When Boys Town for troubled kids closed its doors high up on the ridge of Trabuco Canyon in the summer of 2017, a buzz ran through the charity community.
What would become of the 80-acre compound?
Rumor had it that several developers were offering to buy the picturesque property (with the $7 million price tag). No surprise there.
But then the first developer’s escrow fell through. And so did the second. This summer Boys Town went back to the third developer, Stone Building Corporation, and asked if they were still interested. They were.
President Gregg Stone plunked down an undisclosed amount. And then he did something unexpected. He set aside 12 of the 80 acres he had just bought, the acres where the five vacant Boys Town houses still stand, and he invited 28 Orange County charities to bid on the parcel.
Many were interested. The Orange County Rescue Mission. Colette’s Children’s Home. Grandma’s House of Hope. Olive Crest. Just which charity would wind up with the property has been the source of much speculation these past few months.
It was revealed Tuesday, Dec. 4.
The winning bid went to Lauri Burns, one of the worst juvenile delinquents around back in the day. A chronic group-home runaway, Burns wound up on the streets, selling her body for drugs. Then one night some thugs nearly beat her to death, and Burns turned it all around, devoting the rest of her life to saving foster girls like herself.
A woman who would have fit right in at Boys Town when she was a kid is essentially carrying on founder Father Edward J. Flanagan’s mission.
Burns closed escrow Monday, and then she drove into the canyon, straight up Flanagan Road, to say a prayer and do some crying.
She hopes that by Christmas all five houses that Boys Town built will be ready for her girls. There will be 30 bedrooms for 30 girls and young women, ages 15 to 21, all of them foster care kids who are survivors of human trafficking. It will be the first home in Orange County dedicated to that wounded population.
Burns is going to call the property Vera’s Sanctuary for Women.
And who is Vera? you ask.
She is the mother of the mystery man, himself an orphan, who gave Burns $1 million to make this whole story possible.
Her next step
The craziest part of the story, Burns says, shaking her head, is that she has long been, in her words, “obsessed with Boys Town.”
If you don’t know the story, if you haven’t seen the movie, it was 1917 when a young priest named Father Flanagan borrowed $90 from a friend to buy a house in Omaha, Nebraska, so he could take in street kids, regardless of their race or religion or behavior.
“There are no bad boys…only bad environments,” was one of his mottos.
By 1921 hundreds of boys had arrived and so he bought a farm outside Omaha and began calling it Boys Town. The thing Flanagan did different than an orphanage, the thing that made him a pioneer, is that he respected the kids’ rights. He even let them elect their own mayor. He also publicly railed against reformatories, often dens of abuse.
Burns herself had run away from 23 group homes and juvenile halls while growing up in the ’70s. So when she was a teen at an Anaheim group home and the movie “Boys Town,” the 1938 classic in which Spencer Tracy immortalizes Father Flanagan, came on TV, it was a revelation.
She couldn’t believe a place like that existed.
It was everything she dreamed a kids home should be. Nice furniture, clean floors, family meals and respect.
Years later, after she turned her life around and was doing computer consulting for Northrop Grumman and fostering kids herself, she actually enrolled in a course on Boys Town’s family-focused methodology (married couples live in the house with the children). And when Boys Town opened its Trabuco Canyon location in 1993, she began mentoring some of the girls there (they began taking girls in 1979).
In 2007 Burns started her own non-profit, The Teen Project, to get girls off the streets and out of abusive foster homes and into jobs and therapy. One day, she drove to Trabuco Canyon with Scott Larson, the executive director of HomeAid, to show him a piece of land for sale and tell him her vision to build some cottages a la Boys Town.
“He said, ‘Lauri you cannot start here. You have no experience. There’s no water up here. No electricity. Someday maybe, but not now,’” she recalls. “I was really bummed out.”
Burns drove out of the canyon, found a house in Lake Forest and in 2010 began taking in young women who were either on the streets or just emancipated from foster care with nowhere to go.
“I tried to make it like Boys Town,” she says. “It looks like a real house. It has a house mom. We do dinners together. It runs like a family.”
Three years later, she opened Freehab, a free 74-bed drug treatment/vocational training home in Los Angeles that has so far helped nearly 1,000 girls.
Fast forward to this August. Burns bumped into a man who began donating to her in 2009 after he heard her speak. She can’t say where she bumped into him or who he is, but his donations to her have grown from $5,000 to $100,000 over the years.
“How’s it going?” he asked her.
“Great,” she told him. But the truth was she hadn’t been sleeping. She needed money to pay Freehab bills. Lots of money. In fact, to ease her stress, she had been “meditating” on what it would feel like to get $1 million.
As she walked away, he called her back.
“Lauri, I was going to leave you money in my will when I die, but why would I do that when I can give it to you now and see what you do with it? I’m going to wire you $1 million.”
Burns burst into tears.
“Oh my God, from God’s ears to yours,” she told him.
The money arrived Aug. 9. A few weeks later Burns got a call from Stone that the Boys Town property was up for sale. Did she want to bid? Stone, who actually lives in Trabuco Canyon with his children, told her that there were bigger charities with better financials that were interested, but he was a fan of her mission and her passion.
“There’s no way I can afford that property,” she told him and hung up.
Then she remembered that she had $1 million in the bank. It was for paying bills, but some public funding had just come through, so the bills were paid.
Burns emailed her benefactor and asked him if she should use his money to buy the Boys Town property.
He shot back an email.
Here we must pause to explain that when Burns first went to a 12-step program back in 1987, she was told to pray to God. George Burns in the movie “Oh, God!” popped into her head, so that’s who she’s been praying to ever since.
So here’s what the mystery millionaire’s email says: “I asked George and he puffed his cigar and said, ‘Sounds good kiddo!’ And by the way, Spencer Tracy also thought it was a good idea.”
Furthermore, he wrote, he has a memory of watching “Boys Town” on TV in a flat with no hot water during “a long, cold Christmas” before his mother Vera died of cancer, leaving him an orphan.
Burns called Stone back.
Forget what I said, she told him. I want it. I forgot I have a million dollars!
First hire
Burns hopes to have her foster girls snuggled in their new beds by Christmas. She has 100 volunteers, including a crew of longshoremen from San Pedro, ready to drive up the canyon next week with paint and furniture. And she already has hired one of the house moms.
It happened on the spot just last week while she was still in escrow. Burns was holding an AA meeting at her house. One of the counselors shared that her job was being cut and she was scared because she had been a foster care kid and she felt like if she lost her job she might once again lose her home. Plus she had a young daughter now, so it made her even more nervous.
“Where did you grow up,” Burns asked?
“A place called Boys Town in Trabuco Canyon,” the woman said.
The hair on Burns’ arms stood up.
Well, sister, you’ve got a job and a place to live,” she said. “We’ve got room for you and your daughter. You’re going back to Boys Town.
The woman began to cry.
This is the weird synchronicity that is my life, Burns says. “God is all over this thing.
And maybe Father Flanagan, too.