He’s Trying to to Get Rid of an Inheritance

Some people’s lives are upended by tragic accidents. Others by random violence. Almost from the day he was born, Bob Beaumont’s has been torn apart by addictions.

Cocaine killed his father. Heroin nearly did the same to his mother. And almost two years ago, a high school friend--and longtime drug addict--died of AIDS complications.

So when his late friend left him $10,000 in a will, Beaumont took stock of his life and the incalculable toll of addictions.

“I was pissed,” Beaumont recalls. “I thought, ‘What am I gonna do [with the money]? I’m not gonna spend this on just anything. I want things to change.’ ”

Slowly but surely, Beaumont believes, that is happening.

Using the $10,000, plus $10,000 from mortgaging his home, the 38-year-old video broadcaster launched Resource Network Inc.--a private, multifaceted program dedicated to tackling the problems arising from addictions.

Drugs. Alcohol. Gambling. Eating disorders. Even sexual obsessions. These are all addressed in a radio program broadcast 8 to 9 p.m. Saturdays on KYPA-AM (1230). The program began in early December and will run through February unless Beaumont can generate sponsors to keep it on the air.

“ ‘Addiction’ is kind of a strange word,” Beaumont says. “Some people are going to hear ‘addictions’ and say, ‘Oh, [this show] is just more of this recovery movement love fest [and] victimization.’ But it is not that. It is a dose of reality.”

Hosted by Sharon O’Hara, a therapist who specializes in treatment of addictions at Del Amo Hospital in Torrance, the hourlong show focuses on either a medical aspect of addiction or, more typically, a manifestation of it. Experts join O’Hara each week to talk about addictions and to field calls.

“A woman called in about women and addictions. . . . She said she probably would never go to an AA meeting. Her kids had been taken from her. She felt horrible. And she wondered, ‘Does this mean I love my addiction more than I love my kids?’

“We told her it is not about being a bad person. It is about being a sick person.”

Without the anonymity of the telephone call, Beaumont believes, that woman never would have shared her story.

“Our sense is he is trying to promote a positive viewpoint of recovery--kind of a radio beacon of hope for those who may feel there is no hope for them,” says John Boop, director of resource development and communications at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage.

While the famous drug and alcohol treatment center generally avoids lending its name to programs, Boop says, it agreed to assist Beaumont because his mission--and approach--seemed consistent with that of the Betty Ford Center. “We’re just trying to help a guy who has heart and head in the right place . . . and certainly, we would want to support any individual who is trying as hard as he is,” Boop says. “God, the guy is dogged.”

Beaumont says his determination flows from years of trying, alone, to right a life that was ruled by addictions.

His mother was a 17-year-old heroin addict who abandoned Beaumont after he was born. His father was a successful beauty salon owner in Beverly Hills whom Beaumont would not meet until he was a young man.

Beaumont was raised by an elderly couple who were supposed to be only a temporary solution to his mother’s incapacity. But they wound up keeping Beaumont until he was 11 years old, when he went to live with his grandmother.

Beaumont first met his mother when he was 6 or 7, he says. “She started coming around when I was a kid. For birthday parties.”

Thirteen years later, grown up and on his own, Beaumont was working at a hotel in Riverside when a guest noticed his name on an ID pin and mentioned that--years before--he had had a good friend with the same name. It turned out to be Beaumont’s father.

“I got a phone number and I called him . . . but he didn’t call me for a month because he thought I was coming after him for money,” Beaumont says.

Unbeknownst to Beaumont, his father had become a multimillionaire in real estate--a jet-setting playboy with a home in Reno, a resort in Palm Springs and a lifestyle that would eventually kill him at age 52.

Not long after they met, Beaumont went to work at his father’s resort. Sometimes he would join him on business trips aboard his dad’s private jet. But too often, it felt all wrong. And always, there were the drugs, including his father’s favorite: cocaine.

Several months after one visit with his dad, Beaumont was at a barber shop in Palm Springs when the conversation turned to a Bob Beaumont. That is when he learned his father was dead.

“He had died three months before,” Beaumont says. “He had taken so much cocaine that he went into coma and never came out of it.”

His father dead, his mother living in Hawaii, Beaumont stayed in Riverside, moving into an apartment with an old high school friend, Dale Torchie.

Eventually, Torchie moved to Long Beach. “I knew he was getting into drugs and having a lot of problems, but we stayed in contact and he eventually got AIDS,” Beaumont said.

Torchie died in May 1995.

Before he began the Resource Network, Beaumont had embarked on his own escape from addiction. In his case, Beaumont says, it was a sexual addiction that cost him his marriage and led to two misdemeanor arrests as a peeping Tom.

His salvation, he says, was a treatment program that reminded him others out there care. (His mother also entered a treatment program and now works as a drug prevention counselor in Hawaii.)

Someday, Beaumont says, he wants the network to not only provide a radio show but help organize educational programs and mobilize communities to confront the problems of addictions.

Says the Betty Ford’s Boop: “Sometimes, you do things on a leap of faith and sometimes on experience. Bob didn’t have a lot of experience, but he had a lot of enthusiasm and some important points to convey. And his message is out there for everybody.”