Patron Saint of Lost Causes

Alice Greenfield McGrath took on her first cause soon after graduating from Washington High School, raising money for Chinese victims of Japan’s aggression in the late 1930s. She was Alice Greenfield then and just discovering her passion for social justice. She made plans to become a union organizer. Then, in the fall of 1942, while she was recovering from a bout of pleurisy at her Silver Lake home, a friend, labor attorney George Shibley, dropped by with a sheaf of court transcripts. That visit--and its aftermath--would last a lifetime. The attorney had his hands full, defending several Mexican American youths accused of murder. The body of Jose Diaz had been found Aug. 2, near a swimming hole in Southeast L.A. County, and some of the accused men had been in the vicinity the night before. The prosecution’s case was circumstantial at best, but the proceedings were unfolding during the xenophobic days of World War II: Japanese Americans had already been ordered to internment camps, and prejudice against Mexican Americans was widespread. Twenty-two defendants, ages 17 to 21, from a Mexican American barrio, were tried en masse.

George Shibley needed help--would McGrath be willing to write a summary of each day’s trial proceedings?

She agreed and soon found herself immersed in a trial that gained notoriety as one of the most racist in local history. The proceedings propelled McGrath into a lifetime of activism and inspired the play and film “Zoot Suit.”

At 84, she is still working to balance the scales of justice for the poor. In the last two decades, she helped develop a pro bono legal aid program in Ventura County for those unable to afford an attorney; championed a pilot project to reduce the cost of family-law cases for low-income clients; and made 85 trips to Nicaragua to provide humanitarian aid.

“You’d think that by this time, she’d be weary,” says author Studs Terkel, who has known McGrath for 40 years. “But her passion is undiminished. She has that hope. She is tireless.”

Alice Greenfield knew about bias and being “different.” her parents had fled discrimination against Jews in czarist Russia and had moved to Canada before settling in southern Los Angeles in 1922. The family stood out in the WASPy neighborhood: “I was different than everybody else. We had different food. My mother usually spoke in a different language--Yiddish--and her English was accented.” Being Jewish and the daughter of immigrants “may explain why it was very easy for me to be empathetic to people who were also ‘the other.’ ”

A few weeks after Shibley’s visit, McGrath was well enough to attend the trial that had become known as the Sleepy Lagoon case. What she saw appalled her. “It was so much worse when you saw the expression of Judge [Charles W.] Fricke. He despised the defendants. He insulted Shibley. If the prosecutor made an incorrect motion, Fricke would rephrase the motion and grant it.”

Even before the trial, a sheriff’s official had told a grand jury that Mexicans had an inbred desire “to kill, or at least, let blood.” The sensationalistic local press advocated a get-tough approach against Mexican American gang members, known as pachucos. The accused men had hung out together and were identified loosely as the “38th Street Gang,” but they were hardly hard-core gang members. Yet newspaper accounts of the trial labeled them “zoot suit gangsters” in derisive reference to the attire popular with some of them.

During the three-month trial, Shibley registered his objections that the defendants were kept at one side of the courtroom and were barred from consulting with their lawyers. Fricke ignored his complaints. In January 1943, an all-white jury convicted 17 of the 22 defendants, five of them for assault. Twelve of the 17 were found guilty of first- or second-degree murder and were sent to San Quentin penitentiary.

Liberal activists and Hollywood celebrities formed a defense committee to finance an appeal. Carey McWilliams, who would later become editor of The Nation magazine, became its national chairman. At first, McGrath ran mimeograph machines and stuffed envelopes as a volunteer. When McWilliams offered her the position of committee executive secretary, she hesitated, worried that she had only a high school diploma and couldn’t even type. “I’ve never done anything like that before,” she told McWilliams.

“And now you will,” he shot back.

Pecking away at an Underwood typewriter, McGrath started putting together “The Appeal News,” which was mailed to hundreds of supporters, including Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. She was a quick study and became an expert fund-raiser and speaker, at one time addressing 1,000 longshoremen in a San Francisco union hall. Alice Greenfield had found her calling.

After the 12 men had served almost two years in jail and prison, the state Circuit Court of Appeal reversed the convictions. The court cited a lack of evidence and attacked Fricke’s actions. Denying defendants full access to lawyers was akin to moving forward “with the haste of a mob.” The case became a milestone in protecting defendants’ due-process rights and was a seminal victory for Mexican Americans, politically powerless at the time.

Fifty-two years after their release from prison, three of the 12 defendants helped McGrath celebrate her 80th birthday. There, the men recalled the happy day, Oct. 4, 1944, when they received her telegram:

“Decision reversed. Victory. Will wire details when we have them. Oh what a beautiful morning. Much love. Alice.”

Social activism is frequently a short-lived career, which makes McGrath’s years of work all the more remarkable. Searching for clues to her longevity, I tour her Ventura hillside home. The range of her causes is instantly apparent; plaques, commendations and photos hang from walls everywhere.

When McGrath begins to recount struggles from the past, her dark eyes sparkle and her hands and long silver earrings move in rhythm with her words. Years ago, when working to secure legal counsel for poor women in domestic cases, “I would take home people’s stories, really heartbreaking stories, and would worry about them and feel bad. And then I thought, ‘No, You can’t do that--you are going to burn yourself out.’ ”

So during the day, she works hard. And she worries. “After that, I have to just leave it there.”

She sets modest goals. “I work with the hope--but not the expectation--

of success.”

And she is good to herself. At the start of the day, McGrath settles in bed with her coffee and English muffin to devour Faulkner or another author. Then she’s ready to drive to one of her many volunteer projects. The end of the day is frequently marked with a nightcap: vodka, straight.

