FIVE WHO PIONEERED AND PERSEVERE : WITH HEARTFELT THANKS FOR THE MANY LIVES THEY'VE TOUCHED, VALLEY'S QUEEN MOTHERS HONORED FOR SERVICE AND SACRIFICE.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Many African tribes hold older women in high esteem because of their wisdom, referring to them as Queen Mothers.

Five women who have lived in the San Fernando Valley for a combined 230 years - helping establish the community's churches and schools, form youth and senior organizations, encourage its young families and care for its children - will be honored in the same tradition Sunday.

Dorothy Bradford, Rosa Broadous, Dorothy Caldwell, Ida Kinney and Dessa Robinson, who range in age from the early 70s to 89, will be honored as the Valley's Queen Mothers by the nonprofit National Council of Negro Women.

``Queen Mother was a title of respect and love - and age also,'' said Vivian Lincoln, president of the Valley's NCNW chapter. ``That's what these women are - our Queen Mothers - and that's why we use that title.''

The women will be asked to share their wisdom with younger community members at the group's annual Black History Celebration on Sunday afternoon in Lake View Terrace, Lincoln said.

``We teach the children they should honor their elders, and these women are the seniors of the community,'' she said. ``The young people can learn a lot from these women.''

And many have. All of the women raised children, their own or other folks'. One was a teacher, another an advocate for literacy. One founded a PTA and another baby-sat the children of the parishioners of the church her husband led.

The women have much in common. Each moved to California from another state. All but one is a widow. They are pioneers; one was the first African-American union member at the aerospace plant where she worked.

For decades, these five women worked to help their families achieve comfortable livings and made time for others, making significant contributions to the community in both official and informal ways. One is a dynamic fund-raiser, another is her church's Sunshine Lady.

From the experiences of these five Queen Mothers emerges a slice of the Valley's African-American history.

Dorothy Bradford

``Everybody calls me Mom,'' said the Alabama-born 73-year-old who raised her six children - and dozens more neighborhood children - while helping her husband, William James Bradford Jr., start one of the Valley's first churches.

They were married Christmas Day 1941 after they both attended Tuskeegee Institute. Because there was little work in the South, the Bradfords and their first baby headed for California, where the war effort was gearing up, in a Chrysler ``that broke down every five minutes.''

``When we got to California, we had $37,'' Dorothy Bradford recalled. ``We lived in our car for three months before my husband found work. I used to buy my baby a hot dog and a Pepsi Cola. He'd chew and we'd swallow, we were so poor.''

The day they had decided to go home to Alabama, her husband found a job as an aircraft mechanic at Lockheed Corp. Soon they were able to afford a down payment on a home. The Pacoima woman recalls the Valley then as ``plenty of sagebrush and jackrabbits. There weren't many houses, no gas, and I had to dig my own hole to have a toilet put in.''

Several years later, her husband began preaching. ``He said he got a call from the Lord,'' she said. ``But he didn't give up his job.''

Eventually, they bought a small building in San Fernando and turned it into Mount Zion Baptist Church. While her husband ministered to his new, mostly African-American flock, she ``did whatever needed doing,'' including keeping the church clean, running women's organizations and watching parishioners' children. In addition to reading and playing games, Bradford taught the kids to garden and tend chickens in her back yard - and also about morality and values.

``There was a church group that had 35 kids, and sometimes I had 35 kids for dinner on Sunday besides my own six,'' she remembered, laughing. ``I've got at least 15 kids besides my own that call me Mom. It makes me feel good to know that I helped some of them along the way.''

After her husband died of a heart attack in 1971, Bradford retired from volunteerism. ``I love being by myself,'' she said. ``I didn't have a childhood, married at 17. Now, I try to enjoy my life. I go to senior meetings. I go to Las Vegas and Laughlin with the seniors. But I don't feel old. I do everything for myself, my own laundry, my own cooking and cleaning. I refuse to sit in a rocking chair and rock my life away.''

Rosa Broadous

``We were blessed,'' Broadous, 78, an Arkansas native with a regal bearing, said, looking back on her life. She and her husband, Hillery, raised 10 children (six became ministers) and both still found time to promote youth organizations and activities, literacy and church activities.

