 30 foundations. When the article appeared, we started getting spontaneous calls.”

Along with 30 people who each contributed $8,600 for a six-year scholarship, two donors--the Samuel Goldwyn Foundation and Palos Verdes Estates businessman Jim Jeong--volunteered to sponsor 10 similarly sized scholarships apiece for the next two years.

The response has allowed the scholarship program to expand to Mark Twain in Mar Vista and Kranz Intermediate School in El Monte. In addition, several Northern Californians who read the Times story signed up to sponsor scholarships at two schools in Mendocino County, where Langer and his wife, Marianne, live in retirement.

“One year ago we had funds totaling $309,000 committed, enough for 29 scholarships. Now we have over $900,000 committed and 92 students will be involved,” Langer said.

One new donor, who asked not to be identified, said the do-it-yourself efficiency of Langer’s program was a major selling point. There is no overhead; all of the money is spent to pay for school supplies, special mentoring and field trips.

As it turns out, the program’s meager infrastructure was a stumbling block when it came to seeking the support of large foundations, Langer learned last year.

The Lennox program wasn’t big enough in scope for the larger charitable organizations to get involved with, he recalled. Smaller local charities were reluctant to sign on because of the six-year commitment to the scholarships.

Now, one of the new contributors is an expert in corporate fund-raising who has volunteered to search for permanent future funding from charitable foundations.

Meg Sanchez, a Lennox teacher who coordinates the scholarship program at her campus, said she was stunned when a year ago she began receiving daily telephone calls from strangers offering to underwrite scholarships for her students.

Langer grew up in a poor New York family during the Depression. “If I hadn’t been helped back then by a private family foundation, who knows where I’d be today,” he said.