A spider's web of extension cords has been rigged through Phay Lok's apartment to enable the former banker to get around his home independently after suffering a stroke. Here, Lok is helped by his nurse, Nary Duong, who visits him mornings and evenings. (Stephen Carr / Press-Telegram)11/15/2006
Even after a lifetime of work, many elderly citizens of Long Beach spend their final years living in poverty.
By Greg Mellen, Staff writer
Long Beach Press Telegram
LONG BEACH - Phay Lok sits every day in his one-bedroom apartment and stares at the walls, alone with his fears and his regrets.
A once-affluent banker in the mineral-rich Pailin area of western Cambodia, a leader of men has been reduced to this.
It's not as if he has a choice. A stroke about four months ago rendered almost useless the right side of his 74-year-old body. So he sits on a ratty couch in his living room surrounded by his memories and a quiet broken only by the sounds of the outside world.
He doesn't listen to music or the radio. He doesn't watch television. He doesn't like to read. Occasionally he'll scan the mail that comes to his house. He mentions a campaign letter he received recently from President George Bush.
Lok has a nurse, Nary Duong, a Cambodian grandmother who comes to his home mornings and evenings. She receives about $1,000 a month from the state to provide in-home health care. She helps him bathe, prepares his meals, massages and treats his stricken limbs and provides companionship, a voice to fill the silence.
The rest of the day is given to long silent stretches of time alone.
Lok is one of thousands of elderly in Long Beach who struggle to make ends meet. Because he receives Social Security benefits of a little more than $800 a month, Lok doesn't fit the U.S. Census parameters for poverty, defined as $9,367 a year for a person 65 years and older. As a practical matter, he is impoverished.
After paying his rent (he gets no housing assistance) there is barely enough left for food and utilities. His landlord has been giving Lok a break on the rent, but is also trying to get the old man to find another place.
According to Census data, about 9.4 percent of Long Beach's more than 43,000 people 65 years and older live below the poverty threshold. The national rate is 9.9 percent.
Thousands of others struggle with fixed incomes. Some, like Rosalyn Jones, house and take care of family members and have to pay off second mortgages on their homes. Others, like Dominic Vocino, take on extra work so they can help their families. Still others, like Tracy Serba, consider themselves lucky, despite having to live in run-down neighborhoods, and say they get by relatively well on government benefits that barely inch them over the technical definition of poverty.
Memory of daughter
During his stretches of time alone, Lok's mind drifts to Lok Sreynong, the daughter he never really knew. Lok sent her to safety as an infant in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge was making its bloody sweep across his homeland. Lok went into the jungle to fight the regime with a group of rebels he says he organized.
Now, Lok is trying to find his daughter. Now, 10 years after she initially sought him out and sent pictures of herself as a grown woman. Now, when he is ailing. Now, he seeks her.
Lok says he regrets not doing more to find her when she first tried to make contact. Her photo sits on a small table near his frayed couch.
It's not something he likes to talk about, and he seems to become confused and forgetful when he recalls details of his daughter's attempt to find him.
He says, partially in English and partially through a translator, that there was confusion when she mailed him a letter and the photo. Her message was sent to Lok's former address, but a friend tracked down Lok and delivered it by hand. Somehow, Lok lost contact with the friend, and somewhere along the line he lost the letter.
Time passed and whatever thread that existed was lost. All that remains is the photograph and the old man's slipping memory.
Earlier this year, Lok placed an ad in local Cambodian newspapers in efforts to find her, thinking she may have emigrated to the United States. A copy has since been picked up and posted on a couple of Khmer Web sites: www.khmerfuture.com and www.kmxbroadcast.com.
"If he sees his daughter, she could stay with him and help take care of him," a translator explained. "The daughter gives back to the parents. That's the culture. So, when he's alone, he thinks about her."
"I am OK to be alone," Lok says in English. "I like to be alone."
From the apartment, one of several units behind a single-family home on Dawson Street, Lok can hear the shouts of children. On a recent evening, there was the sound of what seemed to be gunfire several blocks away.
