Column: After years of helping the homeless, he's one of them after the Altadena fire destroyed his home.
His job, for more than ten years, was to guide 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 cafe, wiped his eyes, and described the historic Black neighborhood where he spent most of his life.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer winner.
“I would go on trips, knock on doors, say 'hello' to people's mothers…go to people's houses and get a sandwich from their mother,” Ruffin recalled. “'Miss Lee, how are you? Miss Phillips, would you make me a Seven-Up cake like you used to make when I was little? Hello Mr. King.' Robert, across the street—I used to 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 faced so much suffering every day as part of his job, Ruffin developed a morning ritual where he would wake up early and sit in the yard, look up at the San Gabriel Mountains, and listen to the birds, all of it. while surrounded by plants he had named homeless clients to become very attached to.
“It was my safe place,” he said.
Anthony Ruffin, Sieglinde Von Deffner, and Jeanette Rowe, left to right, talk as people arrive to get their COVID-19 vaccinations at Leimert Park Plaza.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
Early in the morning on Jan. 8, Ruffin and his wife Jonni Miller — who is also a longtime social worker with the homeless community — had to go out of time to collect valuables.
Handwritten letters, written to Miller by his grandmother on the day he was born, were left behind.
As well as mobile phones that were no longer working, seven of them, Ruffin kept photos of hundreds of clients, as well as contact information and notes thanking him for his help.
Hours later, they heard that the house and everything in it had been burned, most of their building and the neighbors.
“It's bad,” a tearful Ruffin told me outside the hotel where he and Miller were staying as they tried to pack up.
Ruffin and I met over a dozen years ago, when he was running a non-profit organization called Housing Works Hollywood. He worked as a case manager for my friend Nathaniel Ayers, a Julliard-trained musician who was homeless on Skid Row and known as “The Soloist.”
We who know Mr. Ayers protected some of his possessions, including various musical instruments. Ruffin told me he had been holding Ayers' drums for years.
Last week, they got lost in a fire.
At Housing Works, Ruffin's mentor was Mollie Lowery, a well-known social worker who had also helped Ayers, and whose motto in helping clients was adopted by Ruffin – “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.”
In 2017, Times photographer Francine Orr and I featured Ruffin and his work with the Hollywood 14, a severely disabled group of homeless people with severe physical and mental illness. Among his regular matches are amputees, diabetics and drug addicts. I wrote: “Some are partially paralyzed, and many are ghosts, their former state invisible in the shadow of chronic mental illness.”
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Ruffin used to go out on weekends and in the middle of the night – as he still does – to check on his customers. He would kneel on the pavement and look them in the eye, take them to hospitals, visit them in hospitals, work hard to get them to trust him and try to get them into homes.
Ruffin said her desire to become a social worker had a lot to do with her biological father's struggles and homelessness. Ruffin said he was not close to his father until his later years, when his father worked in downtown LA as a legal courier. They eventually developed a close but “good relationship,” Ruffin said, telling me that his father had a bag with a copy of my story about his social worker son.
In 1976, Ruffin was 8 years old when he and his mother, Myrtle Williams, moved into the Altadena home that had been purchased in 1972 by his stepfather, Carl Williams, a former truck driver from Texas who found it while other properties in Los. Angeles was off limits to black people, the west side of Altadena was a safe place.
“We played football in the streets, we played baseball in the streets, we went to school around the corner,” Ruffin said of his childhood.
The house was often filled, he continued, with different relatives who needed a place to stay for a 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,” said Ruffin. “If you sleep in the living room on the couch, or on the floor, or on the bunks…that's where you sleep. And there was a place under the bunk beds, so someone was sleeping.”
Ruffin said that it was common for Black men in the area, when they were nearing the end of their lives, to insist on taking the last breath out of their homes. They experienced housing discrimination and struggled to find jobs that paid enough to buy land and raise families, Ruffin said, and “wanted to die in the homes they built.”
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
His mother and stepfather decided, after 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 started renovating it, being careful not to change the structure or renovate 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 on to that place, because I knew how important it was to my family,” Ruffin said Monday, pausing to fight back tears. “We really fixed up the house and made it look respectable.”
Ruffin said his mother and stepfather, now 76 and 83, are “devastated” by the destruction. So are all the neighbors whose hearts were broken as their hiding place was gone.
“I talked to all of them,” Ruffin said. “I talked to Miss Lee. He spoke to Miss Douglas, who won't stop crying.”
Ruffin and Miller also lost their one cat and two chickens. On the run, they managed to collect their adopted, one-eyed cat, Maple, (formerly homeless in South LA), and their rescue dog, Nan (a Skid Row stray).
On Jan. 13, their lives changed and their futures uncertain, Miller, like her husband, who works on Skid Row at the County Health Department, had returned to work. Ruffin was taking a day off that grew like most of his other days off work.
“I have to meet someone today who is homeless and try to help them get into a house,” Ruffin said of the Skid Row client. “I also did that on Friday. I have to help someone, every day…I have my problems, but I'm lucky. A lot of people down there on Skid Row are dealing with addiction and homelessness and they don't have some of the resources that I have. I mean, I have a motel room right now, and they don't have one.”
Ruffin, like many others who lost their homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, was also busy sorting out insurance issues and options for temporary housing. He doesn't know how much he will pay for the insurance or how much it will cost to start over, so he opened a gofundme page and said he intends to share the money with his neighbors.
But you know exactly what the long-term plan is. You want to rebuild, with the same dimensions, in the same place.
“There is so much history there,” she said. “I want the same thing. Nothing else. Nothing less.”
steve.lopez@latimes.com
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