Solitary Success : Independent Carson Youth Honored for Hard Work, Good Deeds

Randy Leiker is busy.

He’s on the phone, trying to arrange his schedule to squeeze in two meetings that fall at the same time on the same day.

This is not unusual for him; at age 18, Randy Leiker has been juggling responsibilities for years.

A senior at Banning High School in Wilmington, Leiker maintains a 3.5 grade average. Last year he was co-editor of the Banning newspaper. This year he puts his energies into a peer counseling program that he helped establish at Banning. The peer counselors--Leiker is one of 14--guide other young people who are having trouble in school. And in a separate program, he also counsels students who are college bound.

He has done all of this while living on his own, supporting himself by working after school as a sales representative at the Target store in Carson.

And he has done so in obscurity until recently, when he was brought to the attention of the Horatio Alger Assn., a national nonprofit group that honors those who have achieved success through hard work.

This year, the association selected Banning High School as one of 30 schools across the country whose students would be eligible to compete for a $5,000 college scholarship. Leiker won. He was honored at an awards ceremony last month. He plans to go to Cal State San Diego in the fall.

“He is a perfect example of a young kid who said if anybody’s going to do it, I’m going to have to do it myself,” said Banning Principal Augustine Herrera Jr.

Said Patricia Brown, director of Educational Development for the Horatio Alger Assn.: “We’re looking for someone who’s overcome adversity in life.”

Leiker himself is far more matter-of-fact.

Learning to Cope

“I’ve gotten used to my situation,” he said Thursday at Banning’s college counseling center. He adds that no matter how serious the problem--whether it’s a grade on an English test or being on your own at age 16--”90% of the battle is just coping with your situation.”

Leiker’s situation is this: His father and mother split up when he was a baby. Neither could care for him. For the first 10 years of his life, he lived in various places, moving from Southern California to Texas to Tennessee to Mexico, living with various friends and relatives, including a grandmother he admires greatly.

Then, when he was 10, his mother took custody of him and moved to Carson. Six years later, she and her husband moved to the Palmdale area.

Randy told them he would not go. He had only two more years of high school, and for the first time in his life, he had stayed in one place long enough to make some friends. He told his mother and stepfather he would fight them in court rather than move.

“My mother, at first, she was opposed to it, really opposed to it. But I told her that I had spent most of my life on my own anyway . . . By 10 years old, I could cook for myself. I knew how to clean and I could iron.”

Leiker lived with an uncle for a time, then shared an apartment in Long Beach. Last week he moved back to Carson, where he boards at the home of some friends.

Those who know Leiker agree that his maturity is startling, that he hungers for success and that he is adept at mediating disputes and helping others solve their problems. He exudes an inner peace, a sense of calm that many adults never achieve.

He attributes this in part to his grandmother, who taught him to “think things through in a calm, rational manner.” He also credits the National Conference of Christians and Jews, whose workshops he attended at youth leadership camp. He spent time discovering who he is and what he believes.

He says he finds it difficult to trust people and is not big on showing emotion. Part of him says he should work harder at developing ties to his family, and yet he hasn’t done it. Sometimes, he said, he is “sarcastic to the point where it makes you want to get rid of me.” He acknowledges that he has demonstrated the qualities valued by the Horatio Alger Assn.--”not by choice, but by circumstance.”

He describes himself as a conservative person with liberal beliefs. He thinks the creation story is myth. “I believe in the idea of gaseous matter being condensed by starlight.” But he does believe in God. “I figure that somebody had to start this whole process.” A Catholic, he says he finds the church oppressive, yet he wears a gold cross around his neck.

Nickname: ‘Mastermind’

“Randy is remarkably mature and insightful about life itself,” said Glen Poling, programs director for the local branch of the Conference of Christians and Jews. “For some reason, Randy seems like he’s an older person in a young person’s body.”

Said Banning’s dean of students, Barbara Evans, who established the peer counseling program with Leiker: “. . .I gave him the nickname ‘Mastermind.’ He hated that nickname, but I think more and more he thinks about it, and it has made an impression on his life. He has accepted more and more the fact that he is a mastermind.”

For a teen-ager, however, this can be a heavy burden to bear.

“A lot of kids do feel intimidated by him,” says Leiker’s girlfriend, Ana Hernandez, also a Banning senior. “He’s gotten used to that. He’s a very mature person, and kids do look up to him.”

Hernandez credits Leiker with encouraging her to apply to college--she will attend Cal State Long Beach in the fall--even when her own parents were pressing her to stay home and get a job. She said she knows that Leiker has had a difficult life and she wishes he would spend as much time on himself as he does on others.

Leiker, meanwhile, seems not to want to dwell on his past. He said he has survived “by not thinking of everything at once. I just try to deal with one thing at a time.”