A constant companion these days is fear.
Lok gets around his apartment with the help of Duong and a spider's web of extension cords that has been jury-rigged about chest-high through the apartment.
Lok grabs the cords and hoists himself up with his left arm. With Duong's help, he can get around. But Lok fears he will have to leave the apartment if the rent is raised.
He doesn't want to be committed to a home for the elderly. He prizes what independence he still has.
It is bad enough that he has been confined to his apartment by his body, but his limited English skills further trap and isolate him.
He doesn't know what services might be available. He doesn't know whom to call, what agencies might be able to help.
So he sits alone, with little to keep him company but his mail, his daughter's photo and his slowly slipping memories.
Genocide survivors
On a recent evening, Lok and Duong have a visitor, Selle Ly. The three sit in Lok's apartment, chatting quietly.
Duong has been Lok's caretaker since he suffered his stroke, and she also takes care of Ly.
She cooks Lok's meals and does chores and odds and ends around the house. Occasionally she takes him out on errands, such as helping him to the bank or post office after navigating a narrow staircase from the second-floor apartment.
Duong would like to help in other ways. But she too is constrained by barriers that aren't physical - language, culture, lack of money and the fear that many survivors of the genocide never completely lose.
Duong is the mother of five grown daughters, some in the United States, some in Cambodia. She shares a one-bedroom apartment with three other Cambodians. She picks up salaries here and there from performing home health care.
Although she usually makes enough money to make ends meet, she occasionally has to ask her children for help. When she has extra cash, she says she sends it to Cambodia to help the impoverished there.
Duong survived the Cambodian genocide by fleeing to Vietnam, to an area where many disenfranchised Cambodians, called the Khmer Krom, live.
She returned to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, in 1979 and earned a meager living providing health aid to the elderly and as a seamstress.
Although she was happy to have her family around, Duong says money and food were scarce.
In the United States, she says, people can help each other and pool resources to at least be fed and housed. In Cambodia, everyone she knew was impoverished and scraping to survive.
Duong's daughters have married, and her second daughter, Lyda Morgan, who lives in Minnesota, brought Duong over in 1999. Duong says Minnesota was too cold for her, so she came to Long Beach.
Although Duong worries what will happen if she becomes ill and wishes she could afford her own apartment, she is mostly happy with life in the United States.
However, she acknowledges, there are nights when she lies in the dark and feels a terrible loneliness.
Ly was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. An engineer in his home country, he was kept alive to help construct bridges, he says. Seeing trouble brewing in his home country, Ly sent his children to the U.S. in 1972, where they now live.
Ly eventually escaped to Thailand, where he worked for the Red Cross at refugee camps. He emigrated and has lived in Hawaii, South Carolina and Southern California. Despite his education and qualifications, Ly says through a translator that he was lucky to find a job at a law firm, where he did secretarial work until his retirement in 1996.
When asked if he was angry about receiving low wages after being an engineer, Ly says the technology in the United States was different from the French schooling he had, and he felt too old to return to school when he arrived in the United States. Ly receives about $500 a month in Social Security, has Section 8 housing and pays about $170 a month and says he lives comfortably.
Family matters
As Rosalyn Jones sits in a plastic chair in her front yard, she is enjoying the sunlight and the heat that relieves the arthritis and relaxes her damaged back.
Along the sides of her front yard on Salt Lake Avenue east of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue are towering rose bushes that have been growing for 30 years. Jones says when she was able-bodied, her yard and plants were even more impressive.
Although Jones, 77, revels in the small pleasures - her grandkids clamoring for her attention, an unexpected trip to Hometown Buffet, or a sunny day like this - she also feels frustration at the age and disability that have limited her to plastic chairs.
Jones says anytime she sits in a stuffed chair or sofa, she can't get back up, so the plastic chairs are strategically placed inside and outside.
As a healthy woman, whose husband left her when the youngest of their nine children turned 6, Jones raised a family through the force of an indomitable will and a relentless work ethic.
Today, those children, Pearlie, Brenda, Wanda, Morris Jr., Connie, Michael, David, Jackqline and Jeffery, are grown, and most have families of their own.
