Grieving Lover Finds Peace Tending Roses of Little Brown Church

The man devotes each weekend to the church.

Some days, he prunes the rosebushes. Others, he repairs the brick patio, or installs better lighting, or builds new windows. He knows just about every corner of the building by heart--except the inside.

He has little use for religion, and not much more for God. But on the grounds of the one-room, clapboard church, on a whizzing four-lane boulevard in this city’s sprawling suburbs, Dan Chandler has rediscovered his soul and his sanity.

Mad with grief after the death of his adored girlfriend, Chandler thought he might explode. In the hours after her death in 1992, he had fantasies of going somewhere quiet and shooting a bullet through his temple.

Vicki Kelem died at age 44 from a disease called amyloidosis, in which abnormal proteins build up in body tissues and eventually destroy organs. She was sick for a year and a half.

As he tells it, she was a woman of boundless enthusiasm. She loved Chandler. She loved the congested San Fernando Valley neighborhood where they lived. And she loved the country village look of the Little Brown Church on nearby Coldwater Canyon Boulevard.

Well, Chandler thought, that’s as good a place as any.

“Three days after she died, I went to the church to get baptized and blow my brains out,” he said.

Instead, after a long talk with the pastor, he wound up asking if he could plant three rosebushes, one pink and two red--Vicki’s favorite flowers, in her favorite colors.

Soon, “I started planting more roses,” he said. “They didn’t have any flowers there. I put three bushes in, it made everything else look bad.”

Chandler, now 62, laughed. “I’m an overachiever.”

Financially speaking, the church did not need him. The burgeoning congregation recently bought a new house of worship nearby.

So when Chandler planted a whole new garden, then moved on to improve the fencing, pathways and parking lot with his own money and sweat, the congregation was dubious.

“You always wonder, you know, what’s his angle?” said the chapel’s senior minister, the Rev. Laurence Keene. “I think it took a year or two for us to realize he doesn’t have any ulterior motive. He was just a lost soul.”

Chandler ran away from home at age 13 and drifted through various Western cities. He eventually bought a string of auto repair shops, married, fathered a son, then divorced.

In 1977, Chandler moved to Los Angeles and met Kelem a year later. “I fell in love with her instantly,” he said.

Pictures show a bright-eyed woman with a cheery smile and chin length, platinum-blond hair. She favored blue eyeliner and pink clothing, manicured nails and glittery rings, one for each finger of each hand.

“She was always smiling--very, very cheerful,” Chandler said. “She wouldn’t let herself be sad.”

Chandler was a bitter man when he met her. “She changed me,” he said.

They would have married--in the little church, of course--but legal issues lingering from Chandler’s first marriage prevented it.

When Kelem got sick, Chandler tended to her himself until, overwhelmed, he placed her in a nursing home for the last six months of her life. He visited her every day.

That’s when he started, surreptitiously, stopping by the Little Brown Church.

“The pain broke my spirit,” he said. “I’ve always been a ‘Here, I’ll do it’ type of person. It broke me down to the point where I could no longer do it.”

With its simple, country look, the Little Brown Church is often rented out for weddings. It’s where Nancy Davis married Ronald Reagan in 1952, and where Marlon Brando, Mickey Rooney and David Hasselhoff have tied the knot.

“The Little Brown Church met all our requirements,” recalled Nancy Reagan. “It was small and had a certain quaint, old-fashioned charm we loved.”

The building dates to 1940, when the Disciples of Christ denomination offered $600 to build a church.

Despite the departure of its congregation, the community remains welcome at the church, which never closes its doors.

“We have a locked offering box. Every week, there’s money in there,” said the Rev. Keene. “We’ve had checks as big as $5,000, $10,000, with notes saying, ‘Thank you for an open door at 3 a.m. My heart was breaking.’ ”

Like the church, Chandler leads a simple existence. His home doubles as an office in the company he owns--U.S. Labor Services, which produces practice manuals for federal civil service exams. He drives an aging black pickup and spends $150 a week on his few personal needs.

The rest of his savings and salary--about $150,000 so far--goes to his one grand indulgence.

Vicki loved to get roses. Now, they encircle the Little Brown Church like a rooted rainbow. Walking in the garden, Chandler points out the varieties by name, notes which ones smell sweet and which do not smell at all.

“It’s his way of keeping her alive, and he’ll never give up,” said Richard Healy, 27, Kelem’s son and a close friend of Chandler’s. “When I go there, it’s her. He’s captured her spirit in that church.”