She Finds Niches for Self, Others : Elderly: After a lifetime of searching, Gloria Sondheim has created a position as Habitat for Humanity’s senior citizen liaison in Los Angeles.

All her life, Gloria Sondheim never quite fit in. But now, at age 70, she’s found her niche as Habitat for Humanity’s senior corps leader for Los Angeles, a position she created.

Right from the beginning, she was different. Born in New York but raised in Paris, Sondheim said the family left Europe in 1936 after a trip to a German spa. “My mother was scared by the abuse we experienced by the German police, so we returned to New York,” she said.

She always had a talent for fixing things such as plumbing and electrical problems, and she also tinkered with watches and radios.

When she was 16, she told her father she wanted to get a job. “He looked at me and said, ‘Who would hire you?’ and that always hung over me,” she recalled, so Sondheim enrolled at Syracuse University. “I wanted to be an architect, but girls weren’t allowed to take calculus, so I became a fine arts major,” she said.

Halfway through her studies, she dropped out to marry and raise a family. Twenty-one years later, she was divorced with four children and--never having worked a day in her life--in need of income.

Sondheim decided she wanted to go into commercial real estate, but she was told there were no women in the field. So she did what any 42-year-old woman would do in her position--she went into rock ‘n’ roll.

Starting as an office manager in a record company, Sondheim transformed the section into an international public relations department. When her boss told her he was going to do all the traveling and that she should do the work, she resigned and kept a promise she made to herself a long time ago.

“I turned my apartment into a bed and breakfast and put myself through college,” she said.

On her 60th birthday, she received her bachelor’s degree at Hunter College, and five years later, earned a master’s degree in social work. “When I graduated, the first thing I did was buy an electric drill--can’t tell you how many years I wanted one,” she said.

At that point, Sondheim had an advanced degree in geriatric social work and a lifelong love of building. “There weren’t too many jobs available for this combination, so I worked with seniors and volunteered at the UCLA Center on Aging until I saw a story about Habitat for Humanity two months ago,” she said.

Mary Hagerty, Habitat’s Los Angeles program director, remembers the call from Sondheim. “She left a message on our voice mail saying, ‘I’m a social worker who can read blueprints. Can you use me?’ ” Hagerty said.

Within weeks, Hagerty said, Sondheim formed senior corps. “And my hope, under Gloria’s guidance, is that the needs of Habitat and the interests of seniors can be matched,” Hagerty said.

Habitat for Humanity International was founded in 1976 by Millard and Linda Fuller and is headquartered in Americus, Ga. The Los Angeles affiliate, one of 1,200 nationwide, is a nonprofit, ecumenical, Christian housing ministry dedicated to providing decent shelter.

Since former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, volunteered their carpentry skills in 1984 at the Georgia site, the annual Jimmy Carter Work Project has been held in a different American city every year. This year, the JCWP comes to the Watts neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles from June 18-24 for a “blitz-build”--20 houses built in five days by 1,200 volunteers.

Although they have enough volunteers for the project, Habitat needs an ongoing group of volunteers. There are close to 100 more vacant lots for housing and that is where Sondheim thinks senior corps will play a key role.

“We need retirees skilled in office or field work for a weekday work force. And on the human level, we want the expertise of an older population for an intergenerational organization,” Sondheim said.

“I can’t wait to launch senior corps, put on my tool belt and get down and dirty,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye.

For information: Call (213) 386-9930, Ext. 280, and wait for instructions for the senior corps line.