"Don't even ask how many grandchildren I have," Jones says with a laugh.
After her husband left, Jones says, she never received child support.
"He never gave me a dime, not one dime," Jones says. "Now he's passed away so I don't have to worry about it."
Jones worked. She says it was nothing to pull 12- and 16-hour shifts at the Kaiser Permanente facility in Harbor City.
Sure, people may have said it was poverty, raising a large family on $10 an hour. But when the kids needed shoes or clothes, Jones could always pull an extra shift to find the cash. Before getting the job at Kaiser, Jones says she worked two or three jobs.
Because she couldn't afford day care, the older children were responsible for watching the younger ones, and Jones says, "My whole neighborhood looked out for me."
However, since she dislocated two disks in her back about eight years ago, there's little Jones can do. Even standing for a short stretch of time is painful.
"Because of my back, I can't enjoy life like I used to," Jones says.
Jones now has to make do with Social Security payments of $1,179 per month. Much of that, however, is spent paying for loans she took out on her house.
According to Jones, she was scammed out of $27,000 she paid to start a janitorial franchise that failed.
She is also helping her oldest son, Morris Jones Jr., get his teaching certificate at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Morris Jones is living at home while he pursues his degree and works as a volunteer football coach.
Eight of Jones' nine children graduated from Poly High School and one graduated from Compton. Most have taken some post-high school classes. She says they have all remained away from gangs and all but one avoided drugs.
Several went into the military, including her second-oldest, Brenda, who became a registered nurse in the Air Force.
Still, several have struggled financially in an area where generational poverty is not uncommon. One daughter and her family live in affordable housing at the Las Brisas housing project in Signal Hill, another is awaiting affordable housing, and several live at home.
Jones says Morris has offered to leave school to help her make ends meet, but she wants him to stay and finish. Then, she expects, he can make some real money and help begin fixing up her fading house.
In the meantime, money is in short supply.
"We got some work to do (on the house) when we get some money," Jones says.
To save expenses in winter, Jones says, the family stretches its gas payments throughout the year.
Occasionally, when the end of the month arrives, family members go to a food pantry at a local church.
Despite money shortages through the years, Jones says she's never relied on welfare.
The one time she says she went to apply for assistance, Jones says, she was aghast at the anger and stress.
"I went over there and (people) were cussing. We never did that," Jones says.
When she finally met with a county worker, Jones says "I told her, `I can't handle this.' I said `I'll have a stroke.' I couldn't even wait for food stamps."
Despite the hardships, Jones says she loves having family around.
On the day a reporter dropped by, there were eight people sharing her three-bedroom home.
Despite her back injury and arthritis, Jones is quick with a laugh and has a positive attitude about her life and her place.
Suddenly, her reverie is broken. Her arm raises, a finger points toward the road toward her nemesis.
"Oh, oh, there he is. Get him. Get that dog," she yells.
The dog, a small German shepherd mix, barely cocks an ear in Jones' direction as he calmly lifts a leg and pees on a small tree at the front end of her property, before trotting off.
Refusing welfare Still going strong
Tracy Serba and Dominic Vocino could have slid into idleness years ago. But both say they enjoy life too much to slow down.
At 85 years old, Serba volunteers three days a week answering phones at the Long Beach Senior Center and fills in other times at a variety of tasks.
And Vocino, 80, got a paying job and works 20 hours a week at the Senior Center as a security guard.
While some may pity them - Serba lives in a poverty-infested neighborhood and has to walk dark streets in the morning to catch a bus to the center, while Vocino lives in a tiny room in government housing for veterans at the Villages at Cabrillo - they'll hear nothing of it.
Both say they see many other seniors who live in worse conditions, including homelessness.
"It's like 1929 all over," says Serba, who was a child when the Great Depression struck. "It's a shame. I don't know who's to blame."
Serba has the Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to thank for the government benefits that allow her to get by.
Serba says that with Section 8 rental assistance, she does just fine. Under the program, she only has to pay about 30 percent of her Social Security payments, or $300, for housing.
