Robert Reyna used to drink warm beer seven days a week. He says he kept two cans of Budweiser in his pockets to heat them up and one in each hand. The 32-year-old started drinking when he was 12 and didn’t stop until his arrest last October.
Police took Reyna into custody at his Pasadena apartment after they found 2.9 grams of cocaine on him and a Swisher Sweet cigar filled with weed.
Nine months later, Reyna is still returning to the criminal courthouse because of his bust. Three days a week, he heads up to the 182nd District Court of Judge Jeannine Barr and into a jury deliberation room that looks more like the aftermath of an arts-and-crafts store explosion. There are stacks of fabric squares, needles and thread. People who can’t sew sit in the corner and iron. Quilts-in-progress are spread across the table.
Reyna stands at the jury deliberation table folding strips of green cloth. He makes a sharp cut and slices the fabric into a stack of neat squares as he talks about his past.
He and most of the others on hand are working off their community service time in a novel program set up by the judge. Children with cancer are the direct beneficiaries, but those involved with the project say what began as a quilting bee has blossomed into a support group of sorts for these probationers.
“It’s not just the doing of it,” says Doris Laxson, a volunteer quilting adviser to the probationers. “It’s being there and being part of the group and making something together.”
Barr herself has been impressed at the way people who have never picked up a needle before take to the program.
“My favorite thing about the project is to walk back there and see all the men quilting,” the judge says.
Years ago, defendants like Reyna might have been ordered to write essays or do book reports for his three years of community service, because he has neck and back injuries that prevent him from doing traditional chores such as picking up roadside trash. (As part of his sentence, he also has to attend meetings of Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous.)
Assigning essays or book reports was also tricky for judges, because not everyone with physical disabilities had the same reading level or could even read at all. And some community service time was spent with probationers simply sitting slack-jawed in courtrooms.
In 1996, the court liaison officer in charge of probation at the time read an article in Redbook about Project Linus, which makes security blankets for critically ill or traumatized children. Later, the officer’s successor, Nugget Eby, was waiting at a windshield repair center when she noticed another customer reading a book about quilting.
Eby questioned the customer, Doris Laxson, about the craft. “She was asking me to teach her how to quilt while we were waiting for our cars,” Laxson says. She took Eby’s card and promised to send her a quilting book for beginners. “I thought, ‘That poor woman really needs help. She can’t do this from a book.’ ” So Laxson volunteered to come to the courthouse once a week and give lessons.
Last year, the Houston chapter of Project Linus received 3,430 blankets from various groups and organizations, to be delivered to places such as the pediatric section of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Almost 300 of the donated quilts came from the probationers in Barr’s court.
“It’s a learning skill. It’s something they can do the rest of their lives,” says Sally Burns, Houston coordinator for Project Linus. “They’re not only working off their time, they’re learning a skill or a trade that some of them don’t have.”
Ralph Nowlin, 58, has been on probation for six months. He sits in the corner tying lavender yarn onto a quilt. He says he was shot in the back in Vietnam and his neck was crushed when he was working at a chemical plant. “I can do this,” he says, holding up his quilt. “A lot of things, I can’t do.”
He’s about to go to the VA hospital for surgery. When he comes out, he plans to quilt from home.
Another man who has already finished his probation sentence keeps coming every week. He has numbered all the quilts and has a master list that describes each quilt and who is working on it. He e-mails progress reports to Laxson each week. He plans to take private lessons from her so he can learn more and pass it on to the other probationers. He wants to do better, more complicated quilts.
The quilts originally were just two sections of cloth with fluffy batting sandwiched in between and then sewn up. Now that Laxson is on board, they are slightly more ornate. Sometimes they cut the backs in a fringe to create a “ragtime” pattern.
There still aren’t any lone stars or log cabin quilts or any of the more complicated or traditional patterns. “The problem is most of these people aren’t going to be in the program long enough to learn in any depth,” Laxson says. “So we have to keep it pretty simple.”
The best quilt, with the prettiest pattern and the nicest sewing, isn’t finished and can’t be finished because the woman who was sewing it violated her probation. “She’s locked away right now,” Eby says.
Since Reyna cuts countertops for a living, he’s made himself the man in charge of cutting the cloth. He says other people waste time and waste cloth, but he hasn’t made a mistake yet.
He wants to be in charge of the program. He says he’s organized and he can motivate the others to work. He continues working after the rest of the probationers are gone. “I do this on my own,” he says. He wants to set up an assembly line at home and make extra quilts for Project Linus with his four kids.
His 14-year-old daughter wanted a sewing machine long before he had his trouble with the law. “Now she wants it even more,” he says. He plans to buy her a machine and teach her and his other two daughters, aged 15 and 11, to make quilts at home. Maybe his seven-year-old son, Joseph, will learn too.
Once his probation is up, he plans to keep coming at least two or three times a week.
“I can’t let the project down,” he says.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2003.