Remember? Jaeger was living in the basement of a ramshackle chalet, trying to recapture her lost childhood while giving others a childhood that illness was trying to steal. She and some old tennis buddies were running the camps out of an aging hotel, playing basketball in the pool, eating pizza in the hallways, decorating pottery in a windowless meeting room.
"Guardian Angel," read the headline of The Times story on Aug. 18, 1996.
It detailed Jaeger's outlandish goal of building a permanent home for sick children, even though she and partner Heidi Bookout were so poor at the time, they couldn't even get an American Express card.
There were seemingly other places like this, but Jaeger promised that hers would be different.
The numbers would always be small - 15 to 20 kids - and the counselors would always be a small group of close friends who would give the kids their home phone numbers and encourage them to stay in touch.
It wasn't about an escape, it was about an entry, into a family, of children just like them, through long days of rafting and horseback riding and just being kids.
"I was different all my life, I know what it's like," Jaeger said at the time. "I never had a peer group. Neither do these kids. Until they get here."
A wealthy Aspen woman donated the land before her death, giving Jaeger a physical foundation.
When the Los Angeles response to the "Guardian Angel" story reached several hundred thousand dollars, Jaeger had another inspirational foundation.
Three years and hundreds of fund-raising trips later, it has become a $6 million facility that includes everything from game rooms to a meditation room to a full kitchen filled with Tweety Bird glasses and a giant cartoon-covered cookie jar the kids are encouraged to raid.
The address, because you always ask, is 1490 Ute Ave., Aspen, Colo. 81611.
The annual operating budget, in case you were wondering, is $2.2 million
Jaeger is still trying to raise enough just to cover the rest of this year, but she's not looking for another Los Angeles handout.
Instead she wants Los Angeles to look over here, at its room, and enjoy.
The pension check sent by the woman from West Covina? That can be found in that leather couch on which Amber Boydte, 16, is reclining, wearing her dolphin necklace.
When she was given two weeks to live because of a rare cancer that attacks all parts of the body, she told her mother to cremate her and spread her ashes over the ocean, so she could be protected by the dolphins.
That was a year ago. During the fireworks Sunday, she cried at the memory, and was stunned to find others hugging her and crying with her. She fingers the necklace and smiles and looks out at the mountains.
"Other people, when they find out you have cancer, it's like, 'Oh my gosh, I can't touch you!'" she says. "Here, they touch you."
The piggy-bank savings from that grade schooler in Long Beach? That money can be found in the denim easy chair on which Emily Scherwitz sits, aching from the effects of ovarian cancer, yet smiling because here she is not sick, she is 16.
"Here, they treat you like a human being, not like a cancer kid with no hair," she says, looking up at the steel wildlife sculpture winding around the giant wall, raising her arms to the endless sky, laughing. "This is the best place on Earth."
And those quarters taped together by the elderly man from Glendale? They are in that fat ottoman being hugged by Jessica Villalpando, a wide-eyed 10-year-old from Baldwin Park suffering from leukemia.
She steps behind the microphone at the talent show with a message.
"There are different kinds of cancer, and lots of people get scared," she says. "Some people die from it..."
She begins weeping, huge tears that stain her gray T-shirt. Jaeger steps up, wraps an arm around her, whispers to her, and Jessica continues.
"...but I'm glad I lived through it."
Later that night Jessica dances into the city of Angels room, her shaggy-haired shadow bounding of the wall, light and shapeless and forever.
Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address:
bill.plaschke@latimes.com