She and her husband came to California from Oregon when he was discharged from the Army after World War II. He became the pastor at Greater Community Baptist Church in Pacoima, and she settled into the busy role of a preacher's wife.

Broadous, who rode the train through miles of brown desert to get here in the late 1940s, recalls the Valley as a beautiful oasis. ``There was a warmth and friendliness in the Valley. There were trees and there was grass,'' she said. ``Transportation was a big problem, though. There weren't many houses. There was one across from us and one up the road; other than that, it was open fields. Friends coming to see us used to say they were going to the country.''

Besides working in the 1970s in food service for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Pacoima woman founded the PTA at Wadsworth Elementary School in Los Angeles, raised money for dozens of charities, helped plan YWCA programs and organized events for Church Women United and the American Baptist Women's Ministry. Literacy was a cause dear to her heart - especially teaching reading and writing to adult members of Calvary Baptist Church who were embarrassed to seek help.

``We couldn't get the adults to sign up for reading or writing,'' Broadous said. ``They would call us about their children, but we knew they needed it, too. So we started with the little children who were beginning to fail. Gradually, the parents started coming, too.''

She also took an English-as-a-second-language course and began to teach non-English speakers to read English. She continued her volunteer work even after her husband's death from lung cancer in 1982. Her pace has slowed as her vision and hearing have faded, and she has begun to walk with a cane. Still, the woman known in the community as Mother Broadous attends monthly meetings of the Pacoima Over-50 Club and participates in activities as her health permits.

``I'm a perennial volunteer,'' Broadous said. ``I sing a song, `Lord, I'm available to you.' That's my theme song.''

Dorothy Caldwell

The vibrant Arkansas-born, Texas-raised woman describes herself with a laugh as a nonstop talker and a born volunteer. ``I'm so much like my mother,'' the Mission Hills woman said. ``My mother never met a stranger. I love to talk to people. The only reason I wouldn't talk to you is if you wouldn't let me.''

But there's one subject she won't talk about: her age. ``My mother used to say any woman who would tell her age is either lying or a blabbermouth,'' she said. ``Just say I'm a senior.''

Caldwell was still in her teens when her family moved to the Valley in 1937 from Fresno, where she attended college.

``There were lots of trees, trees everywhere,'' she recalled. ``You'd see lots of black people sitting on benches waiting for the bus, walking along. You don't see much of that anymore. It's mostly Spanish people.''

She was divorced from her first husband, living with her two young daughters and her mother, when she met and married her second husband, Henry, in 1952. ``When Henry and I got married, he married me and the girls and my mother,'' she laughed.

Henry worked as a deputy sheriff for Los Angeles County for 34 years, until his death from prostate cancer in November 1995, and she worked as an administrator for the federal government, retiring in 1977 as assistant to the pathologist at a veterans hospital.

Over the years, Caldwell helped found and raise money for Concerned Black Women of the San Fernando Valley, a nonprofit group that in the past dozen years has awarded more than $100,000 in scholarships to minority high school students who show academic promise but whose grades are not high enough to qualify for traditional scholarships.

She also helped found the Northeast Valley Health Center, a clinic that provides health care, drug, alcohol and AIDS programs for low-income minority residents, and remains a member of the board of directors. And her intercessions over the years with First United Methodist Church in Pacoima have kept the Pacoima Senior Center - she's a member of the center's advisory board - afloat financially when it ran out of state and local government money before the next grant came through.

Newly widowed, Caldwell, the mother of five children, has renewed her commitment to the church, where she's active in local, district and national policy-making conferences. ``Missions are our priority,'' Caldwell said. ``If there are problems in Africa, that's where we are. Five years ago, we built a church in Africa. We're in Asia, everywhere.''

Since 1982, she's been a lay speaker at her church and others, and she delivers motivational and religious talks gratis for just about any group that asks her.

``I just felt a calling,'' Caldwell said. ``I wanted to talk to people about God. I have a personal relationship with Christ.''

She has no plans to slow down.

``I think being with people is very important,'' Caldwell said. ``I just got to stay busy. There's always something for me to do. There's always work to be done in the church.''

