Community Draws Excitement From a World of Experience

Paul Kittlaus went to Chiapas to build a pigsty for a village in the emerald mountains around San Cristobal de las Casas. The work gave the then-64-year-old minister and his wife, a university administrator, a chance to help the peasants in their ongoing struggle against the Mexican government.

It also steered the couple into an ominous collision with authorities. One night, immigration agents summoned them and other church members to headquarters, confiscated their passports and interrogated them for hours about possible ties to armed rebels. Eventually, the authorities let them go.

A year or so later, Kittlaus moved to the Pilgrim Place retirement community in Claremont and was invited to speak about Chiapas to a group of fellow residents. As a newcomer, he thought his experience would be a fascinating anecdote for the audience.

He was wrong.

This, he soon learned, was a different cast of retirees--ones not so easily impressed by two-week adventures and a mere one-night detention.

Among those gathered before him that day was the female missionary who had spent two years in solitary confinement in China. There was the couple who had escaped from a World War II Japanese concentration camp in the Philippines. And the former Jesuit priest who, among many personal crusades, had helped free a Salvadoran journalist from the repressive, U.S.-backed government there in the 1980s.

And yes, there was the pair of Baptists who spent decades in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, rescuing prostitutes from brothels, promoting local crafts and studying Burmese languages.

Since its founding 85 years ago by the Congregational Church, Pilgrim Place has become a refuge for retired church professionals of all denominations who have devoted themselves to social justice around the world. About 320 people live on the 34-acre campus, renting 185 small, Spanish-style homes and apartments set on meandering roads just west of Claremont’s village district.

Don’t expect to find the Christian Right here. The name Jesse Helms invites nothing but sneers. Indeed, the conversations in the dining room and auditorium are intellectual and mostly leftist. “It is sometimes said there are a few closet Republicans here,” said Paul Lewis, a 76-year-old American Baptist minister with a doctorate in anthropology who put the Burmese hill-tribe languages of Lahu and Akha into writing.

People don’t move to Pilgrim Place to sit in front of the television. They invite speakers to discuss economics, agriculture, globalization, world affairs, genetics and philosophy. At lunch every day, the residents are assigned to eat with different people to keep the discussions fresh, and to stimulate the oldest residents.

“For some of the less able, their world gets smaller and smaller,” said Sue Likens, spokeswoman for Pilgrim Place. “So the dining room is where they come to hear the latest thinking and what’s going on in the world.”

While a nursing home and assisted living are available, many Pilgrims remain active. They ride bikes. They produce a cable television show and write books. They make oven-fired pottery and build furniture in the wood shop.

The products are sold at an annual festival that draws thousands. Proceeds go to residents who, on their own, couldn’t afford to live at Pilgrim Place and whose names are confidential.

Built 32 miles east of Los Angeles by Congregationalists for missionaries on furloughs, Pilgrim Place now has a waiting list to get in. Most residents are Protestant and they must have done church work of some sort for 20 years. Priority is given to those who have done overseas missionary work. Rent can run from $380 to $1,600 a month.

Management tries to ensure that Pilgrim Place remains a true community. Applicants are urged to move there when they first turn 65 so there is a constant influx of younger retirees to balance those who are in their 90s and older. Newcomers must show how they will complement the place, whether that means by joining political organizations, helping in local schools or taking part in one of the numerous committees.

The result is a group of elders who can be more radically charged than the students at the nearby Claremont Colleges. Last year, for example, the fatal police shooting of a black motorist rocked the normally quiet, tree-lined town. Protesters rallied at City Hall every week, saying the killing was unjustified. The police, meanwhile, argued that the victim had pointed a gun at them, and were widely supported by the town’s establishment.

But when the city manager designated the two officers involved in the incident as employees of the year, at least 113 residents of Pilgrim Place were outraged. They signed a letter calling his actions “extremely unfortunate and appallingly insensitive.”

The letter was written by Thomas Ambrogi, 70, one of the first Catholics to enter Pilgrim Place, although he prefers to call himself a “trans-denominational Christian with roots in the Catholic tradition.”

It is no surprise to anybody that he would write such a letter. As a Jesuit priest in the 1960s, Ambrogi became frustrated with the church’s slow-moving bureaucracy, resigned his ministry and married an ecumenical activist named Donna Myers. He then became inspired by the politically charged “liberation theology” developing among the clergy in Latin America and joined the cause, helping build refugee camps in the sun-scorched eastern valleys of El Salvador.

Since then, his life has been a series of crusades, sometimes within the church, sometimes outside it. As the San Francisco Archdiocese’s commissioner on social justice in the 1980s, he released a scathing report about how gays were viewed and treated within the Roman Catholic Church. Now he is organizing protests advocating the cancellation of Third World debt and has joined the movement against the World Trade Organization and the World Bank.

So why would such a maverick, who is not particularly fond of Southern California, move from San Francisco to retire in genteel Claremont?

“You’re stimulated around here. You’re not served and waited on here. You commit to be part of a dynamic community,” he said. “People are curious about what’s going on in the world.”

The Lewises, Paul and Elaine, feel the same way. They’re here between regular trips to Asia, where Elaine visits the women’s center and the craft market she helped establish in Thailand, and Paul continues ethnographic studies and translation for the Hani people of southwest China.

Although they are Baptists, they chose to retire at Pilgrim Place because they were attracted by its activist bent.

“This is a place where there are like-minded people concerned about issues in the world, and not just their own personal issues,” said Elaine Lewis, 78. “There’s a lot of intellectual stimulation.”