Little Presents

Love this story. In a time when I feel like many reporters are writing the easy story with the widely available information and no depth, it's nice to know that there are folks out there getting to know a community, finding a hero and writing about it. Thanks, Erik!

It's definitely worth the complete reprinting. Enjoy!

December 17, 2007
American Album
Working Hard to Give Others a Better Beginning
By ERIK ECKHOLM
PHILADELPHIA — Lorenzo Compton did not have a promising start. His parents kicked him out at 17 for refusing to obey, he dropped out of the 12th grade when he got a girl pregnant, he served almost two years for drug dealing and he carries a bullet in his thigh.
At 43, Mr. Compton is again a force in the Frankford section of northeast Philadelphia — but this time as a one-man block patrol, as a mentor to countless young men, and as keeper of the keys to the fancy new football field that helps bring a ragged neighborhood together.
He rises at 5 a.m. to drive a school bus, his paying job. After work, he makes sure his three younger sons do their homework.
And then, most every weeknight and weekend, Mr. Compton makes the short drive from his house to Gambrel Field to inspect the turf before practice begins. Mr. Lorenzo, as he is called with respect, has been deputized to watch over the $2 million field, an emerald oasis of AstroTurf with night lighting and an electronic scoreboard.
It is home to the Frankford Chargers football teams, which occupy the evenings, weekends and dreams of 400 local boys ages 5 to 14, mainly low-income black and Hispanic children from single-parent households, including many from the rough public housing project next door.
On a recent evening, Mr. Compton unlocked the gate a little before the flood of boys in red uniforms and helmets arrived. Like an overprotective parent, he slowly walked up and down the field to pick out sunflower seeds or pebbles, cursing when he saw a splash of Gatorade, which he said can hasten decay of the turf.
Mr. Compton seemed to know everyone and be known by all. The children refer to him, with awe, as “the field general,” because he brooks no nonsense. “Clear out of there!” he yelled to children encroaching on the turf out of turn. “Don’t eat near the grass!”
He can be loud and gruff, but as one old friend of his put it, “Sometimes you need someone loud,” and as one young player put it, “He makes me feel like a professional.”
Another side showed, too, when after a heartbreaking loss in regional playoffs, he walked with a teenager, hand over his shoulder, and said, “Son, you got no business crying, not after that game you played today.”
During practice, nobody even took notice of the sirens blaring on nearby streets, the nervous beam of a police helicopter’s searchlight.
Murders in Philadelphia jumped last year by 8 percent, to 406, giving it the highest per-capita homicide rate of the nation’s largest cities, and a shortage of male role models is often cited as a contributor to crime and drug use.
But on this field, more than 40 volunteer coaches are there every night during the season, putting nine teams, sorted by age and weight, through their paces. The teams have been frequent champions in the Pop Warner and other youth leagues, and are Frankford’s claim to fame throughout the city.
The players must keep a C average or better to play.
A burly man whose shaved head and neat ear-to-ear beard make him look even rounder than he is, Mr. Compton and his wife, Dorina, an administrative assistant with the city, have put potted flowers and seasonal decorations in front of their own house, a sharp contrast with the boarded-up buildings on either side.
The corner by their house, with a small food market, used to be a drug bazaar. But for the last 15 years it has been quiet, with none of the loitering hustlers visible a few blocks away. “I go right up to them and say, I don’t want to see you around my house,” Mr. Compton said.
Rick Ribera, 20, who stopped by the store, said that “a lot of the old guys here don’t get that respect, but with him it’s, ‘Yes, sir.’” Mr. Compton says he gets respect because “they know I’m cut from the same cloth.”
The Chargers teams were started 40 years ago by Bill Gambrel, 71, a building contractor whom Mr. Compton considers a second father. When Mr. Compton got out of prison in his early 20s, Mr. Gambrel gave him a job and an apartment.
Mr. Gambrel still shows up every evening to watch the games.
For years, the Chargers played on scraggly, bumpy ground. The new field was paid for with city money and donations from more than a dozen organizations. Mr. Compton was one of many who volunteered to help with construction.
Mr. Gambrel put him in charge of the field.
Matthew Herbert, 21, who played on the Chargers and now coaches, called the field “our little sanctuary,” where street disputes are left behind, and called Mr. Compton “Frankford’s uncle” because he has taken so many young men under his wing.
Mr. Compton, Mr. Herbert said, helped him stay out of trouble when he was younger. Once when Mr. Compton caught him cutting school, he said, “he grabbed me, gave me a little body shot to the ribs, talked to me and took me to school.”
“I never cut school again. I was too scared,” said Mr. Herbert, who now works as a bus driver.
Still, football does not save everyone from drugs and violence. Mr. Compton himself was a player who went astray. Once in prison, though, Mr. Compton said, he changed his ways. “I realized this isn’t for me, sitting in a small room and working for three cents a day.”
One particularly gratifying thing, Mr. Compton said, is that otherwise absent fathers show up at ball games.
“That’s enough to make a kid play extra hard,” he said. “That’s enough to turn to their dad with a smile, like, ‘Dad, look what I did.’”
Perhaps the father will realize, Mr. Compton said, that “man, his mom is doing all this, I’m not a part of this.”