One day back in the early '80s, when Leon J. Henry was 14 or 15, he tried to buy a nickel bag of pot.

His friends had pooled their allowance money and an excited Leon marched to a corner near his home on Barclay Street. The dealer stared at the $5 bill and shook his head no. "Aren't you Mr. Lewis' son?" he asked.

Leon returned home empty-handed. His stern father, Lewis Henry, whose reputation alone kept order in the neighborhood, never found out what his son had tried to do.

Now, the father has passed and the teen is a grown man, 43 years old, a high school and college graduate, and director of outreach for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Maryland. He spends his days searching for stand-in siblings for kids who don't have someone whose commanding presence can keep them off drug corners.

Henry returned to the neighborhood last week for a number of reasons. His organization is pleading for volunteers. It has 2,000 children set up with mentors, but there are 800 on a waiting list, most of them in Baltimore.

But Henry comes nearly every day for another reason. He's visiting a 12-year-old boy for whom he serves as big brother.

The boy is a cousin of Donatello Fenner, the 22-year-old called out by the city's top cop in 2007 as a dangerous gang member who needed to be watched, and who was shot and killed earlier this month in an alley behind an elementary school off East 26th Street in Charles Village.

Henry grew up with the Fenner family, and he counseled Fenner when he was a youngster. He attended Fenner's funeral on Thursday.

Now, Henry takes Fenner's cousin on trips - they've visited 10 states so far - and he took other members of the family on a trip to Great Britain, a stunning change of scenery for inner-city kids whose world too often comprises only the streets they can see from their homes. Henry said he knows children on Barclay who have never been to Artscape - "and that's around the corner" - or ventured north of Morgan State University. One of the kids he took to Liverpool thought they were going someplace near New York City.

Trying to get kids to turn their lives around or escape their rough surroundings is not an easy task. The hope is to "get out" but many don't know what "get out" means. Is it fleeing the drugs and the violence, or the neighborhood and the city, or both?

The Fenner family has a rare opportunity - one-on-one help from a man who came of age when the crack epidemic first swept up Barclay Street. And even his help could not stop a kid who once sat on his lap from dying on the streets.

"It's always a failure when someone doesn't succeed the way you hope they would," Henry told me, standing at the spot where Fenner was shot behind Margaret Brent Elementary School. The shooting occurred behind 2602 N. Calvert St., a rowhouse that Henry had rented after he got out of college many years ago.

Henry prefers to remember Fenner's bright spots - tossing a football, his charisma. He said "we should be talking about what graduate school he's planning to attend" instead of standing over where Fenner died. But, Henry sadly acknowledged, "There are things that are beyond our control."

His job seeking big brothers and big sisters to help kids just like Fenner reminds him of growing up on Barclay and of his father, who came to Baltimore from South Carolina, where he was a sharecropper. With a third-grade education and while lugging heavy girders for 35 years at Bethlehem Steel, he raised a successful family. Even as the crack and the violence took over, Lewis Henry brought order.

"The bad guys were still the bad guys, and good guys were the good guys, and the bad guys left the good guys alone," Henry said. "And if you were a bad guy and Miss Jones walked by, you stopped whatever you were doing, you let her go by and you called her 'Ma'am.' "

That kind of respect is long gone, as are many of the fathers. Henry remembered counseling Fenner when he fathered a child at the age of 14, and he doesn't want Fenner's cousin to suffer the same fate.

The day after walking around Calvert and Barclay streets, I visited the Farring-Baybrook Recreation Center near the southern tip of Baltimore in Brooklyn. Here, victims of past gun violence, all using wheelchairs, played basketball with kids from three other schools. The children had to play in the chairs as well, as part of an exercise to help them understand how a bullet can impact a life.

Louis Fortune was shot outside a West Pratt Street bar in October 2006, a bystander in a dispute between people he didn't know. He was 25 at the time, with two children, including an 11-year-old he still raises at his new home in Randallstown. The bullet to his neck put him in Maryland Shock Trauma Center for two months and then a rehabilitation hospital for another three. He lost his job as a tractor-trailer driver and is now at Sinai Hospital learning to do data entry.

He addressed the kids in the rec center's gym but few asked questions. He told them about the costs of violence, how it robbed him of his job and life, how the simple things, such as going to the bathroom and getting ready in the mornings, take considerable time and effort.

"I want them to make good choices," Fortune said.

Antonio Lockett, now 33, said he was shot by a former friend on East Jefferson Street in 2004. Hit three times in the stomach, once in the back and grazed in the head, he is paralyzed from the waist down and has limited use of his arms and hands. He was involved in the drug trade, he told me, but now lives in Milford Mill with a therapist he met at Kernan Hospital and her family, who took him in.

"I'm blessed," he said, noting he's back in school, just got his driver's license and is part of a family. He wanted the children to know that, "You could end up in this chair for life. You just have to be in one bad situation."

The city's wounded often meet at rehab hospitals, in gyms like this, at counseling sessions, former friends and enemies once thrust together by drugs and sometimes at the opposite ends of guns, now united as victims struggling to build new and different lives. Lockett told me he has met plenty of old rivals.

"We know now that the life we once lived was useless," he said. "We grew up."

The mayor's doomsday budget calls for cutting police and rec centers, a threat not lost on the people at Farring-Baybrook. Under current projections, 29 of Baltimore's 55 rec centers could be shut. It sounds like a false threat to encourage acceptance of new fees and higher taxes, but the dire proposals have got people's attention.

At the basketball game, the Recreation and Parks Department's recreation director, Mike Naugle, walked the court with a microphone, urging on the participants. "We're hoping and praying something happens," he said between whistle blows.

He was talking about money, so that on another day kids can meet people like Lockett and Fortune - and maybe get the message - so they don't end up like Donatello Fenner, lying dead in an alley and mourned for squandered potential.