Volunteers Love Their Beat: an LAPD Station

Billie Mae O’Donnell just wants to help. She certainly doesn’t want to get in anyone’s way.

That’s why, when she heads to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire station three mornings a week, she packs her own supplies.

So she doesn’t have to ask, she takes a plastic bag full of pencils, pens and markers. Because the station can get chilly, she carries a cardigan. In case she needs to work past her regular quitting time, which is before lunch, she packs crackers. Sometimes she needs them.

There is no shortage of work for the 72-year-old, who sorts and files piles of paperwork so the officers and detectives can do more important things.

O’Donnell has been volunteering at the station for 13 years. She’s one of a dozen retirees who started donating their time because they wanted to give back to their community. But they’ve stayed for other reasons.

“The officers are like all my kids. You kind of feel like family,” said Ruth Goldman, who has volunteered for 17 years and routinely brings Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts for detectives.

Det. Josh Cho, who usually keeps two or three boxes stored safely in his desk drawer, is grateful: “Goobers are hard to find,” he said with a smile.

Goldman says she likes doing things for the officers.

“I feel like they need me. I know that I release those officers to do what they need to do,” said Goldman, 77, who started volunteering because she just wanted to get out of the house every week. “When you’ve worked your whole life and you don’t have to work anymore, the feeling I had is that I’m kind of useless now.”

O’Donnell agreed: “We all need to be busy, especially when we’re older.”

A self-described perfectionist, O’Donnell arrives at the station each day dressed in a Pendleton skirt with color-coordinated high heels and sweater. She has a weekly appointment to get her hair done. And she always wears a small angel pin that bears two sapphires, her birthstone.

Sometimes she takes in cymbidiums that she and her husband grow, and she hands them out as she makes her way from the entrance to her desk. Even though that distance is only about 50 feet, the walk usually takes her 15 minutes or so, because she stops to chat with just about everyone she encounters.

In January, much of that talk was about her friend and co-volunteer Ann Angione Ray, who had been hospitalized. The two women met at the Wilshire station when O’Donnell started volunteering there. They quickly hit it off and soon started going shopping and having lunch together. (Sandwiches and soups at Nordstrom were their favorite combination.)

Ray kept up her volunteer work until early January. She died at the end of that month. She was 91.

Among about 60 people who attended her memorial service in early February were a dozen Wilshire station detectives, who had known and adored her for 18 years.

During the weeks when Ray was in the hospital, detectives and staff frequently swapped stories about her. They laughed when someone brought up the time she jumped over the detectives’ front counter because no one was there to buzz her in. She was, after all, only 5 feet 1.

More than one person called her a “firecracker,” because she was always full of energy and never feared telling anyone, not even lieutenants or captains, what was on her mind.

They talked about her stories -- of her work as a psychiatric social worker with the Red Cross during World War II -- and the service award she received from the state attorney general’s office a few months before her death.

They also talked of other volunteers the station had lost over the years, about how there were once about 50 of them.

“Remember Harold?” they asked one another.

Several years ago, Lt. Douglas Miller had to ask Harold Kramer to stop coming in for a few months. Kramer, who was in his late 80s, would sometimes lose his balance, slip and fall. That became a problem, Miller said, during a station remodel, when construction equipment was strewn throughout the building.

“Basically, for his own good and to keep him out of harm’s way, I had to advise him that it would be in his best interest to hold off on coming in until construction was finished,” Miller said. “He was very, very upset. It was part of his routine. He called and called, but I couldn’t relent because it was just too much of a safety factor.”

Kramer never returned. He died before construction ended.

Shirley McGurk, 77, started volunteering at the station in the late 1960s. Then in 1987, she and her husband moved from Hidden Hills to Newport Beach. For a while, she made the 65-mile drive north to the station every Wednesday. She stopped only after she hurt her back and the trip got too hard for her.

But though she’s been away nearly 20 years, she still likes to stay in the loop. A few times a year, she talks to O’Donnell, who tells her the latest.

“I haven’t been back there in a long time, but I miss them,” McGurk said recently.

For 10 years, Gene Costin has been answering the phone and fielding questions at the station’s front desk. He always wears a tie and sport coat. And in his jacket pocket, he carries a pen he’s owned for 10 years. (He prefers a pencil so he can erase mistakes, he says. The pen is for station visitors, when they ask him for one.)

Not long after he started, he made an alphabetized reference guide. Under “C” is “cellphone, lost or stolen.” Under “D” is “domestic violence.”

“I’m a little bit of an organizer and a control freak,” he said, adding that he thinks his system has made things easier for everyone.

“There are issues that come up at the front office that officers didn’t know or wouldn’t think that they would have to know,” Costin, 78, said.

What keeps him coming back every week, he said, is knowing that he’s helping people in his community.

“You’re very often a counselor,” he said.

Once, a woman from New Jersey called because her friend, a Los Angeles resident with whom she spoke every day, was not picking up her phone. Costin sent a patrol unit to the L.A. woman’s home, where officers discovered that she had lost her hearing aid. Costin then called the woman on the East Coast and reassured her that her friend was fine.

A few days later, a package arrived at the Wilshire station, bearing a postmark from New Jersey. It was full of homemade cupcakes and addressed to Costin.