There are other interests. McGrath learned to swim at 65, and goes to the pool three times weekly for conditioning. She communicates by phone and e-mail with her daughter, Laura, an attorney in Los Angeles and son, Daniel, a paralegal in North Dakota. They were born during her first marriage to businessman Max Schechter.

She met her second husband, poet Thomas McGrath at a political fund-raiser. During the McCarthy era, Thomas McGrath was not retained as an instructor at Cal State Los Angeles because he had refused to testify before a House Un-American Activities panel. With her husband unemployed, McGrath went to work full time. Independent filmmakers hired her to arrange shooting locations for “The Savage Eye.” Later, she joined the nearly all-male ranks of sales representatives at Grove Press, a publishing house.

McGrath learned early how to maintain her focus. One such lesson came from W. E. B. DuBois, the distinguished African American author. When McGrath organized a 1954 dinner in DuBois’ honor, she also showed the civil rights leader around town and related a racist-tinged incident that had occurred in the city. That incident, she exclaimed, had made her “very angry.”

DuBois counseled her: “Your anger is appropriate, Alice. But save your energy for the work.”

And so she did.

When Daniel began self-defense training at age 9, McGrath met his instructor, Bruce Tegner, whose regimen emphasized self-assurance rather than aggressiveness. McGrath began taking classes from Tegner and she soon was helping to run his judo business. Later, they wrote some of the first paperback books in English on martial arts and established their Thor Publishing company.

After she and Tom McGrath divorced, Alice lived with Tegner. In 1977 they invited friends to their Ventura home for Alice’s 60th birthday and surprised them with an informal wedding.

McGrath, who has a brown belt for proficiency in judo movements, despised the image of women as “helpless.” So she helped introduce the teaching of self-defense to women and girls at Ventura College, using the martial arts discipline to develop self-esteem and assertiveness. After Tegner died in 1985, she continued operating their publishing business.

McGrath’s charisma, conviction and persuasiveness have attracted hundreds to her causes. Oxnard teacher Amada Irma Perez summarizes their sentiments: She “has a magic about her.”

Mcgrath first traveled to Nicaragua in 1984, eager to experience the country after Sandinista forces had toppled the long-reigning Somoza dictatorship. She met some of the Marxist-oriented Sandinista leaders and soon was taking “political tourists” there.

During one visit, she encountered a Scottish investment banker who had volunteered to work construction in Nicaragua during his vacation. It became another calling; she, too, would do what she could to help the impoverished country. Since then, she has made an average of five visits a year. Several physicians, including Dr. Greg Stidham of Memphis, were among her invited guests during a 1993 trip. Their destination was Children’s Hospital of Managua, where scores of Nicaraguan children were suffering from congenital heart disease and no specialist was available to perform the delicate surgeries they needed.

“Her contagious affection for Nicaragua and its people were nothing short of an inspiration for me,” Stidham says. Indeed, he has returned to Managua seven times, accompanied each time by 12 surgeons, nurses and technicians. They have performed 120 surgeries on children with congenital heart disease. They also have provided medical equipment and training.

McGrath’s most recent missions to Nicaragua were first contemplated in the hot tub of the Pierpoint Racket Club in Ventura. One evening, as she was talking about Nicaragua with others in the hot tub, Jan Lindsay, then president of Ventura East Rotary Club, overheard her. “Why don’t you tell our Rotary members about your work?” he asked.

Thus began an unusual--and successful--collaboration.

Funds from the Ventura East Rotary Club, supplemented by Rotary International grants, will build housing for Nicaraguans uprooted in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch’s devastation. With McGrath’s aid, the Rotarians also have approved $38,000 to aid small coffee farmers and help preserve part of the Nicaraguan rain forest.

The legal community of Ventura knows of her commitment as well. McGrath took over day-to-day management of a pro bono program sponsored by the Ventura County Bar Assn. in 1996, recruiting many attorneys to offer their services for free. More recently, working with the Mexican American Bar Assn. of Ventura, McGrath promoted a concept known as “unbundling.” Under this pilot project, a low-income client unable to hire a lawyer for an entire divorce case can retain an attorney for just one vital phase--the custody portion, for example.

“It’s fun to work with Alice,” says Lindsay. “She gets it done.”

more than 30 years after the Sleepy Lagoon case, McGrath’s life came full circle. The trial and its aftermath became art.

Luis Valdez knew that he wanted to write and produce the play that would become “Zoot Suit,” but he needed a “heart line” to make the drama work. In 1977, McGrath met with the Chicano playwright and provided key material and insight. “Alice became my link to the events,” Valdez says.

“Zoot Suit,” loosely based on Sleepy Lagoon and the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots--a weeklong period during which Mexican American youths were beaten up by servicemen--became a hit at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978. Rich with pachuco slang, swinging dance numbers and the acting of Edward James Olmos, the production moved to the Aquarius Theater in Hollywood, where it broke attendance records.

McGrath became a celebrity within the Chicano community. I first met her at one of her appearances as she shuttled from one Mexican American gathering to another. At her talks, she was always gracious, reminding listeners that credit for the Sleepy Lagoon victory should focus not on her, but on the entire defense committee and on Shibley, attorney Ben Margolis and the other lawyers.

When the play was most recently revived, in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in the summer of 2000, McGrath was there on opening night. She never ceases to be moved by the play and the events it portrays. It evokes the same sense of compassion she first felt at Washington High School.

Speaking about the beneficiaries of her activism, she repeats a sentiment spoken by the character Alice onstage: “If they lose, I lose. We all lose. I am not Lady Charity trying to help the Mexicans--I am doing this for us.”