Homelessness in the Valley / Surviving Day by Day : Starting Life Over at 50 : Evicted Grandmother Has a Home Again Where She Can Raise Her Daughter’s Children

It’s not the life Samantha Scott planned to lead in her 50th year, and she admits to some sadness over that.

But the two tots packing their mouths with bananas and squabbling over playthings this afternoon are her grandchildren, and for them she’s become a mother again--after raising four children of her own. For them she quit her job and sold everything--including the Elvis collectibles and family heirlooms--to buy diapers and baby formula.

For them, and with them, she moved into a homeless shelter after being evicted from her apartment.

“I was not looking forward to raising another family,� she says, then adds with a chuckle, “They give me a reason to get up in the morning, but God, they give me a reason to go to bed at night.�

Scott and her grandchildren, Anthony, 2, and 1-year-old Ashley, are back in their own home now, a one-bedroom apartment in the sun-bleached heart of North Hollywood’s gangland. It’s nothing like the spacious two-bedroom she once had, but then it’s much better than a shelter, she says.

But without that shelter, the Women’s Care Cottage in Van Nuys, she “would have been on the street completely.�

Scott’s daughter was an 18-year-old gangbanger with problems when she got pregnant with Anthony in 1991, Scott says, taking down a portrait of the boy. Hidden behind that photograph, in the same frame, is another of her daughter with her wrist turned to display a tattoo: “18th St. Gang,� it reads in large letters.

Seeing that the situation was desperate for her pregnant daughter, Scott quit “the best job I’ve ever had� as a medical records clerk and whisked the youngest of her four children to Sacramento in an attempt to help her daughter escape the influences of the neighborhood.

After giving birth, the daughter came back to the San Fernando Valley anyway, and Scott soon followed, jobless and living on the small nest egg she’d worked endlessly to build.

“She called me at 5 o’clock one morning,� Scott recalls, fighting tears, “and said to come and get (Anthony) because she was going to hurt him.�

Scott went to authorities and eventually received custody of the boy. Between court appearances and caring for the child, however, she was unable to find a job, and she soon took to holding yard sales for money, hawking her bed, sofa, dishes and memorabilia from Graceland to buy food.

When the eviction notice came, she took Anthony and the belongings she had left--her grandmother’s mirror, a cabinet that belonged to her mother and Anthony’s crib--and moved in with 13 other homeless people at the Van Nuys shelter.

While there, she took in her daughter’s newborn, Ashley, and the family grew to three.

Now, as the hearings and court dates continue--Anthony’s parents don’t want custody, Scott says, but aren’t ready to let her adopt him--Scott pinches pennies to make the $811 she receives in government aid and food stamps last the month.

She’s just enrolled both children in a day-care center sponsored by the shelter and, after an upcoming adoption trial, hopes to find a job again.

Lori Shaw of the Care Cottage, considers Scott a classic story of success, of long-term homelessness nipped in its impoverished bud.

“I have no doubt that she’s going to make it,� Shaw says.

Even if starting a second family and living in a shelter was not how Scott planned to begin her fifth decade of living, she shares Shaw’s optimism.

“We’re a family,� she says. “We’ll survive.