Serba lives in an apartment building that is mostly filled with other Section 8 recipients. Her unit looks over Long Beach Medical on Anaheim Street and Pacific Avenue.
And although she says she rarely has money at the end of the month, she considers her living situation comfortable.
"I never save anything," Serba says. "By the time I buy clothes, there's nothing left."
After a working career in which she was a cook, a waitress and a mechanic on B-24 bombers during World War II, and after raising two children, Serba says she and others from her generation have earned their benefits.
"I wish they'd provide for us a little better," Serba says. "But who do you go to?"
When she looks at growth in Long Beach, Serba comes to the conclusion that seniors are overlooked.
"Look at all the fancy stuff. Look at the Pike. Who are they building that for? It's not for us," Serba says. "Look at the fancy condos. Who are they building those for? It's not for us."
Vocino could get by on his benefits, considering he pays just $300 a month, the lowest rate available, for a furnished room at the Cabrillo Plaza Apartments at the Villages of Cabrillo, a sober-living facility for veterans.
For that, he gets a tiny bedroom in a "pod" and shares a common living room, kitchen and bathroom with other vets.
Vocino receives about $850 a month in Social Security benefits.
However, the former restaurateur says he has a credo that keeps him working.
"I have a certain philosophy," Vocino says. "You can never expect the next emergency expenditure."
And in Vocino's mind, the next emergency cost is the one that can wipe out a senior.
Partially because of that, despite having passed his 80th birthday, Vocino still works.
He enrolled in a government program that trains seniors for new professions and allows them to earn an extra $500 a month that doesn't count against retirement benefits.
So, Monday through Friday, Vocino can be found patrolling the halls of the Long Beach Senior Center between 8 a.m. and noon.
Vocino raised seven children and spent 30 years as an owner and operator of an Italian restaurant in Detroit.
He says he made a lot of money, especially when he turned the restaurant into a topless establishment.
He subsequently lost it all in legal battles.
Although there is a glint in his eye and a conspiratorial smile when he talks about his past exploits, there is also a bit of regret. Vocino's legal and personal problems caused rifts in his family he's still trying to mend.
Today, Vocino spends much of his time with his youngest daughter, Nikki Marlowe, and her three boys, Seth, Tate and Chesare.
"I help support them," Vocino says. "I need to be able to help in a financial sort of way."
Still, it rankles Vocino that after a lifetime's work he can't do more.
"Maybe if I had no family, it would be easier," Vocino says of making ends meet.
"Do you like that word - survive?" Vocino asks.
Vocino is critical of how the federal government, particularly the current administration, treats the elderly.
"It's developed a subculture of poverty," Vocino says. "People who have worked their whole lives like Trojans and suddenly (we are) spending Social Security dollars that are behind the times."
Greg Mellen can be reached at greg.mellen@presstelegram.com or (562) 499-1291.
By Greg Mellen, Staff writer
Long Beach Press Telegram
LONG BEACH - Phay Lok sits every day in his one-bedroom apartment and stares at the walls, alone with his fears and his regrets.
A once-affluent banker in the mineral-rich Pailin area of western Cambodia, a leader of men has been reduced to this.
It's not as if he has a choice. A stroke about four months ago rendered almost useless the right side of his 74-year-old body. So he sits on a ratty couch in his living room surrounded by his memories and a quiet broken only by the sounds of the outside world.
He doesn't listen to music or the radio. He doesn't watch television. He doesn't like to read. Occasionally he'll scan the mail that comes to his house. He mentions a campaign letter he received recently from President George Bush.
Lok has a nurse, Nary Duong, a Cambodian grandmother who comes to his home mornings and evenings. She receives about $1,000 a month from the state to provide in-home health care. She helps him bathe, prepares his meals, massages and treats his stricken limbs and provides companionship, a voice to fill the silence.
The rest of the day is given to long silent stretches of time alone.
