Altadena fire destroys house of one who helps homeless

Steve Lopez, Tribune News Service

His job, for more than a decade, has been to steer homeless people into housing. Last week, social worker Anthony Ruffin lost his home. On Monday morning, still reeling five days after the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, Ruffin, 56, sipped coffee at a Glendale diner, wiped his eyes, and described the historic Black neighbourhood where he has spent much of his life. “I’d take walks, knock on doors, say ‘hi’ to people’s moms... go to people’s houses and grab a sandwich from their mother,” Ruffin recalled. “‘Miss Lee, how you doing? Miss Phillips, can you make me a Seven-Up cake like you used to when I was young? Hi Mr. King.’ Robert, across the street — I’d sit there for hours and talk to him.”

Ruffin grew up in a two-bed, one-bath house on West Palm Street, just above West Altadena Street between Lincoln and Fair Oaks avenues, which he later bought from his parents. As someone who confronts so much suffering on a daily basis as part of his job, Ruffin established a morning ritual in which he’d wake up early and sit in the yard, gaze up at the San Gabriel Mountains, and listen to birds, all the while surrounded by plants he’d named for homeless clients to whom he’d become particularly attached. “It was my safe place,” he said. Early on the morning of Jan. 8, Ruffin and his wife Jonni Miller — who is also a longtime social worker serving the homeless community — had to evacuate without time to collect precious possessions.

Handwritten letters, written to Miller by her grandmother on the day she was born, were left behind. So were the decommissioned cellphones, seven of them, on which Ruffin stored photos of hundreds of clients, along with contact information and notes thanking him for his help. Hours later, they learned that the home and everything in it was incinerated, along with much of their block and neighbourhood. “It’s terrible,” a tearful Ruffin told me near the hotel where he and Miller are staying as they try to collect themselves. Ruffin and I met more than a dozen years ago, when he was with a nonprofit called Housing Works Hollywood. He served as case manager for my friend Nathaniel Ayers, the Julliard-trained musician who was homeless in Skid Row and became known as “The Soloist.”

Those of us who know Mr. Ayers have safeguarded some of his possessions, including various musical instruments. Ruffin told me he’s been holding onto a pair of Ayers’ drumsticks for years. Last week, they were lost in the fire. At Housing Works, Ruffin’s mentor was Mollie Lowery, a legendary social worker who had also assisted Ayers, and whose motto in helping clients was adopted by Ruffin — “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.”

In 2017, Times photographer Francine Orr and I profiled Ruffin and his work with the Hollywood 14, a gravely disabled group of homeless people with severe physical and mental illness. His regulars included amputees, diabetics and drug addicts. “Some are partially paralysed,” I wrote, and “many are ghosts, their former selves barely visible in the shadows of unrelenting psychosis.” Ruffin routinely rolled out on weekends and in the middle of the night — as he still does — to check on his clients. He would kneel down on the pavement and look them in the eye, ferry them to appointments, visit them in hospitals, work tirelessly to earn their trust and try to get them into housing. Ruffin said his desire to become a social worker had a lot to do with his biological father’s struggles and homelessness. Ruffin said he wasn’t close to his father until the last years of his life, when his dad worked in downtown L.A. as a legal briefs courier. They ultimately built a belated but “beautiful relationship,” Ruffin said, telling me his father carried a briefcase that contained a copy of my story about his son the social worker.

In 1976, Ruffin was 8 when he and his mother, Myrtle Williams, moved to the Altadena home that had been purchased in 1972 by his stepfather, Carl Williams, who was a truck driver from Texas who’d found that while certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles were off-limits to Black people, the west side of Altadena was a safe haven. “We played football in the streets, played baseball in the streets, went to school on the corner,” Ruffin said of his childhood. The house was often full, he continued, with assorted relatives who needed a place to stay for a little while or maybe longer.

“It was a happy time, because there was a lot of love in that house and people just slept where they slept,” Ruffin said. “If you fell asleep in the living room on the couch, or on the floor, or in the bunk beds...that was where you slept. And there was room under the bunk beds, so someone slept there.”

Ruffin said it was not uncommon for Black men in the neighborhood, when they approached the end of their lives, to insist on taking their last breaths in their own homes. They had known segregation and housing discrimination and struggled to find jobs that paid enough for them to buy property and raise families, Ruffin said, and “they wanted to die in the homes that they built.” His mother and stepfather decided instead, upon Carl Williams’ retirement, to move to Hesperia. But still, they wanted to keep the house in the family. So Ruffin bought it from them two decades ago and set out to renovate it, careful not to alter the layout or remodel the house, but to preserve it, as a tribute to all the sweat and love his parents had invested in it.

“I worked two jobs to hold onto that property, because I knew how much it meant to my family,” Ruffin said Monday, pausing as he brushed away tears. “We really fixed the house up and got it looking really decent.”

Ruffin said his mother and stepfather, now 76 and 83, “are devastated” by the destruction. So are all the neighbors whose hearts were crushed as their foothill haven vanished. “I’ve talked to all of them,” Ruffin said. “Talked to Miss Lee. Talked to Miss Douglas, who can’t stop crying.” Ruffin and Miller also lost one of their two cats and two chickens. When they fled, they managed to gather up their adopted, one-eyed cat, Maple, (who had once been homeless in South LA), and their rescue dog, Nan (a Skid Row stray).

On Jan. 13, with their lives upended and their immediate future uncertain, Miller, who, like her husband, works on Skid Row for the County Department of Health Services, was back at work. Ruffin was taking a day off that was shaping up like many of his other days off. “I gotta meet up with somebody today who’s homeless and try to help him get into housing,” Ruffin said of a Skid Row client. “I also did that on Friday. I gotta help somebody, every day...I got my own problems, but I’m fortunate. So many of the people down there on Skid Row are dealing with addiction and homelessness and don’t have some of the resources I have. I mean, I got a motel room right now, and they don’t have that.” Ruffin, like so many others who lost homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, was also busy sorting through insurance matters and temporary housing options. He has no idea what insurance will cover or what starting over will cost, so he set up a gofundme page and said he intents to share the proceeds with neighbors.

But he knows exactly what the long-range plan is. He wants to rebuild, to the same dimensions, in the same spot. “There’s too much history there,” he said. “I want exactly the same thing. Nothing more. Nothing less.”