To Dad, With Love

He was the dad they never had--the man who for 42 years could be counted on to wipe away the tears and prop up the self-esteem of children passing through Los Angeles’ first privately run orphanage.

No wonder the hugs were so heartfelt and the thanks so sincere Sunday as former residents and colleagues returned to the Hollygrove Children’s Home to say goodbye to Bob Morgan.

Starting in 1958 as a recreation leader, Morgan worked his way from the playground to the front office, where he was assistant executive director at the 121-year-old children’s refuge. Along the way he helped nearly 5,000 children grow into adulthood and helped the orphanage mature into a modern therapeutic treatment center for troubled youths.

Morgan, 64, is retiring with his wife, Glenda, to Morro Bay--a place that for years was an annual camping-trip destination of Hollygrove’s orphans.

Sunday’s farewell was staged at the home’s longtime El Centro Avenue location, and it was emotional.

“Bob Morgan is the only tangible connection to male integrity I can recall from childhood,” acknowledged Chris Curtis, a 53-year-old videographer from Chico who lived five years at Hollygrove after being abandoned by his father at age 8.

“Bob gave us back something that we had been robbed of. You probably can’t understand the magnitude of being accepted as a human being by someone like him. He’d look you in your little eyes and put his hand on your shoulder and you knew you had a place here and weren’t just somebody else’s throwaway.”

Fred Delgado, now 50 and an emergency medicine physician in Folsom, said the lessons he learned from Morgan have benefited him all of his life.

“He was kind of a father figure and an older brother at the same time,” said Delgado, who was 7 when he entered the orphanage. He lived there from 1958 to 1962.

“Bob gave you a sense of belonging in this world. He gave me a positive sense of who I could be. He’d talk about my future and say I had to eat right and live right and have good thoughts because they would help me in my future years,” Delgado said.

“He was so good with me that I decided I wanted to be like him when I had kids. It worked. I have three and they are adults now, and they turned out fine.”

Some of Morgan’s young charges may have been grown-ups before they fully appreciated what he did for them, said Fred Valdez, who was a troubled, fatherless 8-year-old when his mother placed him at Hollygrove in 1973.

Now 35 and a Washington, D.C., lawyer, he said Morgan taught him values and social skills.

“I learned some basic things for the first time. Like how to sit at the table and eat with good manners, how to say you’re sorry. How to interact with others in your environment in an orderly fashion,” Valdez said. “As simple as it sounds, things like that are not what every child is always taught.”

About 150 former Hollygrove residents and employees attended Sunday’s reception--some coming from as far away as Connecticut. They swapped stories of the outings Morgan organized, of the Hollygrove Scout groups he ran and of how he would shield children from trouble if they did something like break a window while playing ball.

The crowd understood when David Vargas, now 29 and a Hollywood film production assistant, explained how Morgan stepped forward in unexpected ways.

As a 7-year-old, Vargas had been placed in Hollygrove when his heroin-addicted mother disappeared. He lived there for five years and was there when his mother was found murdered.

“Bob went out of his way to set up a funeral for her at Hollywood Presbyterian Church and then bury her,” Vargas said. “She didn’t have any kin other than me. If it wasn’t for Bob, my mother would have died as a ‘Jane Doe.’ ”

A poem by Hollygrove employee Amy Solorio thanked Morgan for “never abandoning” the generations of children and for never giving up trying to make them feel “like other kids.”

Morgan acknowledged that his earliest days at the orphanage weren’t easy. Before the concept of orphanages changed in the 1970s and Hollygrove--a nonprofit facility--developed into more of a center for troubled children, many residents indeed were abandoned youngsters. It was opened in 1880 by two women who founded the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society and began taking in homeless children off the street in a horse-drawn carriage.

Morgan recalled being shocked when as a 22-year-old college student he learned there was an orphanage in the middle of Hollywood.

The idea that some children had no family had troubled him since his own childhood. Morgan had been hospitalized for three years with polio and he had seen several fellow polio patients--some in iron lungs--abandoned by their parents. He never forgot their sadness.

So when he visited Hollygrove, “I was just stunned. There were these young, little children who should have had a mother and father like children from regular families. I was overwhelmed. I knew this is what I had to do. This is where I had to help.”

Although he was studying elementary education in college and had worked as a camp counselor and as a church Sunday school teacher, Morgan said he was unprepared at first for orphanage work.

“I remember getting down on my knees and crying and praying for some of these kids,” he said.

In the early days, young Morgan was the only male presence at Hollygrove, except for the gardener and the janitors. “The kids were watching me very carefully,” he said. “They needed a firm hand, but they didn’t need mishandling or abuse.”

Hollygrove Executive Director Judy Nelson praised Morgan for helping the home evolve from a residential center--Norma Jean Baker’s aunt placed her there from 1935 to 1937, before she became Marilyn Monroe--into a modern therapeutic-care facility. Its 68 current preteen residents have been placed there by the courts and include some born addicted to drugs or victims of parental abuse.

Tom Tandy, a retired Sun Valley telephone company worker who met Morgan while repairing phones at Hollygrove in the 1960s and ended up volunteering for 17 years to portray Santa Claus for the orphanage, said Sunday that Morgan’s mark on the place runs deep.

“Bob’s the best man I’ve ever met,” he said simply.