Her World Crumbles--but She Clutches to Dreams in a Bag

Jaynis King smiles when she recalls the weekend outings 60 years ago when she and her mother would head into downtown El Paso to admire all the pretty things they couldn’t afford in the department store windows.

“Since I was 9 years old, I decided I was going to have a house of my own with all the details,” said King, 70. “I was going to have all the dishes, all the glassware and enamelware. . . . Everything for every occasion.”

In 1954, with her savings from her job as a seamstress in the Los Angeles garment district, King bought a modest wood-frame home in East Los Angeles and began filling it with the things she loved--and much more.

Some of her older neighbors on Evergreen Avenue recall the active woman who played the piano and busied herself installing a new royal-blue roof soon after she moved in. She kept to herself, though, and sometimes neighbors saw her rummaging through their trash cans.

An inveterate collector, King began filling her yard, then her house with her finds, until the rooms overflowed with piles of trash. Her obsessive hoarding got worse over the years, until her finds crowded King out of the home she loved.

Today, the hunched-over old woman with the lumbering step wanders the streets of the city with what is left of her belongings stuffed into three plastic grocery bags. She hides her tangled, graying blonde hair under an imitation fur hat that she seldom removes, and keeps a change of clothes in a Union Station locker that she rents for 75 cents a day.

Her house--declared uninhabitable by city authorities--sits deserted, waiting for demolition.

Most of the contents of the house--described by fire inspectors as a floor-to-ceiling pile of decomposing “junk”--was removed earlier this year by city work crews. On previous trips, crews removed trash by the truckload from the yard.

Still, unable to face her crumbling dreams, King has come to believe that city authorities have conspired to steal her possessions and throw her out of her home. In her confused mind, the conspiracy is directed by a spurned suitor--a man she says she has never met, but who has been trailing her for 40 years, stirring up trouble against her.

“What depravity is this country coming to?” she rails, arms flailing, a knotted, crooked finger wagging in the air. “How can fire and police officers come into your house and rob and destroy everything you’ve worked and shopped years to get?

“They even stole a trunk with my mother’s wedding dress and hair wreath, my baby pictures and my father’s Spanish dictionaries,” King said. Gone with the trash are her 1934 Roosevelt High School yearbook, she said, and the violin that her mother, a music teacher, encouraged her to take up.

The barriers between past and present often blur as King recounts her life.

Representatives from a number of public agencies familiar with the case seem at a loss over how to rescue the stubbornly independent woman who refuses to accept help from others and often retreats to a world of her own.

In that world, the musty shell of rotting floor boards and broken windows, the sagging roof and walls that rest precariously on a tilting foundation “just needs some paint.”

“I can fix it myself! I know how to deal with contractors,” King barks defensively when questioned about her ability to make an estimated $30,000 in needed repairs to her home on her $500-a-month Social Security income.

City Fire Inspector Michael Theule describes a home piled with debris “so dense that a pitchfork couldn’t penetrate it.”

The kitchen alone took a six-man crew an entire day to clear, he said. The room was filled with a five-foot-high, moldy pile of empty milk cartons, boxes, dried food and other organic material in various stages of decomposition that had rotted the floor, he said.

Theule estimated that material at the bottom of the “compost heap” dated back at least two decades.

King, however, describes a different reality when she remembers her kitchen.

What comes to mind is the upright broiler she got with 11 books of Blue Chip stamps in 1979, the glass candy box shaped like a piano, the new toaster-oven, pizza baker and bakeware she bought on sale and stored away.

Other fond memories include the royal-blue roof, one of numerous “projects” she lovingly took on. She wallpapered the house, King said, and built a set of patio furniture, and her distinctive front porch windows were embellished with large white peacocks in lattice-like work that she copied from an Egyptian motif that she once saw on a movie set.

King said she accumulated different sizes of nails and pieces of fabric, sewing needles and building materials for these projects. Her home included “a pharmacy department, a hardware department, a stationery department. . . . I’m always busy,” she said. “That’s why I’m never lonesome.”

Lived in Yard

After being banished from her house by city authorities, King lived for about a year in her yard in a tent that she fashioned from a plastic tarp.

But now she stops by the house--sometimes in the middle of the night--only to feed the cats that live there, according to neighbors.

When it rains, King sleeps in all-night movie theaters. If she needs a shower, she rents a downtown hotel room for a few dollars, she says. Ordinarily, though, she gets all the sleep she needs napping during the day in the downtown cafeterias she frequents, she said.

A connoisseur of downtown kitchens, King can list the dishes served on most days--and their price--at a number of restaurants and dime-store counters in the area. She knows her way around town on city buses. But she trusts no one.

“People are dirty, rotten and conniving--especially the men,” King said, arching the single brown lines she pencils in over each eye. She decided early on she would never marry, she said. “I never loved no one.”

Her only friends, she said, are the dozen cats at her house and another bunch of strays on the grounds of the County-USC Medical Center, which she visits before dawn each day, first to feed her pets and then to eat breakfast at the hospital cafeteria.

Tempered Justice

King’s home, first judged a public hazard by the city Fire Department nearly a decade ago, has had a series of “vacate or repair” orders from the city’s Building and Safety Department posted on its front door. But, until now, the notices have come down, as city agencies and the courts--unwilling to throw an old woman out of her home--have relented and, time and again, looked the other way.

While no one involved in the case is eager to chase King off her property, most agree that the issue of either repairing or bulldozing the house can no longer be put off.

The building department has obtained a demolition order, but King has appealed it, temporarily delaying demolition, according to Patrick Cannon, a public defender representing King.

He admits that King is unable to maintain her property, but contends that she is otherwise able to care for herself.

Except for the scabs that have formed around callouses on her lower leg, which she nervously picks at, King maintains that she is healthy. “I haven’t been to a doctor since I was 15,” she boasted.

Mental health authorities, who have judged her neither a danger to herself nor others, have determined that she does not fit the legal criteria for involuntary commitment to a mental institution, said Deputy City Atty. Alan Dahle.

Flights From Reality

“A lot of old people are in and out of touch with reality,” he said. It is not uncommon for elderly people under the kind of financial and legal stress that King is under to appear irrational, he said.

But that is not sufficient reason “to take away someone’s rights and have their life run for them,” the attorney said.

Dahle suggested that a private attorney be appointed to arrange for a conservatorship to manage King’s finances and provide her a home, either by having her property repaired or sold.

Cannon said he hopes that another government agency, such as the city’s Community Development Department, will help finance the needed repairs so that King can live out the rest of her life at her home.

King, however, stubbornly maintains that her house is no one’s business but her own.

“When I was young, nobody thought I could support a household, but I did and even saved enough money to buy a house,” she said.

“Most women got frightened and married the first man that came along. But I did it on my own. My own way.” And, she doesn’t want anybody taking care of her now or trying to tell her what to do with her life. “I’d rather be out on the street,” King said.