FLOWER ADULT DESIRE TO HELP TEENS IN NEED STILL MOTIVATES MOTHER OF YEAR.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

NORTH HILLS- The Community Mother of the Year is an ex-hippie who knew the words to every Beatles song ever written and drove around in a pink bus with flowers painted all over it.

Thirty years later, Ivelise Markovits is running a successful nonprofit corporation in North Hills that has a lobby filled with photographs of prominent supporters and letters of commendation from former President Bill Clinton, Gov. Gray Davis and local politicians praising her for the job she's been doing leading wayward girls down the right path in Los Angeles County.

Down Penny Lane to be exact.

``Actually, I wanted to call it Strawberry Fields or Abbey Road because those were my favorite Beatles songs, but we decided on Penny Lane instead,'' Ivelise said this week, taking another sniff of the flower she held in her hand.

Don't let the executive title and corporate dress fool you. This year's Community Mother of the Year - an honor bestowed on her by the Jewish Home for the Aging's Mother's Day committee - is still a flower child at heart.

For more than 30 years, she's been providing peace, love and a mother's guidance to more than 5,000 girls who have been sent to her Penny Lane treatment center by the courts to straighten their lives out.

Girls like Gina Roach and Georgia Martin, who are now mothers themselves and leading successful lives they never dared even dream about before they met an ex-hippie named Ivelise, who came to pick them up from juvenile hall driving a pink bus with flowers all over it.

``She saved my life, it's as simple as that,'' said Roach, who was on the streets at 14, getting in trouble, until a judge gave her one more chance and sent her to Penny Lane.

Today, Roach lives in Stevenson Ranch in Valencia with her husband and young baby and is a successful insurance saleswoman.

``Ivelise was my mother, and mother to thousands of young girls who came from bad families, or families that had given up on them,'' she said. ``Everything I have today, I owe to her and Penny Lane.''

Georgia agrees. ``I wasn't even 14 yet, and already I was giving up on life when I was placed in Penny Lane,'' she said.

``That's where I found love and caring. Ivelise gave me more than anyone had ever given me. She was my mother. I'd be dead now if she hadn't guided me in the right direction.''

Today, Georgia's a 45-year-old art teacher living in Van Nuys with an 18-year-old daughter graduating from high school who wants to become a school teacher.

``Kids, no matter how bad you think they are, can be helped,'' Georgia said. ``I'm living proof of that.''

They're all good kids, Ivelise says. All of them.

That's what 35 years of working with children labeled ``bad'' by society has taught her.

It took awhile for the lessons to sink in, to see that she could be doing more with the psychology degree she earned from Long Beach State in 1962 than trying to work within the strictures of the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

``They had recruited about 20 of us out of college with the idea of developing future administrators for the county,'' she said.

``I almost didn't make it through the training and evaluation period because I kept getting marked down when I got too emotional or cried seeing a little girl in trouble getting lost in the system.

``I was just too idealistic, I guess. They put me out in the Valley with a placement file of 50 girls to find homes for. I thought I'd find them wonderful places to live, but the reality was very few places wanted teen- age girls.

``A few of us started thinking about creating our own place, but nobody paid much attention to us,'' she said. ``We had plenty of good intentions, but no money.''

It took a loan from her dad and her boyfriend's father to scrape the money together to rent an old building in 1970 that used to be a convalescent home.

``We were all hippies at heart, so we painted everything bright colors, including our old bus,'' she laughed. ``We started with 25 girls the probation department released to us from juvenile hall.

``We gave them a place to live and counseling, and that was the beginning of Penny Lane. Our only paid staff was the cook and maintenance man. The rest of us worked for nothing, and it was still tough to meet payroll every month.''

Today, Penny Lane has a staff of 350 helping more than 100 girls and boys living in separate residential units around the North Hills facility and 1,200 teen-agers in its outpatient facility.

``We wanted to find a community mom who should be recognized for her work, and Ivelise's name was at the top of the list,'' said Dan Rosenson, chairman of the Mother's Day committee for the Jewish Home for the Aging.

``It's been absolutely phenomenal what she and Penny Lane have accomplished in turning around the lives of thousands of young people headed in the wrong direction,'' he said.

Ivelise, who has a 22-year-old son in college majoring in political science, is proud of being called the Valley's community mom on Mother's Day. Proud and a little embarrassed, as well.

The way she sees it, she's still a hippie at heart, not a corporate executive.

A young woman born in Puerto Rico who married a man from Argentina, and opened a home for wayward girls she wanted to call Abbey Road or Strawberry Fields because she loved the Beatles.

Still pulling up to the gates of juvenile hall in that old pink bus with the flowers painted all over it to become mother and counselor to kids society has written off.

But society's wrong, says the Community Mother of the Year.

They're all good kids - all of them.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- ran in Bulldog edition only) Ivelise Markovits, director of Penny Lane, a treatment center for troubled youths, shares a laugh with residents Lourdes Ramos and Dana Tello.

(2) Ivelise Markovits has been named Community Mother of the Year by the Jewish Home for the Aging for her work at Penny Lane, the nonprofit treatment center for youths she founded 30 years ago.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer