San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Serving the community with love
Couple build legacy of social change with decades of volunteer work on the West Side
In 1969, Patti White and Rod Radle had much in common with other idealistic American 21-year-olds.
Devout Catholics and pacifists who had fallen in love at Marquette University in Milwaukee, they were disgusted by the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon. But they wanted to channel their anger and activism into something more tangible than protest.
White had spent three of her college years studying theology and philosophy at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. She convinced the lean, bushy-bearded Radle to move with her to the West Side to pursue what surely seemed quixotic to some — a committed life based on volunteerism and social reform in what was, and still is, one of the nation’s poorest urban communities.
“I came fully loaded with ignorance,” says Patti Radle, laughing. “I was fully committed to voluntary poverty, but I wanted it to be safe.”
Some 52 years later, the Radles, by any measure, have fulfilled those goals. Their nonprofit organization, Inner City Development, has set a standard for scandal-free community work. Patti Radle has served in elected office for years. Rod Radle is a key local player in affordable housing.
Not to alarm anyone: The Radles are not riding into the sunset soon. Far from it. They are both vegetarians, stunningly energetic at 73 – they have the exact same birthday in 1947 – and they spent their 50th wedding anniversary beside Apache Creek, reciting the rosary.
No festivities or public tributes. Not their style.
They found themselves congratulated again by a wide swath of the city’s philanthropic and do-gooder class when Patti Radle stepped down this year from her six-year tenure as president of the San Antonio Independent School District board.
“I respect Patti enormously for what she is,” said former Mayor Phil Hardberger, who worked with Radle when she served on City Council from 2003 to 2007. “She is as selfless of a person as you could find. She and Rod both have a purity of heart that radiates in action.”
By the time she became a council member, Patti Radle had been an SAISD schoolteacher for many years, and Inner City Development was
well established as a neighborhood center for after-school activities and a source for emergency food, shelter and clothing for destitute families.
On a sweltering recent afternoon, the Inner City complex and its warren of converted bedrooms was noisy with neighborhood kids playing air hockey and board games.
Some dabbled on computers; others played basketball outside or swam in a supervised above-ground pool.
The Radles have served as its directors of volunteers since 1970. Inner City now has about 150 of them, in a multitude of roles that include running the popular after-school reading program and the spring basketball league, and only one parttime administrative employee.
Each day the center’s food pantry prepares sack lunches for the adult homeless in the area and assembles bags of groceries for specific needy families. The entire food program at Inner City, says Rod Radle, is funded with about $40,000 from mostly small donations raised in an annual effort called Thanksgiving 365.
They estimate some 6,500 people benefit from their efforts each year, but the neighborhood’s poverty has resisted change for generations. Census figures from 2015 show that average annual income of households is below $11,000, 79 percent of them are headed by single parents, only 2 percent of the community have college degrees and the teen pregnancy rate is three times the national average.
But the Radles see the progress
of children every day.
They look look no farther than their volunteers for evidence that their motto – “Strengthen the community through dignity, love and service” — works.
If the Radles have a secret, say admirers, it is themselves. They are the peace and justice power couple who still are truly in love. They complete each other’s sentences.
Both still resemble the timewarp folksingers of their younger days, who sometimes paid the bills performing on the college circuit. But both long ago dispelled any doubts about their ability to deal with the real-world setbacks of addiction, violence and homelessness that plague their community. They have little patience for whining or empty promises of support.
“We all clean the toilets here,” Rod Radle says. “It’s kind of a Gandhian orientation.”
Patti Radle could easily pass for the activist nun she once planned to be. Her orderly discipline probably comes from handling classrooms and school boards, she says. A Navy captain’s kid who learned her smooth Spanish while her father was stationed in Rota, Spain, she can get emotional and even cuss, privately.
Rod Radle is wiry, like the long distance runner he was for years. Of Wisconsin farmer stock, he’s the self-deprecating punster and guitarist, when needed, who gladly defers to his wife. Growing up in Los Angeles and having watched the Watts riots in 1965 led Radle to question the inequality of
America’s cities.
He got a master’s in social work at Our Lady of the Lake University that prepared him to work with dysfunctional families and, he adds wryly, local developers and politicians.
With more than five decades in street-tough charity, the Radles are hands-on leaders.
They have let ex-offenders be volunteers, but not any with criminal records involving children. “You have to take some risks,” says Rod Radle,
“to find the very best people.”
“The worst year for gang activity was 1993,” says Patti Radle. “We routinely had murders. I’d lie in bed and count gunshots instead of sheep. We had gang members here washing floors and prepping food. They needed a place to belong.”
They spoke fondly of one gang member who turned his life around and eventually was able to adopt five children.
The couple occasionally has sought out city and federal funds for various programs, says Rod Radle, but the strings attached to some of the grants have left them disillusioned.
“Early on, we had a federal grant for a free lunch program,” recalled Patti Radle, “and they would literally want to know how many boys played ping pong at 3 p.m. The paperwork was astounding. We never wanted government money again.”
“We’re not against accountability,” adds Rod Radle, “but (the programs) take away your flexibility. There was so much wasted food with the federal lunches.”
They fed about 140 kids a day during a normal nonpandemic summer. They provide emergency food for about 800 “families in crisis” throughout the year.
Through a separate nonprofit birthed by Inner City, they also provide temporary housing for a number of families. Rod Radle has served on the boards of both the San Antonio Alternative Housing Corp., where he was the director for 19 years, and the Hemisfair Redevelopment Corp., where he pushed for the public-private partnership to set aside some of its rental units for families making less than $57,000 annually.
“Rod definitely has a lower profile than Patti, but is no less influential,” says fellow board member Juan Landa, an investment adviser. “Rod is very savvy when it comes to financing needs, and I’ve seen more than one banker underestimate him because of his disarming outward appearance. He’s got a Zen-like demeanor. I was not surprised to learn he once studied at a seminary.”
Lou Williams, a University Presbyterian Church member and former high school counselor, remembers meeting the Radles in the early 70s and thinking there was something unique about their commitment.
“Patti was teaching elementary school and I remember how quickly she realized her kids would be at a real deficit in standardized testing and so she set up intensive tutoring,” he said. “Then she organized a Christmas toy sale at Inner City that became so popular they had to give the parents tickets.”
Williams remembers how the Radles always seemed to have some or all of their children in tow. They had four of their own and became guardians of a fifth child who showed up at Inner City at age 6.
Their first home on the West Side was dilapidated and “really the pits, but exactly who they were,” Williams said. They eventually built their own house about two blocks away, painting it purple, per the kids’ wish.
How did the Radles accomplish so much with so little?
The couple credits their religious faith, but it’s hard to find anyone who has heard them proselytize.
“There’s never been any sense that they had a hidden agenda,” Williams said. “They are just legitimately who they claim to be. It’s very hard to find people like them.”