Hangin’ with a dogcatcher

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Aug. 14, 2006 | 7:26 a.m.

"Gangbangers - when you kill someone your mother, sister, and brother all will suffer."

- Dogcatcher Youth Foundation

The sign, in red paint, is stapled to a post on Lake Mead Boulevard.

It isn't hard to find the sign's author - just ask around West Las Vegas. Seemingly everyone knows Hen-Hen, as he is called.

A day later, Henry Thorns is on the phone. Despite being born and raised not too far from the sign, he still bears a trace of the Louisiana drawl his folks brought to the valley decades ago. He jokes about "being smoked," or shot, once a wider community of newspaper readers finds out about his tilt at the windmill of teens with guns.

Accept an invite to climb in his car the next day and you are riding up and down the West Side, that village of extended black families, while he points out more of his signs or the lampposts they hung on before they were taken down.

Thorns put up the signs as a response to the May 28 shootings at a West Side block party that left three people dead.

"It's to let 'em know we got to stop - what are we killing for?" he says.

The ride through the streets of West and North Las Vegas to see the homemade signs is also a tour through Thorns' remarkable life, during which he has become a father figure of sorts for hundreds of children, mostly boys, after 20-plus years of coaching football and basketball teams and community activism.

Easy-to-point-to successes include Marcus Banks and C.J. Watson, NBA players who once played with his teams that have been competing in local, state and regional tournaments every summer since 1982. But there are also hundreds of others who have gone to college who otherwise might not have even finished high school, after Thorns, as he puts it, "trapped" them with sports. Some have even left gangs to stay in his program.

It adds up to a man Assemblyman Harvey Munford, D-Las Vegas, calls "one of the very few people doing something positive in the community (who is) out there in the trenches getting his hands dirty." Munford represents the district that includes much of West Las Vegas, and taught and coached in area schools for 36 years.

"Calling on all you black leaders - help save our future."

- Sign posted at Doolittle Avenue and J Street

"I grew up right here," Thorns says, pointing up to a second floor window in a corner apartment, across the street from Matt Kelly Elementary School, where the former star athlete started his journey through a series of streets and schools, a journey with stopping points dictated by the rent his mother could afford while raising eight boys and girls.

U-turns and sudden stops, then you're at Doolittle Community Center, the wooden floors of its courts squeaking under dozens of rubber soles.

Not only does everyone from the parking lot to the court salute Hen-Hen, but every adult seems to have been a Dogcatcher, the name attached to the teams and the foundation, a means to an occasional grant.

Standing in the lobby, a guy called "Lu Dog" hands Hen-Hen a cell phone. "You know, still trying to save lives," Thorns answers someone on the line. "Everything out here the same, life getting a little better."

It was someone calling from jail. Not everyone makes it.

Back out on the pavement, driving down Owens Avenue, Thorns sweeps the landscape with his hands, passing over empty shopping centers.

Up side streets, single-story houses with plywood sheets for windows have a message spray-painted across their walls: "No trespassing. Police take notice."

Thorns points to one park after another, without children. "Look at that - what do you see?" he asks.

"And their parents can't get a job over here," Thorns says.

"It comes down to the haves and the have-nots - and these people don't have."

Growing up, his own father was "locked down" most of the time Thorns was in school. "But I had a mother, grandmother, and a village," he says.

He did well in school, excelling in everything from the long jump to football, despite standing only 5 feet 5 inches. He graduated Clark High School in 1979, the year he says gangs first came to the inner city.

Thorns missed getting caught up in those gangs, but his four younger brothers did not. They also turned their lives around, though, one of them becoming a preacher at Greater Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church.

Munford, who coached Cashman Junior High basketball, remembers Thorns the player.

"He dominated the league as a point guard who ran the show. (He) was a natural leader," Munford says.

He also showed respect to the opposing coach, and "still today calls me Mr. Munford - though he's darn near 50 years old." Thorns is 46.

His skill as a defensive end landed him a UNLV football scholarship.

Thorns took up hotel administration, where he says he was the only black student and where one professor asked if his father owned a hotel or restaurant.

"If not," he recalls the professor saying, "then maybe you should forget about this (major)."

As Thorns retells this story, his guided tour passes a lot. "That was my daddy's house when he came out of prison," he says.

Thorns switched to criminal law, but an offer came a year later from a Canadian pro football team and he left UNLV.

That didn't last, and less than a year later, he was back in the neighborhood. Life in another country, he says, was "culture shock."

"I had never left Las Vegas," Thorns says. "I never even really went on the Strip until I was in high school."

So began a series of entrepreneurial forays into selling clothes such as jeans and shirts - still his bread and butter - and his life as a coach.

"To all gun runners - when you give or sell a gun to our youth, you could be the next victim."

- Sign posted at H Street and Miller Avenue

Jhamar Clark, now 23, joined his first Dogcatchers team at age 10.

"I was playing basketball one day and he said, 'Come on, let's practice.' That's how he does it," says Clark, explaining Thorns' approach.

Clark soon got caught up in the Dogcatcher world, learning such basics as "don't steal, can't say nigger, can't cuss," he said.

More than a decade later, Clark says, "he got me hooked on coaching." Clark now coaches one of several Dogcatchers teams and is proud of the fact that the five starting players on his high-school-age team all have basketball scholarships to Division I colleges.

"A lot of kids are going to college instead of getting mixed up in something else," Clark says.

Clark's brother is one of those kids, though he was the victim of a stray bullet that left him blind in one eye and ruined his chances of playing.

"That made his whole attitude change for awhile, but Hen-Hen helped him out," Clark says.

Thorns' philosophy of working with kids is pretty simple:

"All these kids are smart and want to learn. The only time they don't is if they mad, or hungry, or somebody done told 'em some cold stuff."

Thorns' own kids - three daughters and two sons - have all been straight A and B students, he says. And his son, Henry Thorns, Jr., was a basketball MVP at Valley High School and now has colleges courting him.

"I told him, use your sports to get an education," he says.

At the same time, you don't have to scratch much under the surface to see that Thorns himself would like some help.

"Why do I give so much back to the community, and I still be suffering so much?" he says over the phone, a day after the West Side tour.

His business selling clothes is now conducted from the trunk of his car, years after rising rent forced him to close a store he once ran. And he raises money for uniforms and out-of-state trips for his teams by holding neighborhood barbecues.

Munford says that he tried but failed to get funds from the Legislature for the Dogcatchers.

"He's probably built a huge animosity against the black leadership," Munford surmises, "and decided to do things his own way."

Thorns wishes it were otherwise.

"Hopefully someday they don't keep saying, 'What a great guy he is,' " Thorns says. "I don't want no awards I can't buy kids no drawers with that."