April 2 – April 15, 2004
Changing the Face of San Pedro—
Settling Up At Toberman House
Howard Uller Started Life as a Settlement House Child, Now He Strives to Reach Others Like Himself
By Arthur R. Vinsel, Community News Reporter
Photos by Taso Papadakis

     Toberman Settlement House is Los Angeles’ oldest charity, founded 101 years ago,  and a fixture on  San Pedro’s Barton Hill district since the 1930s. Howard Uller, 62, has been executive director for 27 of those years, raising Toberman House to a place of unmatched prominence among Harbor Area social service agencies. The key to his success is that he, himself, was a settlement house child.  He doesn’t just know those he helps—he is one of them.
     Uller is the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, with a maternal grandmother from Bialystok, Poland, who baked marvelous bialys, her hometown’s bagel-like legacy to international cuisine. He was raised with settlement house aid in Chicago—the epicenter of the settlement house movement, which began there in the late 19th Century, helping immigrants assimilate into a nation whose Statue of Liberty welcomes them with a poem, but whose people are sometimes less inviting.
      “I used to think the lady from our settlement house was another one of my aunts,” Uller quips. “She was around so often.”
     Why did the Ullers move further west when Uller was 9, five people in a 1950 Chevy coupe that rumbled down legendary, two-lane Route 66, with relatively few kicks between gas stations,  cafes, desert snake farms and hasty carsickness pullovers?
     “Simple. I was a pretty sick kid. I was dying. Doctors at Cook County Hospital told my folks I couldn’t survive another Chicago winter. I was born underweight. As it was, I spent that winter mostly in the hospital. The folks sold everything and we came to California.”
     The apparently doomed child thrived and became a top basketball player and half-miler in track at University High School, then entered L.A. City College and later  UCLA to take a B.A. and M.A. in History and Social Work. He worked five years at the All Nations Neighborhood Center in Boyle Heights, then for three years as director of poverty programs for the United Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. He also taught community organizing with the UCLA Extension and gained a strong foundation in grant proposal writing, before taking the Toberman post.
     Uller is proud of Toberman’s history and heritage here and reminds anyone asking that the progress sometimes laid to him came only with the help of a cadre of dedicated community organizers and advocates who taught hundreds they are stakeholders here, even if they were born beyond some border and only rent a home from a landlord who lives by the ocean or up On The Hill. Being here counts for something, however one may have come to the Harbor Area, at least for those who toil to support families. The INS might disagree in principle, but there you have it.
     He will mention Lety a matriarch and naturalized citizen who earns $27 an hour as a carpenter’s union supervisor now, when a few years ago, she and her husband made $3 an hour as menial laborers, eligible for citizenship and schooling under President Clinton’s Amnesty Program, but afraid to even ask about it.
     “Originally, they had come across the border illegally. But the Amnesty Program allowed them to stay. They didn’t understand this and feared even making inquiries for fear of the consequences. They are sort of our Poster Child family.”
     Toberman’s Family Resources Center, dating to 1977 when Howard was hired, took care of that, arranging counseling with an immigration lawyer whose services are made available through the organization periodically. Uller—an avid fly fisherman—goes far beyond the old slogan about giving a man a fish so he’s fed today, versus teaching him to fish so he can be self-sufficient for all his tomorrows.
     “Every family that comes to us does not just get help or services. They get a plan, a plan of action,” he explains. “My agenda is to help them raise their capabilities, education and economic status.  We are known for children’s programs. But we serve as many adults as we serve children.”
     “My father liked to say he went to the University of Hard Knocks,” says Uller. “He had to work, at any job he could get. He went to night school. He knew what it is like to be 14 and reading at second grade level. He worked for an insurance company and in his 60s, he finally established his own agency. My mother worked at UCLA in a clerical capacity.”
     The couple did something right. Uller has two degrees, while his late brother was a doctor of endocrinology and chief of staff at Santa Monica Hospital and their sister earned her M.A. in French Literature, all three from a settlement house background.
     Empowering individuals and families such as Lety’s is what Toberman is all about.  But Uller’s accomplishments also include raising Toberman from near-bankruptcy to a position of leadership—today, Toberman is the lead agency through which community block grant funds are distributed among several other organizations in San Pedro and the Harbor Area—and impacting the whole community in a variety ways. Some examples are crime reduction, through creation of the gang counselor unit, as well as development of the Barton Hill Master Plan (with UCLA graduate student assistance). Uller was also instrumental in establishing the Barton Hill Redevelopment Program making interest-free loans to homeowners who qualify.
     Over the years, Uller—today chairman of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council—has made many friends, but his tough, no-nonsense stance for rights of the deserving and capable to scale social and economic ladders—have yielded a regiment of those who don’t wish such efforts well. Some are only two or three generations in America from The Old Country themselves.
     Some were involved in a doomed 1980s move to relocate the Rancho San Pedro public housing and its residents to another location. This led to a community organizing effort on a scale reminiscent of historic maritime labor conflicts. Powers behind this initiative were John Barbieri, jeweler and downtown investor Warren Gunter, Rex Brewer publisher of the now defunct San Pedro Weekly and then-Chamber of Commerce Manager LeRon Gubler.
     “That was a particularly nasty and vicious period in the lives of all of us,” recalls Uller. “There are bad feelings that linger still, 20 years later.”
