Accomplishing a Lot With a Little Help

Over in an old mobile home park tucked between the Long Beach Freeway and the Los Angeles River, 50 Cal State Long Beach students are rolling fresh coats of off-white paint on half a dozen units belonging to elderly, disabled tenants.

There, too, sales manager Kirsten Larsen is painting a ceiling, financial advisor Chris Young is sawing wood for stairs, building contractor Pete Glaeser is shoring up a sagging porch, and commercial real estate consultant Amy Witten is leading Cal State Long Beach President Robert Maxson on a tour of the improvements.

Is this any way to run a mobile home park?

It is -- at the 135-unit Del Amo Mobile Home Park, the hottest place in Long Beach these days for good Samaritans. Over the last year, roughly 365 volunteers have arrived in waves to fix faulty wiring, patch leaking roofs and put up mailboxes.

Park residents still talk about 18-year-old Boy Scout Adam Hass, who earned his Eagle Court of Honor by leading a group of 25 youths who in April installed 49 smoke detectors in 25 Del Amo homes.

A week later, a woman with Alzheimer’s disease put a pot of food on her stove and forgot about it. Her new alarm went off in time to save that home, and possibly others.

“I wanted to do something that would make a big difference in someone’s life,” said Hass, a volunteer member of the Long Beach Fire Department’s search and rescue team. “Everything worked out great.”

It all started when Del Amo manager Betty Sundberg called a Long Beach senior center to see what free assistance, if any, might be available for her lowest-income tenants with health problems.

Her question was forwarded to the local branch of the nonprofit Rebuilding Together, one of the nation’s largest volunteer home-rehabilitation groups.

Since 1993, Rebuilding Together Long Beach, formerly known as Christmas in April, has been providing renovation work across town without charge.The group’s track record over the last decade includes rehabilitating 169 sites, an estimated 5,600 hours of work by the volunteers.

The efforts have stretched the organization’s resources to the limit.

“We have to do a better job of asking for donations ourselves,” said Witten, president of the organization. “There are a lot of poor folks in Long Beach who could use our help. But right now we can’t even afford a paid staff member to coordinate the work.”

Nonetheless, Witten sent Sundberg a batch of applications for assistance, which she dutifully distributed among the most needy -- people such as a 71-year-old woman who has lupus, diabetes, high blood pressure and a heart condition; and a 73-year-old widower recovering from colon cancer surgery.

Sitting at her desk, Sundberg said, “Truth is, we expected nothing in return for all those applications. Instead, we were blessed with armies of angels.”

The help started descending in April when 275 volunteers arrived with hammers, paintbrushes, paint and trash barrels. They fixed up 12 homes.

Around the same time, Hass installed the fire alarms. “When we thanked him,” Sundberg said, “he just shrugged and said, ‘That’s what it’s all about.’ ”

But on a recent Saturday, when the mobile home park was again teeming with about 200 volunteers from Witten’s group and Cal State Long Beach, contractor Glaeser, 44, put it another way.

“The way I see it,” he said after scraping peeling paint off a unit shared by Norma Reed, 73, and her Jack Russell terrier, Mrs. Murphy Brown, “we’re making a deposit in the Bank of Goodwill. The folks who live here are making a few withdrawals.”

Reed was severely tested five years ago when a youth who was riding on a shopping cart in a grocery store ran over her foot. The injuries she suffered led to complications and amputation.

For now, “This new paint is definitely going to brighten up my whole life,” she said, “and that means the whole world as well.”

It was a cloudy morning, with threatening skies, as Reed puttered around her kitchen, preparing a cup of hot tea for Glaeser as he worked outside. “I just hope Pete doesn’t catch cold out there,” she said.

In fact, Glaeser already had a doozy of a cold. Splattered with paint chips and mud, he pressed on with a mantra: “If everybody helps a little, a lot can be accomplished.”

Cal State Long Beach recreation major Jamie Knutsen, 26, got more than she came for when an ailing mobile home owner peeked out of her door, smiled and said, “Thank you.”

“After this, I’ll wash the paint off and go to my other job as a night waitress,” Knutsen said, layering beige paint on some exterior plumbing. “I go to college on my lunch break.”

Across the street, a neighbor stood at her screen door with a mug of coffee, just staring in awe at all the do-gooders.

“Wow!” she said. “These kids. Great. Marvelous. I mean, gee whiz!”

As the work wound down, Sundberg recalled that other mobile home park managers have called demanding to know: “What makes your place so special? What did you have do to get all that help?”

“I just asked for it,” she tells them.