Father to 30,000 South L.A. Kids Who Have None

I’m not going to mess up Father’s Day for Lou Dantzler by talking about the odds against his kids or the war outside his door at 51st and Vermont in South Los Angeles.

He knows what’s out there as well as anyone. But why talk about it, Dantzler says, instead of doing something about it?

Way back in the 1960s, he did.

The son of a South Carolina sharecropper, Dantzler settled in Los Angeles after a tour in the Air Force, married a local beauty named Ruby, and raised 30,000 children. That’s how many youngsters have passed through the Challengers Boys & Girls Club, an oasis, an inspiration, a rebuke to gangs and dropout rates and all manner of statistical negativity.

It all began when Dantzler got home from a gardening job in 1968 -- three years after the Watts riots -- to find an 11-year-old neighbor burglarizing his house near 6th and Slauson avenues. The kid’s dad wasn’t around much, and Dantzler could identify with that. His sharecropper dad died when Lou was 7.

Instead of calling the police, Dantzler gave the boy a talking to, took him home to his mother, then invited the kid to go along on a trip to the park with his own sons the next weekend.

The 11-year-old took a liking to Dantzler and told his friends all about him, and they took a liking too, and soon Dantzler’s pickup was overloaded for his Saturday trips to the park. In 1968, the owners of Vons were so impressed with Dantzler’s work with kids that they deeded him an abandoned supermarket at 51st and Vermont for a grand total of $1.

A construction crew told Dantzler it would cost $5,000 to remove the damaged roof, and he thanked them for dropping by. Then he rounded up some volunteers who did it for free and sold the lumber for $3,000. Get the picture as to how Lou Dantzler operates and why he believes anything’s possible?

“Hi, Lou,” sang a group of kids who were making chocolate chips for their fathers and/or father figures in the home ec class at Challengers last week. They call him Lou, Mr. Lou and Papa Lou, whether they catch him in a hallway or see him duck into home ec, the computer lab or the library, where a sign says “Absolutely No Talking” until homework is finished.

That’s right. There are lots of rules. As Dantzler sees it, half the problem -- aside from the economic ruin spun by the death of manufacturing and aerospace jobs -- is the anything-goes culture in which kids, rather than parents, are in charge.

You want to be a Challenger? Bring your parent to an orientation meeting. And the parent doesn’t get a free ride. A minimum of five hours a month volunteer work is required, and parents also have to study the handbook of rules and regulations so they know what’s expected of their children.

Tuck in your shirt. Mind your mouth. Pull up your pants. None of that baggy, saggy stuff is tolerated at Dantzler’s club, and don’t dare drop a speck of anything on floors that are buffed and waxed to a blinding shine, not just because Dantzler is a neat nut, but because he thinks of his roughly 2,200 current charges -- who range from 6 to 17 -- as future royalty.

“As much discipline as there was in our house, there was twice as much love,” Dantzler says in his new book, “A Place to Go, a Place to Grow,” written with Challengers volunteer Kathleen Felesina.

As for the love, here’s what 8-year-old Aaliyah Davis has to say about the 70-year-old Dantzler:

“I call him Mr. Lou,” said Aaliyah, who speaks as if she’ll be heading straight to college after the fifth grade. “He creates a safe environment for us and he’s extremely nice, which I like, and I wish he would stay with us forever. He’s loving, understanding and caring, like a dad or a grandfather, and the other person I admire is my teacher at school who was a scientist at USC.”

But not everyone walks in that door prepped for Stanford. The majority have no father in the picture, Dantzler said, and quite a few can relate to a Challengers custodian named Wendell “Rock” Williams, a former Hoover Crip. Williams was shot five times, stabbed several more, and beaned in the head with the stone that gave him his nickname. And he’s got the dings and scars to prove it.

“I loved coming here as a kid because Lou didn’t stand for none of that gang stuff,” Williams said. “It was always safe in here.”

But Williams forgot most of what he learned and kept up the knucklehead activity after graduating from Challengers. Thirteen years ago, Dantzler offered him one more chance to go straight. He gave him a job. That’s the best way to beat the gangs, Dantzler believes. You keep stealing their recruits.

“He saved me twice,” Williams said.

Though Dantzler now has legions of fans, at least two young men grew up with somewhat mixed feelings about his long hours over the years -- his two sons, Mark and Corey. When Mark was 12 and Corey was 6, the Dantzlers moved from South L.A. to Altadena, and the brothers remember Dad leaving the house at 5:30 every morning and getting back after 7 p.m. Their mother worked, too, as an administrative assistant for a phone company.

“I was a latchkey kid,” said Corey, 37.

“I’ve been sharing my dad all my life,” said Mark, 43, who remembers coming to Challengers on occasion as a boy and seeing “all these other kids hugging him and hanging all over him.”

But when Mark and Corey got older and realized how many lives their father had touched, they let go of their jealousy and became all the prouder of him. So proud that both now work for their dad.

“All of the things he instilled in us, we now pass on to the kids,” said Mark, who was mediating a minor playground dispute at Challengers while also keeping an eye on roughly 75 other kids. Mark said he had dug up an old picture of himself, Corey and their father, and was having it framed as a Father’s Day gift.

As he told me this, his father was horsing and laughing with half a dozen kids in line for snacks, and a young man named Shawn Honore, 14, who has never seen his father, was catching a ride home to his auntie’s house.

“The most influential person in my life is NOT someone in a magazine, on a television show, in movies, an extraordinary professional athlete or an entertainer,” Shawn wrote recently in an essay contest at Challengers.

In his winning entry, Shawn said he was one of those kids who “could’ve been kicked aside.” He was in special ed classes and headed for trouble until the day his aunt drove him to 51st and Vermont, where he was told to pull up his pants.

“I said, ‘What?!’ ”

Shawn became a DJ in the Challengers’ radio studio, learned about video production and visited museums on field trips. Back at school, he went from special ed classes to the dean’s list.

“Lou is part father figure, part grandpa and part favorite uncle,” he wrote. “It is because of Lou and what I see him doing every day that I believe you can make the world a better place ... even if you have to start one community/one child at a time. Lou Dantzler is the most important person in my life.”

*

Dantzler’s new book is available in bookstores or at Amazon.com. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Challengers Boys & Girls Club.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com