Los Angeles Times, Article collection Private Lives, Public Places Saving Society in 10 Minutes a Month March 27, 1990|LINDA BLANDFORD It is the absences that stand out first in the Crenshaw Area Probation Office: no guards, no police, no quarrels or tantrums. Department stores feel tenser on a busy day. The waiting room is quiet but cozy, too. Families show up together. Small children are cuddled on laps. Old men shuffle in on canes. Young couples giggle privately in the back row. A tough guy with shades greets an old friend from Bible study classes. Men sleep in hand-me-downs; women rest swollen feet. My clients--have mercy on them!" says Chalmetta Johnson, deputy probation officer. "Most of them were just caught up in something they didn't know what to do with." What do we think a probation officer does? When the court hands out two years probation, sentence suspended, when it decrees no mixing with known narcotic users, criminals, guns, whatever--whom do we imagine will be there to nurture, heal, watch over, to lead back to righteousness and Wheaties for breakfast? Chalmetta Johnson puts her bony elbows on the desk and stares at the young man fidgeting with excuses before her. Love, defiance and sorrow are in her eyes. "Now, you and I are not strangers. We've been looking at each other's faces for a while and I'm as serious as a heart attack. If you don't have a job, then how are you living? I can't hardly live--and I'm working." She has had 30 years of this, holding faith that in 10 minutes or so once a month, she can actually make a difference. To the pimply 23-year-old with a wife and, now, a fourth child, she urges prophylactics. ("My clients understand 'rubbers' but 'prophylactics' exposes them to the beauty of the English language.") To the homeless boy with a racking cough: "Are you eating enough? Now, how are we going to get you juice, juice, juice?" The hungry, the poor, the huddled masses to which were promised something better: "I know this is wrong of me," she says, "but I can't see that it's all their fault." What jobs are there for a 37-year-old American who can neither read nor write, must support his mother and now has a conviction? How do you pay back society's restitution fund when your pockets are empty? Private Lives, Public Places Saving Society in 10 Minutes a Month March 27, 1990|LINDA BLANDFORD (Page 2 of 2) Chalmetta Johnson was born in another time and place, in the South, a time of riding the back of the bus, of domestic service and hungry fear. She fought her way to college: "I knew I was going, I just didn't know how to get there." She dreamed of teaching school, and when she followed her husband to California in 1958, she found she could not afford the extra courses for state qualification. "I found this job, and thank God I did because I love it." Is she tired? Of course she is tired: years of long days in an airless office, of giving her heart to hundreds at a time, of raising a daughter alone and sending her through college--and still, somehow, she believes that lives can be made right. Something personal came between her and the Lord at some point; the faith that sustains her now is a rock-bottom, bared-to-the-bone love. $477 a week take-home pay, nearly 250 cases to manage alone since Proposition 13--and still she goes back and forth on stiff and dragging legs, from waiting room to interview cubicle, gathering clients to save and render wholesome as if the world could care. "Honey," she says, "taxpayers do not consider it to the best advantage to take care of crooks, or pamper them, or whatever they think we do. If it doesn't fit, throw it away." Not everyone works her way. The endless chits of paper, forms and folders, rotten backs and bad nerves, the rituals of order over chaos--they are all there to hide behind. But for her brief minutes with them, Chalmetta Johnson reaches out to those before her: mother, nanny, seducer, teacher, voice of love and law. Does she not ever rail against a society that crushes men thus? "If there's some place better," she says with a wrenching smile, "I sure don't know about it."