Lok is one of thousands of elderly in Long Beach who struggle to make ends meet. Because he receives Social Security benefits of a little more than $800 a month, Lok doesn't fit the U.S. Census parameters for poverty, defined as $9,367 a year for a person 65 years and older. As a practical matter, he is impoverished.
After paying his rent (he gets no housing assistance) there is barely enough left for food and utilities. His landlord has been giving Lok a break on the rent, but is also trying to get the old man to find another place.
According to Census data, about 9.4 percent of Long Beach's more than 43,000 people 65 years and older live below the poverty threshold. The national rate is 9.9 percent.
Thousands of others struggle with fixed incomes. Some, like Rosalyn Jones, house and take care of family members and have to pay off second mortgages on their homes. Others, like Dominic Vocino, take on extra work so they can help their families. Still others, like Tracy Serba, consider themselves lucky, despite having to live in run-down neighborhoods, and say they get by relatively well on government benefits that barely inch them over the technical definition of poverty.
Memory of daughter
During his stretches of time alone, Lok's mind drifts to Lok Sreynong, the daughter he never really knew. Lok sent her to safety as an infant in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge was making its bloody sweep across his homeland. Lok went into the jungle to fight the regime with a group of rebels he says he organized.
Now, Lok is trying to find his daughter. Now, 10 years after she initially sought him out and sent pictures of herself as a grown woman. Now, when he is ailing. Now, he seeks her.
Lok says he regrets not doing more to find her when she first tried to make contact. Her photo sits on a small table near his frayed couch.
It's not something he likes to talk about, and he seems to become confused and forgetful when he recalls details of his daughter's attempt to find him.
He says, partially in English and partially through a translator, that there was confusion when she mailed him a letter and the photo. Her message was sent to Lok's former address, but a friend tracked down Lok and delivered it by hand. Somehow, Lok lost contact with the friend, and somewhere along the line he lost the letter.
Time passed and whatever thread that existed was lost. All that remains is the photograph and the old man's slipping memory.
Earlier this year, Lok placed an ad in local Cambodian newspapers in efforts to find her, thinking she may have emigrated to the United States. A copy has since been picked up and posted on a couple of Khmer Web sites: www.khmerfuture.com and www.kmxbroadcast.com.
"If he sees his daughter, she could stay with him and help take care of him," a translator explained. "The daughter gives back to the parents. That's the culture. So, when he's alone, he thinks about her."
"I am OK to be alone," Lok says in English. "I like to be alone."
From the apartment, one of several units behind a single-family home on Dawson Street, Lok can hear the shouts of children. On a recent evening, there was the sound of what seemed to be gunfire several blocks away.
A constant companion these days is fear.
Lok gets around his apartment with the help of Duong and a spider's web of extension cords that has been jury-rigged about chest-high through the apartment.
Lok grabs the cords and hoists himself up with his left arm. With Duong's help, he can get around. But Lok fears he will have to leave the apartment if the rent is raised.
He doesn't want to be committed to a home for the elderly. He prizes what independence he still has.
It is bad enough that he has been confined to his apartment by his body, but his limited English skills further trap and isolate him.
He doesn't know what services might be available. He doesn't know whom to call, what agencies might be able to help.
So he sits alone, with little to keep him company but his mail, his daughter's photo and his slowly slipping memories.
Genocide survivors
On a recent evening, Lok and Duong have a visitor, Selle Ly. The three sit in Lok's apartment, chatting quietly.
Duong has been Lok's caretaker since he suffered his stroke, and she also takes care of Ly.
She cooks Lok's meals and does chores and odds and ends around the house. Occasionally she takes him out on errands, such as helping him to the bank or post office after navigating a narrow staircase from the second-floor apartment.
Duong would like to help in other ways. But she too is constrained by barriers that aren't physical - language, culture, lack of money and the fear that many survivors of the genocide never completely lose.
Duong is the mother of five grown daughters, some in the United States, some in Cambodia. She shares a one-bedroom apartment with three other Cambodians. She picks up salaries here and there from performing home health care.
Although she usually makes enough money to make ends meet, she occasionally has to ask her children for help. When she has extra cash, she says she sends it to Cambodia to help the impoverished there.
