Chapter closes in a lifetime of service to people in need

Friday, Jan. 24, 2003 | 3:32 a.m.

An open house and party will be given in honor of retiring Economic Opportunity Board Senior Center Supervisor Hazel Geran at 1 p.m. today at the EOB Senior Center, 2420 N. Martin Luther King Blvd. at Carey Avenue.

When poor children needed a hot lunch, Hazel Geran was there. When indigent men found work, Hazel Geran got them suitable clothing for the job. When West Las Vegas needed an advocate, Hazel Geran, during four decades, answered the call.

Geran, 76, the Economic Opportunity Board's first black supervisor and the agency's last original staff member, will retire Friday after 37 years with one of Nevada's largest private, nonprofit social organizations.

Despite her many accomplishments that include instituting the first school hot lunch program in West Las Vegas in 1966 at the then-segregated Madison Elementary School and helping start the first baby wellness program in West Las Vegas at Marble Manor, Geran refuses to blow her own horn.

"I just listened to what the residents wanted, then helped them get it," said Geran, who since 1971 has been supervisor of the EOB Senior Center, the city's oldest senior center, which changed locations twice during her tenure.

"I always liked working with people and I never got frustrated that people were always in need. I felt it was my job to give them direction. If I didn't have a program for them or a food voucher to help them, I could direct them to another place that could help them."

During Geran's years with the EOB, it grew from 25 employees and four programs to an agency with more than 30 programs and more than 600 employees.

Geran also played roles in instituting several job programs, starting classes for seniors for everything from sewing to computers and -- what she calls her proudest effort -- running the senior home repair program.

"They call them manufactured homes, but a lot of them are just old trailers in real bad shape," Geran said. "Under this program, we could spend up to $1,000 to make repairs. But I got to tell you that sometimes conditions were so bad I'd find an extra $1,000 to do even more work to make the place livable."

Geran's efforts have not gone unnoticed by today's leaders.

"Hazel Geran is an icon in this community and a jewel to the senior population," Las Vegas Councilman Lawrence Weekly said. "She gets her vast energy from reaching out and helping people any way she can.

"There will never be another Hazel Geran, but she certainly has left footprints for others to follow."

Born in Lexington, Miss., Geran moved to Las Vegas from Chicago on April 6, 1948, and found a town with bigotry to rival the Deep South.

"It was very segregated and conditions in West Las Vegas were miserable," Geran recalled. "I lived in one of the few houses that had inside plumbing.

"When people ask me how bad things were back then, I tell them that to get a loan at the bank that most white folks got with just a signature, a black person had to have a co-signer -- preferably white -- plus collateral. Because most of us had neither of those things, blacks simply did not get loans."

Because blacks who ventured outside black neighborhoods routinely were arrested in those days, Geran said she stayed within the boundaries of West Las Vegas -- off Bonanza Road just west of the Union Pacific Railroad tracks -- knowing very little about what was happening on the other side of the tracks in white Las Vegas.

Her first job was as a keno writer at the integrated Cotton Club on what was then a bustling Jackson Street.

"There was no welfare back then -- we had to find work and we did," said longtime friend Bessie Colbert, 84, a fellow keno writer at the Cotton Club. "Hazel worked hard and did a good job in whatever she did.

"I'm glad to see that she has finally decided to retire because it's just time. She helped so many people over all those years."

While working at the Cotton Club, Hazel met Johnus Geran, a San Francisco barber who opened a shop across the street from the club. They courted for six months, married and had five children. He died seven years ago after 42 years of marriage.

In 1966 Geran accepted a job with the EOB Neighborhood Council as a community outreach worker. A few months later she was assigned to Madison Elementary School, where three of her children had attended and where she had been a member of the Madison Mothers, a PTA-like organization.

Geran's first assignment was to start a food program. She felt it would be better to have hot food served rather than traditional cold lunches. Her efforts resulted in one of the state's first school hot lunch programs.

"For some of the children it was the only good meal they would get each day," Geran said.

After hitting a home run on her first time at bat for the EOB, the agency offered her a program supervisor job.

After becoming supervisor of the agency's senior center at the Nucleus Plaza in the early 1970s, Geran helped open a thrift store there to provide proper clothing for poor people who landed jobs.

"So many times we just gave them the clothes because they couldn't afford to buy them," said Geran, who served under four EOB executive directors -- Bill Cottrell, David Hoggard, James Tyree and current director Marcia Rose Walker.

Outside of her EOB work, Geran led the drive to have the park at D Street and Washington Avenue named after her friend and mentor, Ethel Pearson, a late community activist and civil rights leader who on a door-to-door petition drive in the early 1960s convinced Geran to take up community work.

In 1979 Gov. Robert List appointed Geran to the Southern Regional District Allocation Committee.

The EOB Senior Center moved to Washington Avenue in 1991 and later to its present location at 2420 N. Martin Luther King Blvd.

On May 28, 1997, Gov. Bob Miller named Geran a "Senior Samaritan."

"In 1999, I started thinking about retiring, then they announced they were going to move to this new building, so I stayed to see that," Geran said.

"Then they announced that on Jan. 2 we were opening the senior center's first commercial kitchen so I stayed for that. I decided I better go now before they announce something else that will make me decide to stick around."

Weeks ago Geran packed up her community service awards that had hung in her closet-sized office. However, she still comes in early and greets visitors at the reception desk in front of a large photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

While retirement means Geran will spend a little more time at the El Cortez -- her favorite casino -- she will by no means give up her community work.

Geran says she will remain on the city's Senior Citizens Advisory Board, the application review committee for Habitat For Humanity and the planning committee for the West Las Vegas Neighborhood Executive Board.

She recently was appointed to the Nevada Silver Haired Legislative Forum and is secretary and past president for the American Association of Retired Persons Chapter 308. She also will remain with those organizations.

"All of my dreams came true in my lifetime," Geran said. "Long ago I accepted that the poor will always be with us. Someone has to be there to help them."

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