Scout Hits His Mark in Shooting Range Cleanup

What do you do when you’ve got only eight hours to plug 5,000 bullet holes and your work crew is standing around shooting the breeze?

One thing you don’t do is try to fire them up with the cry, “C’mon, guys, get the lead out!”

Not if you’re a 14-year-old who has lured three dozen other teenagers into helping repair and repaint a police firing range in San Pedro. Not if you don’t want your buddies to bail before the job is done.

Jesse Engelman aimed to keep everyone busy and happy as he led volunteers on a one-day blitz July 9 to spruce up the bullet-riddled range, which is open to pistol-packers from the public as well as Los Angeles police officers.

The North Gaffey Street range -- whose walls were built in the early 1900s from hand-hewn stone blocks used as ballast in 1880s sailing ships -- badly needed refurbishing.

It’s owned by the Navy but has been leased since 1943 to the city, and neither side feels obliged to pump maintenance money into it. The $5 fee charged to civilian shooters pays for any upkeep.

Police Sgt. James Smalling is its range master, and he was more than happy when Jesse volunteered to repaint the firing-line area where shooters stand.

The project would fulfill a public service requirement for the 10th-grader’s Eagle Scout rank.

Smalling became nervous when Jesse, of Rancho Palos Verdes, took a look at the shot-up public range area and said he planned to paint it too. In order to do that, he would first have to fill all of the bullet holes with plaster.

About 1,350 people -- three-fourths of whom are police officers required to practice their marksmanship -- use the range each month.

“So I could only close down the range for one day for him. I thought he’d chewed off more than he could swallow,” Smalling said. “But I said OK. We’ll see what you can do.”

The spackle that Jesse first picked to plug bullet holes at the range turned out to be a slow-setting mixture.

“The stuff took 8 1/2 hours to dry. We were going to have to put on several coats of it in some places and we only had one day to get it done. So we had to get a special fast-drying wall filler,” he said.

But that caused a different problem. “It dries in 15 minutes. The stuff was drying in the plastic picnic cups we mixed it in. The kids were taking, shall we say, personal breaks and talking, and the stuff was turning hard before it was used.”

Moving among clumps of young teens spread out over the firing line and the target range, Jesse tried to motivate his crew by explaining that the spackle compound needed to harden in bullet holes, not boys’ hands.

When that didn’t work, he cajoled: “Hey, when we finish this part, do you want lunch?”

Volunteer James Manos, 15, of Rancho Palos Verdes, acknowledged that the youngsters “were kind of hanging out” at first.

“Jesse said, ‘Let’s get this finished and we can hang out afterward.’ That worked,” James said.

Contributions from area businesses covered the plaster and paint as well as the sandwiches and hot dogs that were served for lunch.

In the end, some of the volunteers stayed an extra two hours to help Jesse finish the job so the range could reopen the next day.

“It was a huge project to try to do in one day,” said Jesse’s mother, Asami Engelman. Although the range had been riddled by lead bullets, she said she was not worried about possible lead poisoning because a lead-removal service had cleaned the range the day before.

Police use six of the range’s 18 shooting alleys. Except for damage to a wall next to the target area, the young repair crew found the officers’ area virtually unscathed by stray bullets.

But “the public side was almost scary,” Jesse said. “There were bullet holes everywhere. Some holes were only 10 feet away from where the shooters stand. There were huge pieces of posts and beams that were shot away and missing.”

Smalling said he talked Jesse out of painting the police officers’ range area because of the amount of work needed in the public area. He said Jesse’s scoutmaster has suggested that minor patching and the repainting of the police side can be another troop project.

But that can wait, the police sergeant said. Jesse and his friends aimed high, he said, but they scored a bull’s-eye.