Duong survived the Cambodian genocide by fleeing to Vietnam, to an area where many disenfranchised Cambodians, called the Khmer Krom, live.
She returned to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, in 1979 and earned a meager living providing health aid to the elderly and as a seamstress.
Although she was happy to have her family around, Duong says money and food were scarce.
In the United States, she says, people can help each other and pool resources to at least be fed and housed. In Cambodia, everyone she knew was impoverished and scraping to survive.
Duong's daughters have married, and her second daughter, Lyda Morgan, who lives in Minnesota, brought Duong over in 1999. Duong says Minnesota was too cold for her, so she came to Long Beach.
Although Duong worries what will happen if she becomes ill and wishes she could afford her own apartment, she is mostly happy with life in the United States.
However, she acknowledges, there are nights when she lies in the dark and feels a terrible loneliness.
Ly was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. An engineer in his home country, he was kept alive to help construct bridges, he says. Seeing trouble brewing in his home country, Ly sent his children to the U.S. in 1972, where they now live.
Ly eventually escaped to Thailand, where he worked for the Red Cross at refugee camps. He emigrated and has lived in Hawaii, South Carolina and Southern California. Despite his education and qualifications, Ly says through a translator that he was lucky to find a job at a law firm, where he did secretarial work until his retirement in 1996.
When asked if he was angry about receiving low wages after being an engineer, Ly says the technology in the United States was different from the French schooling he had, and he felt too old to return to school when he arrived in the United States. Ly receives about $500 a month in Social Security, has Section 8 housing and pays about $170 a month and says he lives comfortably.
Family matters
As Rosalyn Jones sits in a plastic chair in her front yard, she is enjoying the sunlight and the heat that relieves the arthritis and relaxes her damaged back.
Along the sides of her front yard on Salt Lake Avenue east of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue are towering rose bushes that have been growing for 30 years. Jones says when she was able-bodied, her yard and plants were even more impressive.
Although Jones, 77, revels in the small pleasures - her grandkids clamoring for her attention, an unexpected trip to Hometown Buffet, or a sunny day like this - she also feels frustration at the age and disability that have limited her to plastic chairs.
Jones says anytime she sits in a stuffed chair or sofa, she can't get back up, so the plastic chairs are strategically placed inside and outside.
As a healthy woman, whose husband left her when the youngest of their nine children turned 6, Jones raised a family through the force of an indomitable will and a relentless work ethic.
Today, those children, Pearlie, Brenda, Wanda, Morris Jr., Connie, Michael, David, Jackqline and Jeffery, are grown, and most have families of their own.
"Don't even ask how many grandchildren I have," Jones says with a laugh.
After her husband left, Jones says, she never received child support.
"He never gave me a dime, not one dime," Jones says. "Now he's passed away so I don't have to worry about it."
Jones worked. She says it was nothing to pull 12- and 16-hour shifts at the Kaiser Permanente facility in Harbor City.
Sure, people may have said it was poverty, raising a large family on $10 an hour. But when the kids needed shoes or clothes, Jones could always pull an extra shift to find the cash. Before getting the job at Kaiser, Jones says she worked two or three jobs.
Because she couldn't afford day care, the older children were responsible for watching the younger ones, and Jones says, "My whole neighborhood looked out for me."
However, since she dislocated two disks in her back about eight years ago, there's little Jones can do. Even standing for a short stretch of time is painful.
"Because of my back, I can't enjoy life like I used to," Jones says.
Jones now has to make do with Social Security payments of $1,179 per month. Much of that, however, is spent paying for loans she took out on her house.
According to Jones, she was scammed out of $27,000 she paid to start a janitorial franchise that failed.
She is also helping her oldest son, Morris Jones Jr., get his teaching certificate at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Morris Jones is living at home while he pursues his degree and works as a volunteer football coach.
Eight of Jones' nine children graduated from Poly High School and one graduated from Compton. Most have taken some post-high school classes. She says they have all remained away from gangs and all but one avoided drugs.
Several went into the military, including her second-oldest, Brenda, who became a registered nurse in the Air Force.
