Circle of Hope for Troubled Youths

Signs of the holidays aren’t always obvious in the Southland -- no snowy landscapes in most places -- but there’s one never-miss clue: Della Robbia wreaths from the Boys Republic.

Della Robbia wreaths hang on doors and mantels from here to the White House, which has decorated with them every Christmas since the Calvin Coolidge administration.

Boys Republic, a private, nonprofit group home in Chino Hills, has educated, disciplined and guided delinquent youths for nearly a century. Serving sentences for auto theft, burglary, vandalism and possession or sale of drugs, residents stay for an average of nine months. The facility, which does not have fences or locked doors, houses about 168 youths between the ages of 13 and 18.

Among the alumni are actor Steve McQueen and John Babcock, an award-winning Los Angeles television journalist and former executive for KABC-TV Channel 7 Eyewitness News.

McQueen, who died in 1980, credited the institution with changing the direction of his life and “making a man of me.” His childhood was lonely, insecure and troubled until he had a minor scrape with the law and wound up at Boys Republic.

Babcock, who died in 1997, said in a 1987 Herald Examiner article that Boys Republic kept him out of prison: “I figured out very early that it was better to make Della Robbia wreaths then than license plates later.”

Work on this year’s wreaths began in January. The youths make weekly trips around the Southland, gathering liquidambar seed pods from Claremont streets and scouring the desert for beans fallen from mesquite trees. The natural decorations are cleaned, dried and wired to green plastic frames. As the holidays approach, the wreaths are adorned with fresh greenery and fruit and sprayed with clear lacquer.

Then, for three weeks, delivery trucks pull up to the “Pod Barn” and haul away about 3,000 wreaths a day. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, nearly 50,000 wreaths will have been shipped throughout the United States and to 17 foreign countries.

“We’re not in the wreath business,” said Jerry Marcotte, development director at Boys Republic. “But the wreaths are our primary means of introducing the public to our work with disadvantaged kids.”

The proceeds help defray the cost of running the institution, where youths attend a campus high school that is part of the Chino Unified School District. They gather academic work experience on the wreath project and other programs, including raising crops to feed beef cattle on their 200-acre ranch.

Aside from the main campus in Chino Hills, which makes the wreaths, smaller residential centers operate in Los Angeles, Pomona and Santa Ana. The organization also operates a Girls Republic in Monrovia.

Boys Republic began as the California Junior Republic in 1907, when juvenile courts were a new concept in Los Angeles County. Judge Curtis Wilbur -- a Sunday school teacher, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court and future Navy secretary and justice of the California Supreme Court -- organized a group of Angelenos to find a way to treat young offenders without jail.

The project was aided by Pasadena philanthropist Margaret Fowler, a former teacher and one of the original trustees of Scripps College, who donated $10,000 in seed money.

Boys Republic opened at the Boom Hotel near Mission San Fernando and was modeled after the George Junior Republic in Freeville, N.Y., whose founder, William Reuben George, believed in building leadership through self-governance. His motto: “Nothing without labor.”

This Victorian hotel with a leaky roof housed the first 13 troubled teenage boys who worked, went to school and were paid for their labor. The group elected a mayor and council who made and enforced laws. The practice is maintained to this day, hence the name “Republic.”

“Through accountability, the boys learn responsibility and govern themselves,” Marcotte said. “Students are encouraged under the supervision of adult professionals to evaluate and guide each other toward appropriate behavior.”

In 1909, Fowler bought a 200-acre ranch in Chino Hills for Boys Republic. On a nearby hillside she built her own country villa, Casa Colina, where she entertained friends and society groups. She introduced visitors to the boys, then asked them to donate to the program.

Father Edward Flanagan, who coined the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a bad boy,” visited Fowler and picked up ideas for his famous Nebraska Boys Town, founded in 1917.

Fowler hired architect Myron Hunt to design the school grounds, which began with two wooden cottages housing up to 25 boys each.

On a trip to Italy in 1922, Fowler admired the colorful Della Robbia glazed terra cottas decorated with garlands of fruits and flowers, which were created by the Della Robbia family in the 15th century. She returned to California with an idea: producing fresh wreaths patterned after the artworks to help publicize Boys Republic.

The first year, 1923, boys peddled wreaths on street corners and door to door, selling only a dozen. But within little more than a decade, the school was filling thousands of orders and bringing in $3,000 profit from sales through many of Fowler’s philanthropic organizations.

An original Della Robbia sculpture, “Madonna and Child,” is enshrined in the school’s chapel. It was donated in 1950 by a group of sponsors, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan.

After Fowler’s death in 1931, Casa Colina became a rehabilitation center for polio patients and others until it was torn down in the 1950s, Marcotte said. The name continues; it is a renowned rehab center in Pomona, with centers around the Southland.

Alumnus McQueen had been abandoned by his father and left to fend for himself by his mother. In 1944, at the age of 14, he was declared incorrigible by the courts and sent to Boys Republic for 18 months. It was just the chance he needed to turn his life around.

He went on to star in such movies as “The Blob,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape” and “Bullitt,” as well as the popular 1950s CBS-TV Western series “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

Over the years, McQueen often returned to Boys Republic. He sat on the floor of his former cottage and talked for hours with the boys, then shot pool with them. He established a scholarship fund for Republic “youngsters who want to go to college,” he told The Times in 1963, because “I never did.”

The recreation center was dedicated to McQueen in 1983, three years after his death. A bronze plaque pays tribute to the tough-guy icon, reading, in part:

“Steve McQueen came here as a troubled boy but left here a man.... His legacy is hope and inspiration to those students here now, and those yet to come.”

“When Steve McQueen was in the hospital in Mexico [in 1980] being treated for cancer, a doctor said he kept saying the number 3,188 over and over again,” Marcotte said.

“It was his Boys Republic [identification] number. He was the 3,188th boy admitted to the school. Now we are above the 25,000 mark.”

One of the current residents is Jonathan, 17, a former El Monte gang member who was recently elected mayor.

“I campaigned with fliers, a DVD video and in speeches, promising I’d still be the same kid ... and I’d always be there for them to talk to,” he said in an interview. Jonathan asked that his last name not be used.

“I once went by my own rules, partying, doing my own thing,” Jonathan said. “Now I tell these guys that no matter what, you’ve got to go by someone’s rules.”

The wreaths, which sell for $41.95 and $62.95, are available at www.boysrepublic.org.