What Carney adopted last spring was not a child; it was a wall--a
half-mile stretch of the Los Angeles freeway network that has been
assaulted by vandals with spray cans for almost as long as anyone can
remember.

Carney, a 32-year-old car stereo installer from Long Beach, is helping
to win a war the state has been unable to. After spending $1 million in a
futile effort to clean up graffiti, the California Department of
Transportation this year put up miles of walls for adoption by churches,
fraternities, businesses and people such as Carney, who polices his hunk
of concrete like an overprotective father on prom night.

"I'm obsessed with this," Carney said, climbing out of his dirty white
sedan on the shoulder of the southbound Long Beach Freeway near Willow
Street where, just that morning, he had spotted a graffiti tagger's black
scrawl.
The roar of the traffic is dizzying and the smell of exhaust
nauseating. He does his painting on his days off and, unlike the various
organizations whose members share the chore, Carney does it alone.
Sometimes he leaves with a headache. But when drivers cross the boundary
into Long Beach, they can be sure that the wall with the blue sign
proclaiming "Adopted by Tom Carney" will be the beige the state of
California intended it to be.
"At first I did this for selfish reasons, because the stuff really
bugged me," Carney yelled over the roar of trucks, their tail winds
whipping his brown hair. "But when I got into it I realized this is the
first part of Long Beach that people see on the way to the Queen Mary and
it looked pretty bad."
It costs nothing to adopt a freeway wall; the only commitment is time.
The adopting party agrees to keep the wall clean for two years and to
wipe out any graffiti within five days. Caltrans supplies an orange vest,
a white hard hat, beige paint and a roller. For safety purposes, only
walls with at least 10 feet of shoulder are eligible for adoption, "or
we'd have people ending up at the Queen Mary on somebody's hood," said
Joel Fonseca, coordinator of the Caltrans Adopt-a-Wall program.
Since Carney took charge of his wall, he has gone through 80 gallons
of paint. Some taggers grew so tired of watching Carney wipe out their
work that they moved on down the freeway. (So did Carney; he recently
signed up for an adjacent half-mile, southbound.) So zealous was Carney
that he once saw a vandal in action at noon and was out there before the
paint had dried. The organization that adopted a nearby stretch of wall
complained that Carney was cleaning up their territory before
they got a chance.
"My good friend Tom Carney, he loves it! He's out there all the time,"
Fonseca beamed. "This is a diligent commitment and in Tom's spot you
don't see any graffiti. Everybody around here knows Tom Carney's name."
Next year Caltrans expects to spend $2 million painting over freeway
graffiti statewide and when the work is done, the vandals inevitably will
strike again. For Caltrans workers, it's as much a matter of pride as
money. They hate graffiti more than potholes.
"One little tag makes us look ridiculous," said Fonseca, who dismisses
the array of graffiti sprayers as "everything from your A-student to your
average murderer."
"There could be a million Tom Carneys out there, but there are 10
million graffiti artists," Fonseca said, scowling. "But we can beat them.
We're getting a handle on it."
Since the Adopt-a-Wall program began in Los Angeles last February,
Caltrans has issued 21 graffiti-removal permits in Los Angeles and
Ventura counties. Considering that it costs $2 a square foot to clean up
graffiti, officials estimate that the volunteer labor has already saved
the state thousands of dollars.
The idea was declared a success locally and spread throughout the rest
of the state, where 831,000 hours of manpower have been donated so far.
In some areas where citizens have participated, freeway graffiti has
decreased as much as 95%, Caltrans officials report.
Carney checks his wall when driving to and from work. He has invested
hundreds of hours and what he has to show for it is a patchwork of browns
that don't match. It is a quiet act of volunteerism that most drivers
don't even notice.
"Some of my friends think I'm pretty crazy. But I like to think it
helps," Carney said, rolling over the last streak of black paint and
stepping back to scrutinize his work.
When Caltrans offered to put up another plaque to commemorate Carney's
latest adoption, he declined. "That would be self-promotion," he said,
staring shyly at his white tennis shoes, freckled with beige.