Taking the Lead, Thanks to Project Head Start : Some Grads of 20-Year-Old Federal Program Are Launching Their Careers

We are recognizing that poverty perpetrates itself. Five- and 6-year-old children are inheritors of the poverty curse--not its creators. Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation--like a family birthmark.

--President Lyndon B. Johnson, at a White House ceremony May 18, 1965, launching Project Head Start.

Head Start, considered by many one of the real victories in L.B.J.’s War on Poverty, is 20 years old. It has grown from a $128-million summer experiment that gave half a million preschool children from low-income homes a boost toward kindergarten to a year-round program that provides a spectrum of educational, health and social services for 9 million youngsters and their families.

One of the domestic programs spared in the Reagan Administration’s 1981 budget-cutting, Head Start actually got increased funding as part of the fabric of the President’s “social safety net for the truly needy.” (Congress has authorized $1.1 billion for fiscal 1985; $1.2 billion for fiscal 1986.)

Los Angeles city and county, which together have the largest program in the nation, this fiscal year have allocations of $27.5 million in federal funds and $5.3 million in state preschool grants (with an additional 4% promised) to supply services to 10,768 children through 32 public or private nonprofit agencies. Locally, Head Start agencies are required to match the federal funding up to 20%, or $6.8 million, in volunteer hours and contributed goods and services.

L.A.-Area Celebrations

One of these agencies, Plaza de La Raza Head Start/State Pre-School on the Eastside, will kick off local 20th year celebrations with a dinner-dance tonight at the Bonaventure Hotel to honor its supporters--Ricardo Olivarez of the county Board of Education, the Thrifty Corp., Raoul Teilhet of the California Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, and Democratic Assemblywoman Maxine Waters of the 48th District.

President Johnson spoke of Head Start in terms of its potential for productive man-years salvaged, pointing out that the 530,000 children in the first program in 1965 represented 30 million years that might otherwise be “wasted in tax-supported institutions or in welfare-supported lethargy.”

Fourteen years later, a study by Irving Lazar, refuting an earlier study that found the benefits of Head Start were temporary, reported “startling differences” between Head Start children and youths from similar backgrounds who had not been in the program. He pointed to a lower high school dropout rate, fewer legal problems and less need for remedial help.

Helping Youths

The point of Head Start, said Lazar of the department of Human Service Studies at Cornell University, “is not to create geniuses but to help poor kids keep up with children from more economically advantaged families.”

It was midday at the French Roll, home of pizza and 13 different “killer sandwiches.” Above the cacophony of car horns and the music blaring from pickup trucks passing through the busy Boyle Heights intersection, Eric Leyva, the 21-year-old proprietor and a Head Start graduate, was laying out his future as a restaurateur-entrepreneur.

Leyva is “owner, manager, cook, janitor and sound engineer” of the deli that he bought in May, only six weeks after going to work there. Already, he is talking about expansion, from 550 square feet to 2,200, and of a name change. Soon, he said, the French Roll will become “Godzukie, Son of Godzilla.”

By way of explanation, Leyva volunteered that Godzukie had been his nickname as a chubby-cheeked high-schooler. By way of further explanation, he said, “I’m not your average 21-year-old. I’m something of a kid.”

Wasn’t he Chuck E. Cheese, mouse head and all, for a Pizza Time Theater in Chico while a political science major at Cal State Chico? There were stints, too, as a dog sitter and a kiwi picker before, overwhelmed by what he described as financial pressures and family expectations, he left college.

For the last three years, Leyva has been in the food business--as a deli and fast-foods worker and as a waiter. He grinned and said, “I was a terrible waiter. I was fired from every job I had.”

But if he was temporarily foundering, he said he was also determined to prove wrong his junior high teacher who used to tell Leyva and his classmates, “You’re all destined for welfare.”

Leyva grew up in Boyle Heights, the second youngest of four brothers of a Mexican-American father and American Indian mother who had moved to the area from El Paso in the ‘40s. The first house in which they lived, now the site of a Food Mart, stood just across the street from the French Roll.