Still, several have struggled financially in an area where generational poverty is not uncommon. One daughter and her family live in affordable housing at the Las Brisas housing project in Signal Hill, another is awaiting affordable housing, and several live at home.
Jones says Morris has offered to leave school to help her make ends meet, but she wants him to stay and finish. Then, she expects, he can make some real money and help begin fixing up her fading house.
In the meantime, money is in short supply.
"We got some work to do (on the house) when we get some money," Jones says.
To save expenses in winter, Jones says, the family stretches its gas payments throughout the year.
Occasionally, when the end of the month arrives, family members go to a food pantry at a local church.
Despite money shortages through the years, Jones says she's never relied on welfare.
The one time she says she went to apply for assistance, Jones says, she was aghast at the anger and stress.
"I went over there and (people) were cussing. We never did that," Jones says.
When she finally met with a county worker, Jones says "I told her, `I can't handle this.' I said `I'll have a stroke.' I couldn't even wait for food stamps."
Despite the hardships, Jones says she loves having family around.
On the day a reporter dropped by, there were eight people sharing her three-bedroom home.
Despite her back injury and arthritis, Jones is quick with a laugh and has a positive attitude about her life and her place.
Suddenly, her reverie is broken. Her arm raises, a finger points toward the road toward her nemesis.
"Oh, oh, there he is. Get him. Get that dog," she yells.
The dog, a small German shepherd mix, barely cocks an ear in Jones' direction as he calmly lifts a leg and pees on a small tree at the front end of her property, before trotting off.
Refusing welfare Still going strong
Tracy Serba and Dominic Vocino could have slid into idleness years ago. But both say they enjoy life too much to slow down.
At 85 years old, Serba volunteers three days a week answering phones at the Long Beach Senior Center and fills in other times at a variety of tasks.
And Vocino, 80, got a paying job and works 20 hours a week at the Senior Center as a security guard.
While some may pity them - Serba lives in a poverty-infested neighborhood and has to walk dark streets in the morning to catch a bus to the center, while Vocino lives in a tiny room in government housing for veterans at the Villages at Cabrillo - they'll hear nothing of it.
Both say they see many other seniors who live in worse conditions, including homelessness.
"It's like 1929 all over," says Serba, who was a child when the Great Depression struck. "It's a shame. I don't know who's to blame."
Serba has the Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to thank for the government benefits that allow her to get by.
Serba says that with Section 8 rental assistance, she does just fine. Under the program, she only has to pay about 30 percent of her Social Security payments, or $300, for housing.
Serba lives in an apartment building that is mostly filled with other Section 8 recipients. Her unit looks over Long Beach Medical on Anaheim Street and Pacific Avenue.
And although she says she rarely has money at the end of the month, she considers her living situation comfortable.
"I never save anything," Serba says. "By the time I buy clothes, there's nothing left."
After a working career in which she was a cook, a waitress and a mechanic on B-24 bombers during World War II, and after raising two children, Serba says she and others from her generation have earned their benefits.
"I wish they'd provide for us a little better," Serba says. "But who do you go to?"
When she looks at growth in Long Beach, Serba comes to the conclusion that seniors are overlooked.
"Look at all the fancy stuff. Look at the Pike. Who are they building that for? It's not for us," Serba says. "Look at the fancy condos. Who are they building those for? It's not for us."
Vocino could get by on his benefits, considering he pays just $300 a month, the lowest rate available, for a furnished room at the Cabrillo Plaza Apartments at the Villages of Cabrillo, a sober-living facility for veterans.
For that, he gets a tiny bedroom in a "pod" and shares a common living room, kitchen and bathroom with other vets.
Vocino receives about $850 a month in Social Security benefits.
However, the former restaurateur says he has a credo that keeps him working.
"I have a certain philosophy," Vocino says. "You can never expect the next emergency expenditure."
And in Vocino's mind, the next emergency cost is the one that can wipe out a senior.
Partially because of that, despite having passed his 80th birthday, Vocino still works.
