Annette John-Hall: 2 sides to this man: Tough and tender

Percy "Buster" Custus doesn't mess around.

When he sees a need, he doesn't complain about it, or procrastinate over it, or ignore it. He acts on it.

"I do stuff spontaneous," he says.

Which is how one property owner revamped one building to house two businesses he never thought he'd mention in the same sentence: a boxing gym and a child-care center.

On Brooklyn Street, right off 42d, in West Philadelphia, sits the James Shuler Memorial Gym and the newly opened Custus Childcare Academy.

It's a bemusing sight to see - muscular young men trudging upstairs into the gym while, downstairs, mothers wheel their babies in strollers out of the center.

Sort of like Million Dollar Baby meets Daddy Day Care.

But let Custus tell it. Marrying the two businesses is as natural as his lifelong passion for boxing, children and community.

He was always the dad who loved kids. When he took his own kids to the park, he'd bring all the neighborhood kids with them.

"My dad was a father figure for everybody," daughter Crystal Custus, 34, says. "Our house was the place to be."

Especially in this hardscrabble Mantua neighborhood, just a few blocks away from the site of the "Lex Street massacre," where seven people died in the biggest mass killing in the city's history.

"I never figured out what I wanted to be," Custus, 56, explains, sitting ringside in the gym, watching a young fighter spar. "I never sat down and made a goal. This," he says, gesturing to the gym and the day-care center, "this gives kids good direction."

Anybody who knows boxing has heard of Shuler Gym. Since Custus opened it in '94, it's gained a reputation for being the best place to train, with the toughest sparring partners around.

Bernard Hopkins trained at Shuler. So did Tim Witherspoon.

"No boxer can call himself a boxer unless he comes to Shuler's," says Al Campbell, a retired state police officer who has helped Custus make improvements at the gym, "and they usually come here and get beat."

But more important, Shuler has become a gathering place for generations of aspiring boxers to focus on their bodies and minds.

Which, indirectly, is how the day-care center came to be.

Custus' insurance prohibited children 6 and under from coming into the gym, which created a problem when fighters would bring their kids with them.

Plus, Custus, a former Golden Gloves boxer, was spending so much time at the gym, training his boxers and overseeing the operation, he hardly saw his family.

That didn't sit well with his wife and four daughters.

"My daughter Jasmin said, 'Dad, the only way we can get your attention is if we put on gloves and head gear,' " Custus recalls with a wry grin.

Crystal, who shares her father's love of children, kept begging Custus to replace the auto-detail shop that had been on the ground floor with a day-care center.

Her vision was to teach children through creativity, much the way she developed her own self-confidence through the classes she attended at Freedom Theater as a child.

So that's what Custus did. The day-care center - colorful, warm and open - officially opened two weeks ago. But not without Custus going through three electricians, a dictionary-thick book of code compliances and a headache that he still hasn't shaken.

"Something that should have taken six months took a year and a half," Custus said. "I've been through the Book of Job with this . . . but it'll be all right."

His goal? "I just want the daycare to pay for itself," he said. "The average business person would have walked away from the gym a long time ago because it doesn't make any money."

But he's not the average business person. You get the feeling he has a higher calling.