Coro Dinner a Feast of Accomplishment

There is usually a tone, a flavor to every big dinner. At too many of them people are just fulfilling obligations, occupying a chair in the banquet room of the big hotel just long enough to make an unseen exit between the angel food cake with hot fudge sauce and the first speaker.

I know people who have been going to big dinners all their lives and who have never made it through to the dinner chairman’s last good-night.

It’s all timing. Arrange to arrive toward the beginning of the cocktail hour, run around like a hamster, smiling, and speak to as many people as possible. Then stay for the dinner and just when everyone is turning his chair around to face the stage, you can make a clean getaway. But all those people you saw during the reception will swear they saw you later. Of course, that works only if you don’t know intimately the people with whom you’re seated.

One of the few dinners at which I don’t have my escape planned by the time the fruit cup is served is the Coro Public Affairs Award dinner. Coro is a nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation established 43 years ago to give young people a cram course in leadership.

There are Coro centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis and New York. The young men and women who are selected in each city spend a year at a dead run, using every bit of their energy, imagination, diplomacy and endurance. Coro recruits their candidates for the fellowships from colleges and universities, then winnows 96 possibilities down to 48, 12 in each city.

The Coro year is really nine months during which the fellows are given walking-around money, providing they don’t walk very far. They spend time working in and observing community agencies, labor organizations, corporations, political headquarters and city, county and state entities.

They go into the year like enthusiastic, hungry puppies and come out with a practical knowledge of the decision-making process and a healthy respect for their leaders, the men and women who have taught them by letting the fellows follow them through their dynamic days.

I have been fortunate to have had several Coro fellows in my office, and the privilege was on my side. They’re bright, they have reaching minds, they want things to be better. They learn that the way to get something accomplished is through orderly thought processes and bone-crushing work.

At the awards dinner each year people are named to receive the crystal Coro eagle. This year, the dinner chairman was Sanford Sigoloff, chief executive officer of Wickes Companies Inc. The honorees this year were Roy and Betty Anderson, Eli Broad and Jill Halverson. I am always awesomely impressed by people like this. Betty Anderson is president of the Friends of the School volunteer program, opening up great blocks of time so that teachers may spend their time teaching while the volunteers do the necessary and daily routine chores. She has a shelf full of awards from educational organizations. Her husband, Roy A. Anderson, was introduced at the dinner as being one of the generation who, along with his lofty corporate position as chairman of the executive committee for Lockheed Corp., accepts the stewardship of public service in our town. He is a leader of United Way, chairman of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and co-chairman of Stanford University’s centennial campaign.

Eli Broad, chairman and chief executive officer of Kaufman & Broad Inc., the housing and insurance company, is founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art, vice chairman of the board of trustees for the California State University system and chairman of the board of trustees of Pitzer College in Claremont. And that’s just the first half-column of his accomplishments. When he received his award, he said he loved being in Los Angeles because it was possible to accomplish anything you wanted without having lived here for four generations.

Jill Halverson was the fourth honoree. She founded and is director of the Downtown Women’s Center, which now has its own three-story building where women on Skid Row can find a good meal, a clean bed, a friend and pride.

It’s people like those and the fellows who make the Coro dinner like a family dinner, with everyone in the room someone you’d like to be able to talk to.

A stroke of pure genius was the table chart and the list of names indicating the seating arrangement so that people could say hello to their friends. The chart was at everyone’s place.

I was pleased to see Sharon Butler, one of my special friends from Coro. And while I stood in line to get my car, I talked to Michael Kellner from Irvine. His daughter is named Michaela, after him, and at 6 months, that very day, she had stood up in her crib on her own two fat legs and crowed with delight. I’ll bet Michaela will be a Coro kid in about 20 years. Standing on your own two feet and knowing the value of laughter are Class-A qualifications.