“A lot of people have done well and moved out” of the neighborhood, he said, but he wants to do well and stay. Not far from his restaurant is Roosevelt High, his alma mater, where he was yearbook editor, active in student government, in debate and worked in the student store. “Roosevelt’s done a lot for me. I’m giving a scholarship to Roosevelt.”

He remembers, as a little boy, a well-meaning person telling him, “I’m giving you this clothing because you are poor.” And he remembers how strange that seemed to him.

“Kids are the happiest people in the world,” he said. “It’s grown-ups who have a hard time being happy. A kid doesn’t know what poor is. We had our home, and we were all together.”

Still, there were rough years. His father, a commercial photographer, suffered from debilitating asthmatic attacks that forced his retirement when Eric was 8. For 30 years, his mother has worked as a data processor. “It seemed Dad was always in the hospital,” he said. “I remember seeing letters that the bank was going to foreclose on our house.”

When Leyva was 4, his parents enrolled him in the Head Start program at Euclid Avenue preschool, an experience he now perceives as a real boost but which he then found terrifying. “My baby sitter would wait for me there. I would not stay if she wasn’t there. If she was there, I felt safe.”

In time, his fear subsided. “There was a fire station right next door and you could hear those sirens, the bells ringing. It was something to look forward to each day.” He loved the shiny tricycles and the “hippity-hops” to jump around on and, though he resisted the notion at the time, he learned numbers by flash cards.

If it hadn’t been for Head Start, he said, “I would have been happy staying home and watching cartoons, I suppose.”

When opportunity--the chance to buy The French Roll--knocked in May, Leyva went to the zoo, one of his favorite thinking places, mulled over the pros and cons and decided he was ready. “When I said ‘I’ll buy it,’ I had no idea where I was going to get the money,” he said.

His family came through: “My parents did what very few parents would do: They mortgaged their home. How do you say thank you when someone gives you something they’ve worked all their lives for?”

With a $50,000 investment in the French Roll, Leyva has monthly rent and loan payments totaling $1,556. “Everything I make goes right back into the store. This summer I lost $5,000.”

But he does not view that as a shaky start so much as a predictable turn of events tied to change of ownership and resulting customer apprehension.

Overhead is minimal, as Leyva and brother Duane, 18, a co-owner, do all the work with the help of one employee. Leyva figures if the restaurant grosses $2,400 a week, he’s on course.

The hours are long. “I’m here 16 to 18 hours a day, longer on weekends,” Leyva said, “but that’s what it takes. You’ve got to give up two, three, four years of your life to make it happen. And that’s what I’m going to do.

“When I’m 24 or 25, I’ll have about six stores, a chain. I’ll call it Moukie’s, which is the name of my dog. Moukie’s is going to be a showcase. We’ll have Moukie’s in Houston, Dallas, Denver . . .

“By then Godzukie’s will be all over California. I’ll borrow against this company and then . . . “

Mitzi Brown tells friends, “From 5:30 (p.m.) to 10 minutes to 7, you’ve got my attention.” The other 22 hours and 40 minutes of each day are pretty well spoken for, what with a full-time job and evening college classes.

Brown, 20, is studying business administration at Long Beach City College, planning to transfer next year to California State University, Long Beach to earn a four-year degree that she hopes will launch her career in corporate finance or investment finance.

Sixteen years ago Brown was a Head Start kid, enrolled in the program at Burnett Elementary School in Long Beach when her mother, a single parent, was laid off at McDonnell-Douglas. As she tried to recall the experience, the first thing that popped into her mind was hot dogs. “We used to have hot dogs once a week. Now, why would you remember a hot dog?”

But she remembers, too, the visits to the library and the field trips. “Education, no matter how young or how old you are, is the most important thing,” she said, “and these people need a place to go, just like other people who do have the resources.”

By the time Brown was in junior high, having seen one too many “doctor shows” on television, she decided that was her calling. She was not dissuaded later by emergency-room experience while working as a volunteer Candy Striper at Long Beach Community Hospital.

But then computers came in big, and Brown was hooked. She wanted a career in business.

