HOME DELIVERY
Rodney Anderson looks forward to the future.
This future will not be the one in which he has a surprising and starring career at Cal State Fullerton then moves to the NBA, where he makes lots of money and buys his parents a house in a safe place.
There is a new house. Two new houses, actually.
But they haven’t come from NBA money.
Tonight, the Andersons will be the stars on the weekly ABC television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”
And Anderson’s future is much different from the one he had desired.
It is a future in which Anderson uses his college degree in social work to help children, to guide them with his wisdom, to cheer them up when it seems life is too unfair to deal with, to encourage them to see the good in the world and not the bad.
On March 12, 1999, Anderson was a freshman forward on the Fullerton basketball team and had taken advantage of a weekend off to go home to South Central Los Angeles and visit his family. While standing a few doors up the block from his home, Anderson was shot in the back and left a quadriplegic with minimum movement in an arm. Anderson said that the gunman bent over and apologized to him, saying he had mistaken Anderson for someone else.
So Anderson’s dreams have changed. There will be no NBA, but maybe there is something better: a college degree and a career spent counseling young men and women like the gang member who shot Anderson.
And since the shooting, Anderson and his family have found nothing but kindness in their world. An Orange County boy, Aaron Blumenthal, touched by Anderson’s story, began sending the paralyzed basketball player hand-drawn pictures and notes. Blumenthal also sent his allowance every week into a fund set up for Anderson. Blumenthal and Anderson still correspond. “Rodney just got a Christmas card from Aaron,” said Martha Anderson, Rodney’s mother.
Fullerton kept Anderson’s scholarship for him. Martha has been driving Rodney an hour each way to the Fullerton campus and has been touched by the offers from professors and students who offered the 61-year-old mother and grandmother the use of their homes during the days while she waited for her son to negotiate campus and class.
Most astoundingly, the family was selected by the cast of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” to have its modest house rebuilt.
Tonight, about 50 family members will gather to watch the episode about the Andersons.
The show sends a crew of designers and builders to rehabilitate or, in this case, rebuild, the home of a deserving family each week. The premise is that all the work is completed in seven days.
But not this time. Because the design crew decided to tear down the Anderson home and start from scratch, then build not one but two homes, the second one just for Rodney and to be equipped with an intricate voice-activated system that allows him to do things for himself, for the first time in the two-year history of the show, it took longer than seven days. It took nine days.
“It was worth the wait,” Rodney said of the home with the system that allows him to get out of bed and into his chair, and into the shower, for instance, on his own.
During the months after her son’s shooting, Martha Anderson remained convinced that because her faith was strong and her family good, Rodney would some day receive a miracle that would allow him to walk again.
That hope isn’t gone for good. But Martha and Rodney realize that different miracles have occurred.
The Anderson home on 94th Street had been built in 1911. It was small and cramped and, when Rodney came home from the hospital for good, his heavy wheelchair caused holes and cracks in the floor. By the time the “Home Makeover” crew arrived last month, Rodney was confined to residing in the living room and a tiny den that had been converted to a bedroom.
Glenda Anderson, Rodney’s oldest sister, moved into the house to help Martha care for Rodney. Glenda, 46, brought her three children -- Mellone, 19; Louis, 17, and Cortney, 12. Rodney’s father, Joseph, meanwhile had suffered his own misfortune. He was involved in a car accident resulting in several broken bones and internal injuries. Joseph is back at work for Los Angeles County, but Martha had quit her job with the Los Angeles Unified School District for good to care for Rodney.
And matters became worse about two years ago after the family received federal money designated for making improvements to homes of people with disabilities, and the contractor instead knocked holes in walls, tore off some doors and disappeared with the money.
“That was a terrible thing,” said Carl Washington, a former California assemblyman and a family friend who secretly submitted a tape of the Anderson family’s struggles over the last five years to the “Home Makeover” show. “After the issue with the contractor, I just believed in my heart something good was due this family.”
And it was a complete surprise to the Andersons when design team leader Ty Pennington and the rest of the crew knocked on the Anderson door one Sunday last month and shouted the trademark wake-up call: “Goooood morning, Anderson family!”
What has happened since, Rodney says, is more dream than reality.
“I know I live here,” Rodney said, “but it doesn’t feel like mine.”
Said Martha: “Sometimes, I have to look to see that, yes, this is our address because nothing else seems real sometimes.”
While the Andersons were sent on a vacation to the Bahamas, a volunteer construction crew gathered by Tim Ahern of Ahern Construction joined the “Home Makeover” team to do the work. Ahern recruited members of his San Fernando Valley church to help, a small detail that made Martha cry.
“We’re people of faith,” she said, “and it touched my heart that others from church heard our story and helped us.”
On the lot where once stood a single tired, sagging, small home, there are now two modern, tidy houses separated by a small pool and Jacuzzi equipped with mechanical lifts so Rodney can lower and raise himself into and out of the water.
One portion of the show was shot at a Cal State Fullerton rally held for Rodney where his No. 4 Titan jersey was retired. The gym was packed and the emotions were strong.
“Of everything,” Rodney said, “that touched my heart the most. All those people at Fullerton have been so wonderful to me.”
Preston Sharpe, a “Home Makeover” designer, said the experience in the Fullerton gym “was something I’d never experienced before. It was a moment that had to be a product of real love and respect. It showed what special people Rodney and his mother are.”
For nearly six years, Martha’s days have been filled with extraordinary physical and mental effort. She got Rodney bathed, groomed and dressed and she drove the freeways of South Los Angeles and Orange County so that her son could go to college. She loaded him in to and out of his van, helped him get to class, do his assignments.
“My mom,” Rodney said, “has sacrificed everything for me.”
Martha said, “Rodney has overcome so much tragedy to become a man we are all so very proud of.”
The houses that belong to the Anderson family are filled with many of the extra touches viewers of the show are used to. There are flat-screen televisions and state-of-the-art kitchen appliances. Martha and Joseph have their own bedroom suite that includes a bathroom.
“I’ve never had my own bathroom in my life,” Martha said. “That’s my favorite thing.”
Her bedroom has a door. “And that’s been a problem,” Martha said. “I’ve never had a door on the bedroom. People knock on it and I don’t bother to answer because no one ever had to knock before.”
Rodney said the new home is a symbol of a grand, new future.
He got teary when describing the Fullerton ceremony where a video montage of his life was shown. Former teammates Ike Harmon, Brandon Campbell and Kenroy Jarrett were in the crowd of 1,500, and junior forward Jamaal Brown took off his own jersey with the No. 4. Jarrett gave that jersey to Washington and Washington returned it to Rodney.
“That jersey will be in my heart forever,” Rodney said.
There was a final surprise for Rodney, after the houses and Jacuzzi, the four-car garage and a new van equipped for people with disabilities were presented. The television producers, in the middle of the night, threw a wedding for Rodney and his fiancee, Monique Allen, a Cal State Dominguez senior who had dated Rodney before the shooting.
Rodney said he misses basketball.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I dream of playing.”
But he holds no bitterness toward the man who shot him. Martha, who once said she wanted to move to her native Texas and away from the violence of South Central, said the family will never leave.
“We have become like a symbol here,” Martha said. “Rodney is like a beacon of hope. Kids see him and they know good things happen. Bad things too. But mostly good things.”