     The intrusion by outsiders who’d like to see Old Town take on the concrete tower look of Marina del Rey or Long Beach’s Ocean Boulevard—Uller still fears that specter—led to development of a Barton Hill Master Plan done by UCLA community planning students supervised by professors.
     A bulwark in the Toberman organization has been Dee Petty-Benton, a former AFL-CIO union organizer who joined the staff in 1979 to develop and guide the Barton Hill Neighborhood Association, which has also represented Rancho San Pedro families.
     “Developers would go see former Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores and tell her they had a real plan for Barton Hill,” recalls Dee. “Councilwoman Milke-Flores would tell them in that case they’d better go see the Barton Hill Association, because we were the voice for that community. Oh, how they had to change their tune!” she declares merrily.
     Petty-Benton, who retired in November, 2002, calls Uller a marvelous man and employer with encyclopedic knowledge about what should happen in a community and how to make it happen. Of course, its people do that.
      “He made Toberman the place of opportunity for so many people. He taught so many to find their dignity and pride. All his employees are friends. It is never a boss-worker thing. He is a most caring person. And he knows about the poverty syndrome and how it keeps people down unless they get help.”
     Uller is of solid Jewish heritage but has worked most of his adult life for the United Methodist Women, a venerable institution with 120 settlement house facilities similar to Toberman across America. They are ladies with great political savvy and the punch of a Mike Tyson in their lace-trimmed gloves.
     “The UMW owns Toberman. They own the land. The UMW is one of the most progressive organizations in the country,” says Uller. He notes that some years ago a UMW national boycott of a leading food company and its anti-union policies brought it to its knees at grocery check stands.
     “They called a conference with the UMW. Those activist women had hurt them. They relaxed their stance, unions were allowed and everyone lived happily ever after. The corporation prospered. The workers prospered. This is as it should be.”
     Uller says he has never been daunted by circumstances and undertakings at the agency serving about 1,000 families a month with food assistance and linkages with other social service groups such as the YWCA, Joint Efforts and others.
     One of the many challenges he’s faced is fundraising. Toberman was nearly broke when he took over. The only person who really knew was a bookkeeper who adhered too closely to the old maxim about not saying anything if you can’t say something nice.
 “She was the only one who knew how bad off we were. If I had known beforehand, I can’t say I would even have accepted this job,” says Uller, who praises Toberman’s Family Resource Center and its 10 highly interactive  divisions for competence and skills.
     He rattles off names too numerous to copy, the accomplishments and expertise of each.
     “And we have our wonderful gang unit. They mediate disputes and help move young people into different lifestyles,” says Uller, who takes deep pride in what the team headed by James Davis has accomplished.  Three crews of two persons each work San Pedro, Wilmington and the Harbor City-Harbor Gateway district.
     They know who is who and what is what on the gang scene, but relations with the Los Angeles Police Department have been stiff or fractious at times because Toberman’s people keep information close in order to keep the trust of those involved.
     Uller says when he assumed leadership, problems included a passive approach to seeking financial support, as though some hint of shame attaches to asking for money to help those who need great help not only to survive but be taught to prosper and flourish.
     “My agenda has been to work on the cutting-edge issues as they affect the low income population, helping them to develop a sense of respect and dignity as well as economic advancement.”
     Aggressive fundraising—targeted to fund specific programs they engage in rather than lumps of money available to nonprofits if they can contrive a use for them—has placed Toberman on an even keel. A $5.4 building expansion has already begun at First Street and Grand Avenue, San Pedro. Uller hopes to pave his successor’s way with gold, or at least a secure treasury.
     “We’re about at the 80 percent mark in our capital drive, but I think we are going to need closer to $6 million with increasing construction and materials costs. The building phase should be complete by November, 2005 and he hopes to see $4 to $6 million banked and drawing interest for future needs when he retires.
     “I want to do anything I can to help Toberman in the future, But I also don’t want to be in the way,” he explains.
     He plans to return to school on retirement—either for a law degree or a Ph.D.—and devote his twilight years to training new young activists in community organizing. The job is far from done.
     “And then, I’m also thinking of being a certified fly fishing guide in the Sierras’ Eastern and Western slopes,” adds the Toberman chief, who methodically ties tiny dry flies for fishing even during staff meetings, conferences and newspaper interviews.
     “It keeps me focused,” he says, peering over a set of magnifying lenses that attach to his spectacles, while creating a tiny black-and-white trichos, a midge-like insect that mimics one floating dead on the water after its brief lifetime goal of mating. The bit of thread and feather on a Size 22 hook, is so tiny the hole in its eyelet to tie it on a line is barely visible.
     ‘The smaller the fly, the bigger the fish,” Uller observes with a crafty grin, adding a virtual summation of his 27 years running the settlement house.
     “Easy things are not worth doing.”

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Toberman’s hardwood floors echo the scratch and scrabble of its newest and youngest aide—Abigail, a winsome golden retriever, who came to Toberman in early March, at seven weeks—a personal assistant of sorts to Executive Director Howard Uller, who lost his teacher/wife Mitzi to cancer last holiday season. “My son and his girlfriend felt I was not handling loneliness well, so they got me Abigail two weeks ago. She’s a sweetheart,” says Uller, 62, who is far more accustomed to giving solace than receiving it—at least in his adult life, the last 27 years of which he has spent running Toberman.  Photo: Taso Papadakis