Steady Growth : Despite Cold Calls and Cold Shoulders, a Fledgling Activist Fights Blight

Dolores Reece is learning. About such things as “networking,” a word she mouths like a foreign phrase. She’s learning that “it’s not what you know, but who you know.”

She sounds disgusted when talking about mostly futile attempts to get government and business leaders to pay attention to neighborhood projects and problems: “There’s language I’m learning big business and politicians use: ‘It’s been falling through the cracks.’ I’m not accustomed to people saying they’ll call back and don’t; that they’ll do something and don’t. That’s not the way I came up.”

People she vaguely refers to as “the powers that be”--politicians, corporate executives, foundation brahmans and media moguls--do not leave instructions that her calls are to be put through or else.

Table hopping at fund-raising galas or the laying-on of business cards at power breakfasts are not her world or style. Her idea of doing lunch is sitting under a shade tree with a glass of lemonade and a sandwich.

Dolores Reece, fledgling activist, is learning how to get things done when goodwill and perseverance must substitute for the right Rolodex.

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During the past five years, the 60-year-old retired social service worker has steadily blossomed into a dedicated urban environmentalist and neighborhood advocate.

“The older I get, the more I see it’s easy to criticize, (and it’s) another thing to do something about what’s happening,” Reece says.

She believes in giving something back. The something , in her case, is “tender loving care to these neglected and forgotten neighborhoods.” Most often it involves trees.

For a start, she took TreePeople’s citizen forester course in 1987. TreePeople President Andy Lipkis calls Reece “a perfect example of what we’re here for. She takes responsibility, develops leadership and is making an impact on her community.”

Last year she formed her own nonprofit corporation, Green Islands in the City. A tree hugger if ever there was one, her goal is to get more people of color, like herself, involved in the environment.

She also is active--a driving force others call her--in Neighbors United, a block association of homeowners behind Kaiser Permanente Hospital, north of the Santa Monica Freeway between La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.

The homeowners are proud of their integrated neighborhood. But in a time of decreasing city services, they fight a constant battle against graffiti, vandalism and crime.

With Reece as a major goad, Neighbors United and the nearby Crestview Neighborhood Assn. implore the merchants on La Cienega to do their share to keep the commercial area clean and safe, and to beautify it.

Only recently, she says, have they seen their efforts pay off. When Reece and her neighbors tried to get the owners’ and the city’s attention about conditions there, she got her introduction to things “falling through the cracks.”

Reece has a thick file of letters she sent that earned no response. She has an even larger mental notebook of phone calls that either weren’t returned or got the “we’ll get back to you” treatment.

Still, she persists.

Ayn Marie Carrillo, coordinator of the local Model Neighborhood program that Kaiser Permanente funds, has worked with Reece on local issues. Although Carrillo has found her “hard to please,” she has a high regard for Reece:

“She does a lot more for the community than some of our (city) council people. And with no pay.”

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The sun scorches the 5900 block of Sawyer Street so relentlessly that 9:30 a.m. feels like high noon. Reece and a handful of neighbors have arrived to weed, water and remove glass from the blocklong stretch of city property behind KRTH radio station’s fenced back lot.

The vacant lot is a magnet for bottles and trash. Some debris falls short of the fence and lies strewn on the sidewalk and among the 21 slender Bradford pear trees that Reece planted in 1988 on the dirt strip.

The workers are a mixed group--by age, race and affiliation. There are some from Neighbors United, others from Green Islands, and three soon-to-arrive volunteer workers from the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light alcohol recovery program.

Convinced, Reece says, that “there is nothing more soothing to the human soul than digging in God’s earth,” she had asked Harbor Light for volunteers and offered transportation, lunch and the opportunity “to change their environment and change the environment.”

The pear trees--Reece’s first planting--remain her pride and joy.

And heartache.

Right away, vandals nearly destroyed nine trees. The city replaced them and Reece took the wounded home to nurture. When vandals struck again, she replanted the healed trees.

“I cried,” she says flatly. “A lot of my neighbors were real sad. There’s no rhyme or reason. A beautiful living thing, beneficial to everyone? I don’t get it.”

Looking up from the tedium of picking glass shards from pebbly soil, Nancy Fuller says that while many neighbors feel responsibility, Reece is the catalyst who brings them together: “Otherwise we’d walk around complaining or doing our individual things.”

As Reece pours water around a bed of gazanias, she says that she and Fuller planted them on the second morning of the riots. Reece had spotted the sign Fuller had put on her lawn, a yin-yang symbol with the message, “Stop fighting; start fixing.”

The two women--one black, one white--walked over to Sawyer Street and planted the flowers.

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A third-generation Californian, Dolores Reece grew up in a big house with a yard on East 45th Street near Central Avenue.

