I thought this was going to be a very sad story. I don’t know if I think that now.
Every night Dan Karella walks his dog, Gigi, from his Westminster home to nearby Garden Grove Park. The 80-year-old man used to take his grandchildren there when they were younger. When Gigi arrived, going there just seemed a natural.
It was on one of his first walks there that he first noticed Darrell Wood. No, that is not correct.
He first noticed Crazy Dog, Wood’s 16-year-old dog.
“I’m a dog person,” Karella would later say.
To put it as charitably as possible, or to quote the way Karella put it, it was “very obvious that (Wood) lives outside.” He just wanted to make certain that the homeless man had food for his dog, so he stopped and chatted with him.
Something about Darrell Wood got to Dan Karella that day. Not a day passes, mostly, that Karella does not check on the homeless man and his dog and make sure that Crazy Dog has food and Wood a few bucks in his pocket.
Karella called me the other day to tell me about Wood, suggesting I go see him. The man was sitting with his dog, listening to a transistor radio on a blanket in the park.
I have met a medium-sized army of homeless people in my time. Darrell Wood was different from all of them.
He does not drink. He has never used drugs. There, too, is not a whiff of mental instability about him. Nor does he ever panhandle.
“I guess I just don’t like rejection,” he explains.
He used to be somebody. It started years ago when Wood, 44, went to work at a Boeing subsidiary cleaning toilets. He was good at it. The company had just won a contract in Huntsville, Ala., and it needed someone to train a new custodial staff.
It was supposed to be for only 10 days, but lasted for 2 1/2 years, Wood rising to an assistant manager’s position. In 2009, he was called back to California, and was promoted to project manager. Soon, the economic downturn claimed Darrell Wood, too. Before he knew it, he was renting a room in Westminster where he’d been raised and getting by on unemployment.
It was last January when the landlord suffered a stroke, was hospitalized and his sister cleared out the house. Wood by then had exhausted his unemployment benefits. He and Crazy Dog went looking for someplace to sleep that night.
“Before I was homeless,” he said, “I had no idea how hard the homeless have it. It is ‘Get out of the way,’ and ‘Move on!’ And that is exactly what happened.”
Nightmare does not do credit to the past year. He tells tales of trying to find anywhere for him and Crazy Dog to lay their heads at night. There was the space between the movie theater and the supermarket.
“It was out of the wind,” he says matter-of-factly, not a whiff of self-pity in his voice.
He would shove Dumpsters to open a space behind them, and he and Crazy Dog would cuddle in the cold. There were freeway overpasses. He just needed some place to be invisible, he said.
Dodging police officers became the order of the day. One day last summer, he simply could not dodge them. They handed him an anti-camping ticket for sleeping in a park. When they found him days later, Darrell Wood spent four days in jail for failing to settle the first ticket.
A friend took in his dog.
Crazy Dog. Wood’s life now is all about the dog he adopted in 1997 when she was just 3 weeks old. She is why he has never sought out a shelter. None will take him and Crazy Dog.
“I have slept in so many spots, people know her more than they know me,” he says. “As long as I have my dog, dog food and my radio,” he says, “I’m good.”
I left Darrell Wood and found Dan Karella.
He sees Wood most days, always bringing with him food for the man and his dog.
“He has never asked me for anything,” Karella says.
His first inclination was to worry about the welfare of the dog. “Dogs don’t understand what has happened,” he says. Yet in the months since, he acknowledges growing fond of the man.
His wife gave him clothing, some shoes and a sleeping bag they used when camping. Wood curls up with the dog and pulls the sleeping bag over them, he says.
His goal, Karella said, is to get the man back on his feet. Already he has paid a nearby barber to shampoo Wood’s hair, cut it and give him a shave. The homeless man, he said, has yet to make it into the barbershop.
He has agreed, too, to take Wood to Santa Ana where he says he left his identification.
“I told him Crazy can get in the back of my van, he can get up front, and I would drive him there. He has yet to take me up on that, either. I just hope I’m not confronting him too much.”
He worries, like I do now, what will happen to the man once Crazy Dog, who can barely walk and is in severely poor health, passes on.
“I worry a great deal of what will happen to him mentally,” he says.
Why is he doing it?
“If somebody would help me in a situation like that, I’d …” he says, his voice catching. “Wouldn’t anyone help somebody in a situation like that?”
Darrell Wood has simply slipped through society’s cracks, he said. He is convinced he would be a great worker for someone, hence the haircut and shave. He just wants to put him in a position so he can start to make his way back, he says.
“My wife and I, you know, go to church every Sunday,” Karella says, “and people always talk there about helping others. Well, for me, here it is. I just think Darrell is a pretty nice and normal human being, who is a victim of some really bad luck.”
Another human being going out of his way to help another for no other reason than he can.
It is not a sad story at all.
Contact the writer: 714-796-2265 orbjohnson@ocregister.com