First, there was the matter of money for college. During high school summers she established a pretty good little business, cleaning houses--”You can make a real comfortable living cleaning houses, if that’s your cup of tea”--and after high school there was a succession of jobs--in a taco shop, a fabric store, as a library clerk, hostess in a restaurant, cocktail waitress at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, reservation clerk for Catalina Cruises.

Then, in February, she saw a newspaper advertisement for a job as data entry operator at the Senior Care Action Network in Long Beach, an organization under contract to the federal government to provide health and social services for people 65 or older. She applied, thinking “I would get this ‘Dear John’ letter. I’d never had a full-time job before.”

She has a one hour daily round-trip commute, carefully planned “around inclines,” from the mobile home she shares with her mother in Dominguez Hills Estates to the network’s offices. She avoids hills, she explained, because the used car she bought as her first independent credit purchase has a stick shift--something she’d never used before.

If every minute of her day is accounted for, that’s OK with Brown. “It drives me nuts not to work,” she said, disappearing into another room and emerging with a crocheted afghan and a cap-and-scarf set with which she’d just won ribbons at the Los Angeles County Fair. Crocheting, she said, gives her something to do between classes.

Now and then she said she regrets her decision not to go to medical school, but “just think what people are going to get when they get me--this package!

“I just want to be good, and successful.”

When Joe Wille was 4--which was 17 years ago--the family left South Bend, Ind., and the steel mills that had provided his father’s livelihood, for California. His father, Henry, said he “just threw all the kids in a ’55 Dodge, tore the back seat out, made a platform for a bed. We had $75 when we started out and about $25 when we got here. We sandwiched it all the way.”

With three children to support, it was a gamble but Henry Wille soon found work as a route salesman for a jukebox company, servicing restaurants and bars, taking home $75 a week. With food stamps and a lot of doing without, they managed.

Henry’s wife, Bonnie, found time to volunteer for the school district in Artesia, putting in more than 1,000 hours for Head Start and the Greater Los Angeles Community Action Agency, which administered the program at the time. And she wasted no time in seeing that her 4-year-old son was enrolled in a Head Start program at Carver Elementary School.

Those were happy days, Joe Wille recalled: “I still remember Mrs. Adams, who was the first teacher. It was a real pleasant place and a pleasant time. The people seemed like they enjoyed working with the kids as much as the kids enjoyed being there.”

There were field trips to the Museum of Science and Industry, ballgames, puzzles and picture books that made working with shapes and colors fun as well as educational.

And, Wille said, “Head Start made it easier” when he moved on into kindergarten: “I was ready for the teachers, and the rules.”

Three younger siblings would follow him as Head Start kids, one of them a mentally retarded sister with a serious kidney disorder who nonetheless was graduated from high school, the youngest one now an academically inclined fifth-grader. “We always supported Head Start,” said the children’s father, “and we always benefitted from it.”

Joe Wille, who described himself as an “on and off, up and down” student, went on to Gahr High School in Cerritos, where his four-year involvement in the cadet corps, followed by two years in the Air Force, piqued his interest in a career in law enforcement.

A locking knee precluded acceptance as a police officer so Wille decided to capitalize on his experience in the Air Force security police. Today, he works part time for Fairow Security in Azusa, a company in which an older brother is a partner, and is planning to get certification in Mace and baton and start “moving up through the ranks.”

Security officers, who may make from the minium wage to $6 an hour, typically are not TV-type crimebusters. Typically they work parties at public halls, where they check IDs, calm down rowdies and patrol the parking lots to make certain cars aren’t broken into.

Wille, who shares a house in Artesia with his parents, his sister and two younger brothers, is able to help out financially. His mother, now an employee of the Artesia-Bellflower-Cerritos school district, is the major earner in the family; his father, 45, diagnosed as having terminal cancer three years ago and given six months to live, receives SSI payments. Insurance has covered his medical costs and those of his daughter whose treatments, including a kidney transplant, he estimated have cost in excess of $1 million over the last 17 years.

“The older kids have forfeited,” Henry Wille said, “but we’re making it. They’ve pitched in, done without. But we’re here. We’ve got what we’ve got. We do what we can for others. We survive.”