Ida Kinney

This feisty 89-year-old Arkansas native has been fighting for her rights - and the rights of others - for nearly as long as she can remember. Now she's writing a book about her personal struggle for civil rights, which began when white boys tried to push her into the mud on the way to grade school.

``If they hit me, I was goin' to stomp 'em,'' she declared, with a grin. ``One time, three brothers linked arms, and they were going to push us black children into the mud. The boys told me, `We'll fight the big ones. You take the little one.' I grabbed him and bit his ear nearly off.''

Her farmer grandfather, who was a member of the school board, kept the board from expelling her. But the family soon moved to California, partly to keep her out of trouble.

Kinney learned about prejudice and unfairness at an early age. Both her grandparents had been slaves, and while her grandpa was reluctant to talk about those times, her grandmother used to tell her stories about what slavery had been like.

``Grandma told us about when she was 3 years old, watching her mother stripped and whipped until the blood ran down her back because she wouldn't tell the master about young slaves that were running away,'' Kinney said. ``And then they told her not to move, and they sowed a handful of salt over the new wounds. That story stays with me more than anything.''

Kinney attended college, intending to become a teacher, but marriage derailed her career for a decade. Widowed, she moved to the Valley from Santa Monica in 1940, and married her second husband, Perry, in 1952. ``The Valley was all vegetables then,'' Kinney said. ``Van Nuys was a little town.''

She took a job working in a berry patch until Lockheed advertised for women to learn aircraft assembly. She got the wartime job, but it bothered her that she could not belong to the aircraft workers' union like the white women she worked with. Angered, she started a petition drive to make union membership open to all races and became the first African-American union member at the plant.

Finally returning to school to earn her teaching credential, she taught grade school in Bakersfield (``They weren't taking any black teachers in L.A.'') for a few years. Then, worried that many minority children were entering school unprepared, she helped organize the Valley's first Head Start program in the late 1940s to get 4- and 5-year-olds ready to enter first grade. Since she retired from Head Start 23 years ago, she's filled that time ``helping to organize things.''

Kinney helped found the Greater Community Baptist Church in Pacoima (she was the eighth member to sign the charter) and helped established the Pacoima Senior Center and the Pacoima Boys and Girls Club. In 1985, despite arthritis that slowed her step, she was one of two African-American woman to travel with a group of 109 people from several countries to the former Soviet Union to encourage peace and prayer worldwide.

A life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a charter member of the National Council of Negro Women, she also helped form the Congress of California Seniors, a group made up of senior citizens clubs statewide, setting up phone rooms and arranging carpools so seniors can get together to send telegrams and telephone legislators in support of senior causes.

``I said whenever I retire, I'm going to put my whole self into the senior movement,'' Kinney said. ``When they say they're going to take our Medicare and Social Security, they're just kidding. We're going to fight back. Seniors were treated awful, just awful, before we organized. But no more.''

Dessa Robinson

The bubbly 87-year-old, born in Memphis, wears a big grin as she helps Valley seniors. She studied home economics for two years in college, then came to California with her husband, King, in 1962 from Chicago to care for her ailing mother. She and her husband had no children of their own, but helped raise two nieces who were left motherless. Until his death in 1980, the Robinsons owned and operated the Chicken Shack on Van Nuys Boulevard.

In those days, the Valley was a very different place, she said. ``I loved it,'' Robinson said. ``You didn't have to lock your doors. Everybody was friendly.''

Widowed after 52 years of marriage, Robinson sold the restaurant and kept to herself until a friend dragged her to the Pacoima Senior Center. There, she blossomed as a volunteer, helping to set up the lunchtime program and acting as its greeter and cashier for the past 15 years.

``This is a place where you have to have care and love for people,'' said Robinson, who gives big bear hugs to people leaving on vacation, having personal problems or who just look like they need a hug. ``Hugs keep you alive,'' she said with a laugh.

She also checks daily on a handful of local seniors in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease, making sure they're up and dressed and come to the center for lunch and activities, then reporting back to their relatives.