“When I was a kid, my grandfather was in on the planning to get blacks into Kress (variety store) on Central Avenue. They (employees) were all white in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I remember them”--her grandfather and others--”sitting at the kitchen table strategizing. My community and my surroundings have always been an integral part of my life,” she says.

In the small den of her current surroundings, a Spanish-style home she bought in 1972, the Audubon Society’s tree guide sits near her chair. Piles of papers and manila folders are everywhere, and a big typewriter claims most of the kitchen table.

Reece laments her lack of a computer and a fax machine and mentions that she needs management training. Hearing her drift, she cuts herself off with “I need! I need! I need!”

Although she has always believed in “giving something back,” Reece, the mother of two adult children, didn’t have time until she retired after 30 years with the Social Security Administration.

Her work, she says, is more than just about trees. It’s about urban poor people and people of color.

“It has been most devastating to me to see how the city has deteriorated. When I go back to my old neighborhood, it just hurts my soul. I could cry about it right now,” she says, her eyes filling.

“I don’t think it’s that people don’t care. I think it’s the powers that be. Whenever there’s a reduction in services due to lack of funds, they say, ‘Well, we can start over where they live, because this doesn’t matter to them. They don’t care.’ ”

They?

“People of color. In those areas, people are so busy scratching for a living they don’t know they can demand: ‘You come here: pick up the trash; sweep the street. We pay taxes. Don’t neglect us.’ ”

After her TreePeople course, Reece identified nearby “neglected and forgotten” spots. Now, there are the pear trees on Sawyer, the jacarandas on Guthrie, the liquidambar on the traffic island at Genesee and Fairfax . . .

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Reece’s first appeals to merchants for money to plant trees were the written equivalent of “cold calls.” To most she was a stranger with no connections; she netted only one or two replies, which wished her luck but sent no money.

But when she called Bob Kanner, chief engineer at KRTH, which had supported community efforts in the past, she learned a lesson. He offered to buy her some trees, explaining that it would be easier on the books, she says: “This is when the light went on: This big company cannot write a check to Dolores Reece no matter how wonderful they think my project is.”

Thus she formed Green Islands in the City. So far, it consists of Reece, a board of grass-roots activists and environmental types, a logo, some letterhead and business cards.

And, she says, she is learning to ask: “It isn’t easy. ‘No’ knocks me down for two or three days.”

But sometimes people say yes. Reece has Anthony and Cornella Green watering two trees outside their Sir Speedy print shop on La Cienega. “We water every Thursday,” says Anthony Green, who also has donated to Green Islands. “She’s a very determined woman. I appreciate what she’s doing.”

Green Islands volunteers, joined by the local block clubs, have walked La Cienega, Reece says, with spotty success: “What we’ve done--we stop and weed the tree wells, give them water and plant flowers around. We ask the merchants to adopt a tree and give them a certificate.”

And she has her eyes on some of the $2.75 million in federal beautification funds that have been earmarked for the city. She would like to tie in with Rebuild L.A.

“I need staffing. I started as a one-woman, little grass-roots thing, but I’m realizing I can’t do it all myself,” she says. “There’s much more to it than digging a hole, planting a tree and giving it tender loving care, I’m finding out. There’s business management.”

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Dolores Reece has a certain way of looking at the city. Some visions may be pipe dreams, but they’re tangible to her. She admits she wants everything “like yesterday.”

She looks at an abandoned traffic median and sees “a beautiful meditation walk.”

Walking through Ward Plaza on La Cienega, a shopping center that she and several neighborhood groups have been dogging for several years for improvements, Reece looks at a small traffic divider in the parking lot and asks, “Why isn’t this planted?”

She spots an old greenhouse “going to seed” near Crenshaw High School and sees a horticulture program: “Those students could use those skills to give back to our community, to take care of what we have here.”

Reece has not approached L.A. Unified about that yet. She’s looking for an entree, she says, and knows that the budgetary crisis is no time to propose “a half-assed scheme.” For the time being, she is just “fact finding.”

On a recent weekday morning, she arrives at the Alcoholism Center for Women, a compound of two stately Victorian mansions on a decaying section of Alvarado near Pico. The center recently restored the mansions with a Community Redevelopment Assn. loan, but has no money for landscaping, director Brenda Underhill says.

But Reece contacted them, saying, “Let me plant trees in your front yard.”

She must raise money for this project, but donated items have already come in--30 bags of grow mulch have arrived from Kellogg Supply. Green Islands will plant trees and install a drip system.

And, Reece says, pointing to the brown wrought iron fence, closing her eyes and smiling with enchantment: “I thought yellow climbing roses would just accent it.”