On a recent afternoon, when Joe was not on call, he and his dad were planning to put the finishing touches on the greenhouse window they were installing to pretty up the small stucco house. They talked, too, of doing some work on the ’65 Chevy wagon they’re restoring.

Those thoughts seemed to please Henry Wille. He smiled and said, “Our whole life has been a Cinderella story. We came out here on nothing . . . “

Carolina Tanzini, 24, has come home again. Twenty years after she was a Head Start child, she is a Head Start employee, a social services worker at Plaza de la Raza Head Start/State Pre-School agency on Brooklyn Avenue.

For Tanzini, there have been some dips and rises along the road that led home--school dropouts, “bumming around,” a stint at working behind the counter at a dry cleaner’s, another as a driver for a medical lab, stops and starts and “goof-ups.”

Every once in a while Tanzini drives by the old church in Ladera Heights, now a set for television’s “Hell Town,” that housed her Head Start program 20 years ago. “I think back and I remember and it feels good.”

From the first day, Tanzini said, she was hooked on Head Start. Her souvenirs include a picture of herself taken on that long-ago day, with “a humongous smile and paint all over my face.”

She had no difficulty qualifying for Head Start. She lived with her parents and her grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment in Lincoln Heights and her father supported the family with a little Olvera Street newspaper stand that he still runs it.

“I was a handful,” she said. “Today, I guess I would have been considered a special-ed kid. I had leg problems (a condition that caused severe knock-knees) and when I went to school I wore orthopedic shoes and kicked all the kids.”

As the only child until a brother came along when she was 15 Tanzini was, by her own description, “a spoiled little brat. My family would hold back on themselves so I could have everything I wanted. I wanted to go to Catholic school, and then I wanted to go to public school, and then I wanted to go to Catholic school.”

By high school, she had set her sights on St. Andrew’s, a Catholic school in Pasadena. “Mind you, I was still living in Lincoln Heights. But I thought St. Andrew’s had neat uniforms, different ones for summer and winter. To me that was-- wow --so aristocratic. And nobody else (from her junior high) was going there. I was going to be different. Besides, I thought, ‘Why should I stick around kids who weren’t going to be anything when I was going to amount to something?’ ”

But in November, 1977, a close friend at St. Andrew’s, Sonja Johnson, 14, was found dead in Elysian Park, a victim of Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono Jr. Depressed and despondent, Tanzini asked to be taken out of the school. “Lying about our address,” she enrolled at Belmont but dropped out halfway through the 10th grade. The split-up of her parents was an excuse for her not to do well. The truth, she said, was, “I was rebellious. I was lazy.”

To encourage her 16-year-old daughter to finish school, her mother moved Carolina and a younger brother to quiet, safe Alhambra but the old pattern re-emerged; disappointed by a mix-up about credits in her senior year, she just chucked the whole thing, opting for a general education equivalency certificate.

With high school behind her, “I thought I was really hot stuff. Then all of a sudden I thought, ‘Now what am I going to do?’ ”

She set her sights on a job in the entertainment industry, which to her represented “fame, fortune, popularity, the whole bit.” But enrolling in the theater arts program at East Los Angeles College didn’t quite work out. She laughed as she said she did get a job with an answering service in Beverly Hills whose clients included Eddie Murphy, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson.

On Aug. 26 she started at Plaza de la Raza. At last, she said, “I’m really happy. I feel like I belong. Here, I don’t have to battle anybody. I can be myself. I don’t feel I have to rebel.” (The $700-plus per month salary isn’t exactly show-biz fame and fortune, but that seems less important now.)

At Head Start, Tanzini helps to seek out eligible children for the program and also to identify Head Start families that need food, clothing or legal aid or other assistance. “We don’t just deal with the Head Start child,” she said. “We deal with the family.”

Her own Head Start memories are still vivid--of sing-alongs, of learning the alphabet, learning to count, to tie her shoes, to write her name, of bobbing for apples at a Halloween carnival.

“I know,” Tanzini said, “with someone pushing, letting them know they care, these kids are going to be someone one day. They’re no different from anyone else. They just need a little extra attention.”