He enrolled in a government program that trains seniors for new professions and allows them to earn an extra $500 a month that doesn't count against retirement benefits.
So, Monday through Friday, Vocino can be found patrolling the halls of the Long Beach Senior Center between 8 a.m. and noon.
Vocino raised seven children and spent 30 years as an owner and operator of an Italian restaurant in Detroit.
He says he made a lot of money, especially when he turned the restaurant into a topless establishment.
He subsequently lost it all in legal battles.
Although there is a glint in his eye and a conspiratorial smile when he talks about his past exploits, there is also a bit of regret. Vocino's legal and personal problems caused rifts in his family he's still trying to mend.
Today, Vocino spends much of his time with his youngest daughter, Nikki Marlowe, and her three boys, Seth, Tate and Chesare.
"I help support them," Vocino says. "I need to be able to help in a financial sort of way."
Still, it rankles Vocino that after a lifetime's work he can't do more.
"Maybe if I had no family, it would be easier," Vocino says of making ends meet.
"Do you like that word - survive?" Vocino asks.
Vocino is critical of how the federal government, particularly the current administration, treats the elderly.
"It's developed a subculture of poverty," Vocino says. "People who have worked their whole lives like Trojans and suddenly (we are) spending Social Security dollars that are behind the times."
Greg Mellen can be reached at greg.mellen@presstelegram.com or (562) 499-1291.
5 comments:
HUn sen will be assassinated by his bodyguard. That bodyguard will be considered as a hero in Cambodia...
It is coming soon...
it is compelling stories of each seniors. Cambodian elders seem to do poorly compared to white folks partners in term of financial status and other supports. For example the case of Mr. Lok Phay and care giver, Mrs. Duong, each of them have language barriers not to mention family members are not able to provide at least emotional support. I hope that Cambodia will be ready and safe place by the time I'm retired in the next 15 years.
To the person that posted the first message, what Hun Sen will be kill by his bodyguard got to do with this story?
Do you think Sam Rainsy or the crazy prince (I can't remember what his name is) or any of the politicians in cambodia will change, I don't think so, they all are so corrupt, all they care is about getting rich for themself. Until the day that some young cambodian that grow up out side the country have a chance to become a ruler, then cambodians might have a better life.
To the Anonymous that claimed Sam Rainsy to be corrupt, have you ever heard of any accusation of him being corrupted?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be an opposition party in Cambodia? The CPP tries so hard to find evidence of corruption against Sam Rainsy while he was a Finance Minister in 1993 until he was fired because he knew of first hand corruption and reported to the media. They found nothing against Sam Rainsy.
However, you're right about Prince Norodom Rannaridh. This guy is almost as bad as the ruling CPP leaders.
Sam Rainsy is a Cambodian grew up in France, out side the country, a condition, as you suggested, is essential to be a good ruler.
I'm trying to put my self in different roles , of trying to discredit Sam Rainsy, but I can't think of any events/actions that this guy did to accuse him of corruption and to have put his name beside the corrupted leaders of Prince Rannaridh and CPP parties.
I suggest you do the same, think very hard of any evidence before you accuse Sam Rainsy of being corrupted.Can think of any?
First I would like to say that I am 100% agreed with comment#3. I have been telling some Cambodians not to get thier hope up to high. Cambodia will not get anywhere any time soon with or without Hun Sen...They are just a bunch of power hungry ones out there...
As for Mr. Lok's story, it is sad that he is disabled. But on other hand his story told me that he did not care much for his daughter. He is thinking of her now because he wants her to serve him. How could he lost contact with someone he loves so much? I had seen many fathers did not want to have anything to do with their children but would think that their kids owed them so much later in their old lives. Mr. Lok had a chance to see his daughter 10 years ago but he did not. Now he wants her to give him love and care that he never gave her when he had a chance. This could be his SIN!!!
I do not know Mr. Lok or his family's life. I hope I am wrong about him. I made this commemt from what I see in this article and from my personal experience. But of course there could be more to the story that I don't know.
If I am wrong about Mr. Lok, I am sincerely sorry!!
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