A Gentle Reminder to Give -- or Else

We can do this easy, or we can do this hard. Your choice.

I can shake you down for charitable contributions by tweaking your sense of competition. This year, people in the punch-line states of Mississippi and Alabama gave a higher percentage of their dough to charities (many of them churches) than Californians did. No wonder the country thinks we’re self-absorbed infidels. And no, your aromatherapy doesn’t qualify as a religious contribution.

Or I can make you feel guilty, like this: Do you truly want to spend the holiday season pretending you’re on your cell phone to dodge the bell-ringers’ kettles, and then blow 30 bucks on “The Clapper” for someone you don’t much like, someone who really ought to be hoisting his butt out of the Barcalounger once in a while and making it over to the light switch to burn off a couple of Cheetos?

How’m I doing so far?

Long lists of good causes clamor for what we all want more of -- time and money. They clamor all year long, but we may only be listening this month, when the taxman’s deductible deadline hangs before us, when the vulgar excess of the season leaves us feeling a little ill -- the moral equivalent of empty calories.

Me, I’ll be writing checks to protect abused and abandoned creatures, to spay and neuter pets to keep millions of “extra” dogs and cats from being born only to be killed.

And I’ll give to the cause of putting into every hand, into every head, the most basic and vital tool of society and culture: reading and writing.

Ladies, gentlemen -- start your checkbooks.

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Antoinette Laudermilk -- “Toni, please” -- sold real estate for more than 10 years, and if you think she’s lost her instinct for the deal, the close, now that she’s executive director of the Remedial Reading and Learning Center in L.A., you do so at your peril.

She was giving me the tour, telling me about the Wednesday night class that preps students for taking SATs, how the kids read newspapers and ... She stopped, interrupting herself: “You work for them. Who can I call about getting free newspapers?”

Now, every time my phone rings, I expect Toni’s alto voice. In this, she says, good deed-doing is like real estate: “Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up. You have to call, you have to write, you have to visit.” Chip Murray of First AME Church, you’re on Toni’s list. So are you, Golden State Mutual.

Charities come and charities go, some faster than summer-replacement sitcoms. The center has come and stayed. It’s closing in on 35 years since Helen Ramey founded it. Back then it was mostly black children who came after school. Now it’s Latino kids, but the need hasn’t changed because the schools still can’t turn every child into a reader.

Four days a week, four hours a day after school, 400 to 600 kids a year rotate through the center, to be tutored by volunteers, getting time and attention they can’t get in the harried public schools.

Kids come to love it so much they tend to stay longer than they need to, and when Toni began the job three months ago, she first had to “assess who was being taught and who was being baby-sat,” for there are a hundred, two hundred other children waiting to get in.

Helen Ramey, the founder, never wanted the red-tape hassle of government money, so every book, every lightbulb and every dollar in petty cash is donated -- from checks from big foundations to the paper plates from a family whose child is learning to read here.

Woodworking fathers just put in a new kitchen; no child studies here before having something hot to eat, even if it’s macaroni and cheese. A bank gave the center its furniture, and the upholstery shop down the street re-covered it free.

And years ago, Toni began donating herself. Her nieces and nephews were struggling with reading in Chicago. Her daughter here in L.A. needed tutoring. Now her nieces and nephews teach college and work with a NASA science program. Her daughter is a financial analyst. On an easel inside the door are clippings of the center’s alums -- a muckety-muck at Hughes, a VP at a Florida museum. People who learned to read there 30 years ago telephone to sign up their grandchildren.

“My friends call me and say, ‘Do you miss real estate?’ And I say ‘No!’ I was feeling so unfulfilled, trying to find my goal.”

Toni’s goal comes in the door every afternoon, one child at a time -- the shy, the dyslexic, the sleep-deprived ... immigrant brothers who just need to be separated to study properly ... a kid who assures her breezily that he has no homework. “Yeah, right. I tell ‘em to write me a composition about what they did over the weekend.”

She has a Rolodex the size of a Ferris wheel and a passion the size and strength of El Nino. Take my advice -- if Toni calls, call her back. You’ll feel better for it. And I know the kids will.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.

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How to Give

Donations (checks or money order) supporting the Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign should be sent to: L.A. Times Holiday Campaign, File 56985, Los Angeles 90074-6986. Please do not send cash. Credit card donations may be made on the Web site: www.latimes.com/holidaycampaign.

All donations are tax-deductible. Contributions of $25 or more will be acknowledged in The Times unless a donor requests otherwise. Acknowledgment cannot be guaranteed for donations received after Dec. 18. For more information about the Holiday Campaign, call (800) LATIMES, Ext. 75771.