MORE THAN A MEAL CENTER GIVES LOCAL SENIORS SECOND CHANCE.

Byline: Eugene Tong Staff Writer

NEWHALL - All John Erickson wanted was a cigarette and a place to keep warm until the shuttle returned him to the emergency winter shelter for the evening.

``Is there a place where I can buy a cigarette from someone here?'' he said, lounging in the Santa Clarita Valley Senior Center. Nurse and case manager Karin Kelly smiled.

The denim jacket-clad 61-year-old found both at the center, along with a chance to retrieve pieces of his life he thought were lost after years of poor health and sporadic homelessness.

`'It's not uncommon for us to find folks without resources,'' said Brad Berens, executive director of the Santa Clarita Valley Committee on Aging, which runs the center. In the frigid January air, he shared smokes with Erickson, whom he found days earlier at his doorstep.

``I smoked for 50 years,'' Erickson said. ``You think (quitting is) going to make me live longer now?''

The homeless shelter is closed from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., so Erickson spends daytime either in the public library in Canyon Country or in the parks and on the sidewalks of downtown Newhall. With a head of silver hair under his baseball cap and a wobbly gait, he seems more like a grandfather than someone without a home.

``John came in and he was talking with the receptionist,'' Berens said. ``I took him over there to Karin.''

``All he had left was $5,'' Kelly said. Though not his assigned case worker, she has worked to reconnect Erickson with the government and Veterans Affairs benefits to which the Vietnam vet is entitled. They hope to get him under a roof when the shelter begins its eight-month hiatus March 15.

Erickson has been staying at the shelter since January, though he once lived alone in a two-bedroom condo in Canyon Country for some 17 years and held a steady job with Lockheed. A bout with hydrocephalus - water in the brain - beginning in 1997 left him unable to work.

``I had a little trouble walking,'' he said. ``I would just drop. I'd fall down.''

Erickson lost the home and two of his three cars soon after. Since then, he has stayed with friends and at L.A. Family Housing facilities in North Hollywood, Kelly said. He underwent two operations at the VA hospital to drain the fluid and got out in January.

Asked how he's doing: ``If you really want to know, my head hurts, and I don't walk good, as you can tell. It hurts me the least when I lay down. It feels like there is a rock in there.''

Before his illness, Erickson worked primarily as an inspector with Lockheed in Burbank and in Palmdale. He saw the homeless like some living in middle-class comfort would.

``I was naive,'' he said. ``I thought they were too lazy to work. Some of them are that way. But there are a lot of people who aren't that way. They just couldn't (work).''

Upon discharge from the hospital, Erickson said he got into his car - a Mustang - and returned to Santa Clarita. He said both his parents are buried here; they died in the early 1990s.

``I prepaid for (my plot) out there,'' he said. ``This is where I'm going to die.''

The valley is oceans away from Erickson's birthplace of Bradford, England. The family moved to Rochester, New York, in 1957 and eventually to Van Nuys, following jobs in electronics manufacturing. He graduated from Birmingham High School in 1963.

At the Santa Clarita Veteran's Historical Plaza - another memory. Erickson enlisted in the Navy, serving two tours in Vietnam between 1963 and 1967. It was better than joining the Army, he said.

Does he feel pride walking past the memorial?

``Used to, but not any more,'' he said. ``It's been a long time. There are too many things to worry about, like where I'm going to go when the shelter closes.''

His priorities are ``Keeping warm and some place to sleep and lay down, in that order.''

``Who knows? What happens will happen. I don't really know,'' he said. ``I can't sleep out here at night. Thank God we had the warm trailers (at the shelter).

``The cot kills my back though. When I used to visit my aunt in Liverpool, she had a cot from the Royal Navy. As a kid, I couldn't sleep that well on that, and that was 55 years ago.''

Eugene Tong, [phone]

eugene.tong(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Vietnam vet and former Lockheed employee John Erickson eats a hot meal at a homeless shelter in Santa Clarita.

(2 -- color) John Erickson empties the contents of his pockets - a requisite to enter the temporary Santa Clarita winter shelter where he is staying.

David Crane/Staff Photographer