DR. SPOCK : At 82, the activist physician is still fighting to bring about social change.

Benjamin Spock at 82 is a bit more pessimistic than he used to be. We who were raised by his book--all of us post-World War II baby-boomers--have let him down. Just a little.

We haven’t changed a sick, materialistic society. We haven’t marched on Washington and demanded that all nuclear weapons be ground into dust. We’ve taken our own children, born in a naturally open and happy state, and turned them into grasping, demanding violent teen-agers and adults.

But Dr. Spock still loves us. He is still happy to answer our questions about infant sleep, thumb-sucking and vitamin intake. He can think of no higher calling than to do that and to remind us that we can make a difference on everything from affordable child care to nuclear disarmament by writing our congressman, by demonstrating, by getting arrested for acts of civil disobedience.

Refuses to Slow Down

He would never admit it--Spock sees nothing remarkable in an octogenarian who refuses to retire and rest on his laurels--but it may be that we, with all of our faults, keep him young.

Spock, of course, is author of “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care,” of which more than 30 million copies have been sold since 1946, and was a leading figure of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He is still active, still appearing and lecturing, wherever invited, gone for weeks on end from his home in the Virgin Islands. He was in town Monday for a long day on behalf of UCLA Child Care Services, which provides care to the children of UCLA and the surrounding community. There was a tour of the day care center, a luncheon and reception with sponsors, interviews with the press and a lecture before nearly 1,000 people.

Some of His Thoughts

Taken together, shuffled and reshuffled, the thoughts of Dr. Spock during a typical day on the road:

First, there is that old canard to be buried--that he is responsible for a generation or two of overindulged young people who grew into lousy excuses for adults, thanks to a permissive upbringing by parents who swore by his book.

Spock attributes that one to political enemies from the Vietnam era--first the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, then Spiro Agnew--who, he said, labeled him “the grand permissive of all time.”

Spock said Peale, in the late 1960s, accused him of urging “instant gratification” and that charge was “immediately taken up with enthusiasm by conservative columnists and editorialists,” as well as the vice president.

Agnew a ‘Common Crook’

“Thank God,” said Spock in a voice that customarily turns raspy and mock-fierce whenever he launches into a joke, “nobody ever accused me of raising Spiro Agnew, who turned out to be a common crook.”

Admittedly, the care of children in the 1950s and 1960s underwent “a chaotic swing from rigidity to a self-decided feeding schedule.” Children were “fed whenever they peeped and allowed to stay up all night,” he said.

But, Spock said, this was an attitude he never endorsed. Instead, he warned parents not to apply the principle of on-demand feeding to other aspects of a child’s life, and to insist, instead, on respect and cooperation.

For a time, particularly during the Vietnam War years, Spock thought he had accomplished, through his book, something profound. “My book’s main effect was that parents realized they didn’t have to intimidate their children the way I was intimidated as a child by my sternly disapproving mother.” Perhaps, children had changed; perhaps “they had grown up not so easily intimidated.”

War as a Pediatric Issue

There was reason to believe that in the 1960s and 1970s. Spock had been drawn first to the anti-nuclear movement and then the anti-war movement by the conviction that both were “pediatric issues.” He couldn’t stand to see children facing “the fear of nuclear annihilation” or being marched off to “an unjust war in Asia.”

Dressed in his customary three-piece suits, Spock looked around while on the picket lines or while sitting in jail after being arrested for one sit-in or another and found young people in blue jeans talking about “fine, radical ideals.”

“They were asking things like, ‘Why spend your life in the rat race? Why not work in a spirit of cooperation? Why try to accumulate money and goods? Why not see how simply you can live?’ ”

Suddenly, U.S. troops had pulled out of Vietnam and Spock found his young people lusting after BMWs, split levels in suburbia and Aprica strollers.

“They had pooped out. We were right back to the materialism of the 1950s. I hadn’t accomplished anything, really. I hadn’t changed anything.”

Called an Aberration

Given time, Spock came to see that the resistance to the Vietnam War among young people was an aberration.

“The normal cause of Americans is materialism unless they are drawn out of that orbit by something very special--in the 1960s it was being asked to kill and be killed in a war that they thought was wrong.”

All this resulted in “pessimism--our society is sick--and a little depression, but it’s certainly not enough to stop me. The more angry and depressed I get, the more I feel I have to do. I live on the road for months. All I can do is tell people who are already interested (in issues like a nuclear freeze and universally available child care) to keep it up, write your congressman, vote discriminatingly, demonstrate.”

When it was suggested to him that a man of 82 could have long ago left this sort of thing to others, retired and lived comfortably on the royalties of his book without spending time at airports and in hotel rooms, that angry rasp in Spock’s voice, for the first time, seemed other than playful.

Not Decrepit

“Yes, I’m 82, but that doesn’t mean I’m decrepit,” he said, launching into one of his favorite stories--the one about how his mother, during World War I’s wool shortage, made him wear his father’s hand-me-down, ill-fitting gray suit.

“When I saw it I said, ‘I can’t wear that; everybody at school will laugh at me,’ which they did. But my mother said, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself for caring about what people think about you. That doesn’t make any difference. All you have to know is that you’re right.’ ”

There is then “the fierce morality that I reluctantly adopted from my mother” that keeps Spock on the road.

And something else, something he sees in the faces of the children--like the ones he visited with at the UCLA day care center Monday morning.

“I was inspired by seeing those children, so enthusiastic, so busy, so happy. . . . I still think what a wonderful world we could have if people didn’t turn so aggressive and so cynical. If we could inspire parents, we could produce a generation quite different, with less emphasis on competition and getting ahead, and more on love and service to society.”