Living Legacy of Kindness

Gladys Hamilton is called “Grandma” by people who aren’t even family. In fact, she has no grandchildren, not even children. But she says her best years were spent working as a nanny and a volunteer with her “babies.”

At 91, though, it’s getting hard for her to keep up with kids. After 14 years of taking two buses each way to volunteer on weekdays at the Foundation for the Junior Blind in Windsor Hills, last year Hamilton had to stop. Her eyes were clouded over with cataracts and glaucoma, and she had to use a walker to get around. So she stayed home and watched game shows on TV.

But one recent Friday a foundation employee offered her a ride and a rare chance to visit the children with whom she spent so much time. She had to stay home from a National Philanthropy Day ceremony in November, when she was named outstanding volunteer, but she wasn’t going to miss this.

“I miss y’all,” said Hamilton, a New Orleans native with a raspy voice, during her visit. She hugged Mark Vrbka, director of the foundation’s Special Education School, where Hamilton volunteered as a foster grandparent.

“We miss you too, Grandma,” Vrbka said.

The foundation offers education, recreation and rehabilitation programs to visually impaired children from California and neighboring states. Hamilton had not been there since she was honored with the school’s Volunteer of the Year Award in May. She said arthritis made her knee weak, causing her to use the walker, which was not allowed at the foundation.

“If it wasn’t for my leg,” she said, “I’d be here.”

Vrbka knows it. “Rain, sleet, whatever it was, Grandma was here,” he said. “Even when we advised her not to come, she was here during the El Nino and when the streets were flooded.”

And she had a 45-minute bus trip from her home near the Coliseum to get there. Hamilton took the No. 81 down Figueroa Street and the No. 108 across Slauson Avenue, then walked half a mile up Angeles Vista Boulevard to the foundation. Friends say Hamilton often turned down rides home, opting to find her own way.

The Special Education School instructs 3- to 21-year-olds who are visually impaired and developmentally disabled. None of them can speak. Hamilton supervised their arts and activity time.

“Believe me, the work was not hard,” she said. “It was just a joy.”

Hamilton worked with one child in particular--20-year-old Anna Lisa.

Anna Lisa has Cornelia de Lange syndrome, a congenital condition that delays development and whose symptoms include small stature, eyebrows that meet in the middle of the forehead, bowel abnormalities and missing limbs or portions of limbs like fingers.

Vrbka said Anna Lisa was a “classic case.” Still, that didn’t stop Hamilton from giving her all the love she had.

“Grandma just always had a way of looking past the kids’ disability,” Vrbka said.

As Hamilton rolled her walker from the foundation’s main building toward the activity room where the children were playing, her hair shone in the sunlight like sterling silver and her smile matched the maroon dress she wore. Even her gray eyes seemed bright until Vrbka told her some bad news.

She wouldn’t be able to see Anna Lisa, because she was in the hospital having stomach surgery.

Hamilton stopped walking; her eyes focused on the ground. “That smile. She would’ve known me,” she said, clearly disappointed. “I miss my baby’s smile.” Hamilton kept on anyway. At least she’d be able to see some of the children.

Hamilton became a foster grandmother after a lifetime of working as a live-in housekeeper. She had started young, working at 18 for a couple with a young son in New Orleans. She was the one who brought the couple’s second son home from the hospital when he was born and practically raised him.

“I’ve always had an urge to work with children,” Hamilton said.

She and her ex-husband tried to have kids, she said, but weren’t successful. They divorced after eight years.

When she moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, she did more housekeeping for families and eventually retired. But, Hamilton said, “I was bored.”

So in her 70s she started looking for good ways to spend her time. She heard about the national Foster Grandparent Program and quickly signed up.

Foster grandmother Darlene Murray, 85, said it was easy to see how much Hamilton loved the children by her patience with them and how she spoiled them with home-cooked sweets.

“She was always so pleasant and sweet to all the children,” Murray said. “I try to be like that too. Like another Gladys.”

Murray said there is a definite void without Hamilton around, which she continually tries to fill. “I think about her all the time when I sit in that rocking chair,” she said. Murray remembers walking by Hamilton’s classroom, watching the way Grandma Gladys used to rock a child on her lap in the wooden chair.

And staff members remember her every time they pass the poster-size black-and-white photograph that hangs on the school’s wall of Hamilton and Jimmy, a boy she used to work with, playing the piano. Many of the children love to play on the piano, Hamilton said.

As she sat in the activity room on her visiting day, she kept glancing over her shoulder at the girl who pressed the piano’s keys.

“That sounds like Anna,” Hamilton said turning her head. “I thought that was Anna,” she said, realizing it was not.

Hamilton’s other love is working with young children at her church, Greater New Bethel Baptist in Inglewood. She’s been running the nursery on Sundays for 26 years, and the chairman of the board of trustees, Dan Smith, said, “She does an excellent job.”

She used to bake 300 to 400 chocolate chip and coconut cookies for the church to take to the homeless downtown every month but hasn’t been able to lately. And she hasn’t been at the nursery the past few weeks, either.

“The kids love her,” Smith said. “They just crowd around her and they don’t run wild on her.”

When Hamilton knew she wasn’t returning to the foundation, Murray said she called her with a request.

“Take care of my babies,” she said.