``As they kinda slip, they say, `Dessa, take 'em.' And I say, `No problem.' ''

For the past 14 years, she's been president of the Stewardess Board at Parks Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in San Fernando, taking care of the church housekeeping and altar decorations. She's also the church's Sunshine Lady, calling to check on those who are ill or need help from the church pastor or missionary committee. And on Tuesday nights, she calls bingo games at the apartment house where she lives.

Her volunteer activities keep her young, she believes. ``I think I'm left here for some reason,'' Robinson said. ``I'm supposed to be of some service. You got to be of some service or you just go away. You can't sit in your house by yourself. You look at those walls and you go crazy. If I couldn't be with people, I think I'd die. I have young ideas. I don't think old. I trust in God and stay busy doing for somebody else.''

Spirit of Harambee for month of history

Harambee, a Swahili term, means ``let's all pull together.''

The Valley chapter of the National Council of Negro Women hopes to promote that idea Sunday with its Harambee lunch and Queen Mother awards. Their goal: bridging the generation gap to inspire young African-Americans to learn from their elders and use that wisdom to better their community.

``Harambee is basically an alliance of the generations,'' said Vivian Lincoln, president of the local NCNW chapter. ``We'd like to see seniors working more with youth; they could teach crafts or crocheting or knitting, tutor children. And while they're helping them learn, they're imparting wisdom, too.''

Lincoln said one goal is to get more young people interested and involved in community work.

``A lot of young people don't feel like they belong in the community,'' she said. ``Maybe they don't know much about it. Like in Harlem, where I grew up, they don't stay and fix things. They just move on to whatever else they can afford. But the ones still left - the older people - remember how it used to be and want to tell people it could be that way again.''

The NCNW's fifth annual Black History Celebration runs from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Phoenix Academy, 11600 Eldridge Ave., Lake View Terrace. Tickets are $10 at the door for adults, $5 for children under 12. There will be gospel music, dancers, cultural vendors and displays. Information: [phone].

Many schools, government agencies and other groups are also celebrating February as Black History Month with a variety of events. Here's a sampling:

The Harlem Children's Group Batoto Yetu, featuring dancers ages 7 to 17, will perform at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater at Wilshire and San Vicente boulevards, West Los Angeles, with a CenterStage lecture beginning at 1 p.m. with company founder and director Julio Leitao. Ticket prices are $45 and $22, and $9 for students.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will present modern dance performances Feb. 18-23. Shows are at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. CenterStage lectures with Ailey company members begin an hour before curtain times. Ticket prices range from $32 to $40, and $13 for students.

African singer-songwriter Baaba Maal will perform 8 p.m. Feb. 21 with his 10-piece band at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater. Ticket prices are $27 and $30, and $9 for students. For information or to purchase tickets, call [phone].

A free African Market Place, featuring vendors and crafts runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Court of Community at the University Student Union on the CSUN campus Tuesday and Feb. 18 and 25.

CAPTION(S):

6 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) THE QUEEN MOTHER

Rosa Broadus and 4 other San Fernando Valley women honored for contributions to community

(2) `I said whenever I retire, I'm going to put my whole self into the senior movement. When they say they're going to take our Medicare and Social Security, they're just kidding. We're going to fight back. Seniors were treated awful, just awful, before we organized. But no more.'

Ida Kinney

(3) `We couldn't get the adults to sign up for reading or writing. They would call us about their children, but we knew they needed it, too. So we started with the little children who were beginning to fail. Gradually, the parents started coming, too.'

Rosa Broadus

(4) `If I couldn't be with people, I think I'd die. I have young ideas. I don't think old. I trust in God and stay busy doing for somebody else.'

Dessa Robinson

Myung J. Chun/Daily News

(5) `I just felt a calling. I wanted to talk to people about God. I have a personal relationship with Christ. ... I think being with people is very important. I just got to stay busy. There's always something for me to do. There's always work to be done in the church.'

Dorothy Caldwell

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News

(6) `I've got at least 15 kids besides my own that call me Mom. It makes me feel good to know that I helped some of them along the way.'

Dorothy Bradford

Evan Yee/Daily News

Box: Spirit of Harambee for month of history (See Text)