‘I always jump into something. I like to think that I am in charge of my life, that I have got my hand on the tiller.’

Adam Perry likes Americans just fine, but the 48-year-old downtown residential hotel manager is most content when dining with foreigners. A xenophile with a travel bug since his boyhood in East Los Angeles, Perry has traveled the world, first in the Navy, and later as a UCLA student, a communications engineer and a tuna boat navigator. He is now managing downtown property for native Iraqi friends to save money to complete his master’s degree in finance at National University. Although he has always chosen freedom and travel over roots, the off-and-on 17-year resident of San Diego has decided to stay put for a while. He still finds foreign cultures close to home in the downtown community. He was interviewed by Times Staff Writer Nancy Reed and photographed by Dave Gatley.

I was driving through Greece, and I stopped in a little town--it was just before Christmas. This Greek family had a little cafe and a gas station. And it was snowing in northern Greece and cold. I was speaking broken German with them, and I told them I was from America. So after we had a magnificent home-cooked meal, they refused to take any money for it. So they bring out a little boy who is 5 years old. They say, here, take him. He will have a better chance in America. My whole heart dropped. I really got choked up.

I grew up in East L.A., the melting pot of California. It’s a magnificent place. Just about every nationality grew up there--Turks, Chinese, Yugoslavs and Russians--so I grew up with all kinds of cultures.

The day I turned 18, I joined the U.S. Navy and went to boot camp here. I really believed the sign “Join the Navy and see the world,” and I haven’t slowed down yet. I am still seeing the world, I have seen a lot of it.

I always jump into something. I like to think that I am in charge of my life, that I have got my hand on the tiller.

I majored in international relations at UCLA and went to Europe my junior year for the summer to learn a language. I ended up staying for 2 1/2 years. I sold my 1960 Volkswagen--it was in 1964 and I was 24. I had enough money to get there and go to school but not enough to come home. At the airport, my mother said, “Son, you can’t go, you don’t have enough money to get back.” My father said, “Don’t worry about Adam.”

When I was working for an American subsidiary of IT&T; in Europe, I went the inland route through Yugoslavia while traveling. I was not supposed to go through with my security clearance. They told me, if they stop you, tell them you are a heating engineer.

So I am staying at a big hotel with 120 units. The owner and I are speaking in German. I said I was an engineer--heating. So he shakes his head and takes me downstairs into this huge building, points to his boiler and says: “It doesn’t work.”

In 1967, I came back to finish my degree. I decided I didn’t care for the foreign service because I didn’t like what our government was doing in Vietnam, so I went to work for IBM and sold computers in L.A. I was 30 then. I eventually went into business for myself for a couple of months up there. I went through a divorce, and the business didn’t work.

I didn’t have my heart in anything and decided I wanted to do something adventurous. So I came down here and became a tuna fisherman at 34. I wanted to work with my hands, I wanted to do something physical.

The first time you are on the boat, you are a grunt--you have no skills. So I looked around, and thought who has got the best job? The navigator. For about 10 years I was navigator. I would fish for one year and kick back for one year. I bought a yacht and was refurbishing it, and it gave me leisure to study and write.

I took a job navigating on a 5,000-ton tanker. We would take tallow down to Central America and bring molasses back. I was down there before the war, and we had mixed crews from all three countries, and when we would stop in their home port, they would invite me to their homes. The skipper didn’t like that, he thought I was too democratic. That’s how I got to meet people and see beautiful cultures.

I have met some magnificent people that have traveled and done a lot of things at the Gyroscope restaurant downtown in the year I have taken off to go back to school. I eat there five nights a week. It’s an interesting intellectual hang-out. We talk politics and the economy.

We are getting more and more foreigners down here, whether they are from South Korea or Israel, Iran or Iraq. Downtown is a very interesting community.

To me this is the way life should be lived.