Heir Grooming : Week-Long Sessions Seek to Prepare County Youths for Leadership Roles

They piled on the buses in Orange County in the early morning, these 75 or so teen-agers glancing warily at each other, jockeying to sit with a friend, quieter than usual, wondering what they were getting into.

Four hours and 7,000 feet in altitude later, they were divided up into 10 groups, each named for an animal, and told to find other members of the group by wandering around the room and making the noise of the designated animal.

Amid the grunts, meows, barks and whinnies began the glimmerings of fun, and, somehow or other, the whole purpose of the outing: the nurturing of leadership.

By last Friday afternoon, when the week-long Leadership Development Center run by the Orange County chapter of the American Red Cross had ended, the teens’ wariness was gone. In its place were friendships, trust, and--if all goes as planned--ideas to be used by the county’s next generation of leaders.

At a time of ethical scandals in Washington that force high-ranking leaders of the House of Representatives to resign under fire; in a summer where a popular sports figure is accused of violating one of the fundamental rules of baseball (don’t bet on baseball games), after years of talk of the “me generation” and 22-year-olds just wanting to be “junk bond” kings with six-figure annual salaries; after all that, there are still youngsters wanting to be leaders, willing to do something for someone else and to learn how to work with others to accomplish their goals.

For 10 years now the county Red Cross has been running these leadership seminars, off Ortega Highway the first year and in Big Bear Lake since then, packing off teens selected as potential leaders by their peers, schools, churches, and community groups for a week of intense discussions, talks by local business leaders, intellectual game-playing and occasional all-out teen-age fun.

“Leadership is not something you are,” Thomas Parham, director of career planning and the placement center at UC Irvine, told the teens. “It’s something you do. . . . Each of you can be a leader.”

To make the process easier, the students are taken away from their usual surroundings and distractions and are bused up to the land of clean air, blue skies and nights flooded with stars. Sessions like the animal impersonations break down inhibitions and start the bonding process.

Red Cross officials say they don’t necessarily try to pick the students who are about to become student body presidents, because those youngsters are already leaders. Better to choose someone a bit less obvious, they say, maybe a band member, a school newspaper writer, a spark plug in a cultural group.

Someone like Jasdeep Singh (Tony) Mann.

Born in India, 16-year-old Mann is a member of the Orange High School Cultural Action Team, a multi-ethnic group that seeks to defuse racial tensions by going into classrooms and telling students “what we feel as foreigners” about life in general and their America-born classmates in particular.

Mann is a Sikh, a member of a religion that among its other tenets forbids men to cut their hair. When he swam last week, his hair tumbled down his back. When he wore it up in a top-knot, it was covered by a white cloth. Most Sikh adults wear turbans in their everyday lives.

As a result of his appearance and background, “I’m a little different,” the slender youth said. Normally, “I don’t make friends that fast.” But at the leadership conference, “in half an hour, everybody trusts each other. They’re talking so openly you can’t believe it. I don’t think I’d talk like this anywhere else my whole life.”

“I’m trying to be a leader,” Mann said. “I know I have good ideas; I can get people together. . . . A leader has to be fair to all. You can’t just say that ‘I’m going to suggest something that everyone has to do.’ (A leader) has to learn to compromise with all different people.”

Singh’s school paid the $75 cost for his attendance at the Big Bear conference and sent two other students as well. Other “delegates,” as the teens are known, pay the $75 themselves. Red Cross officials say the actual cost is closer to $250 per attendee, with the organization subsidizing most of it.

Delegates don’t have to have any connection with the Red Cross; after going through the course, the youngsters are invited to come back in future years as group leaders, which are volunteer, nonpaid positions.

Michael Starbuck was a delegate to the center in 1980, a youth staff member from 1981 through 1983, and is now a student at St. Louis University Medical School.

The conferences “allow you to grow within yourself,” said Starbuck, who is now 26. “It’s a place where you get to define what your values are and your goals. It’s a place where you can interact with other people and realize we all have different opinions and that’s OK, and accept it and still work together for a common goal.”

In high school, Starbuck said, “teachers direct what you’re going to do and they give you the guidance.” At the leadership sessions, “the students themselves do that.”

The delegates begin by naming their individual groups, dreaming up a slogan and writing a group song. They form “rap groups,” intensely personal discussions that sometimes lead to tears but which are conducted on the rule that no outsiders are allowed and nothing said in the group is repeated outside the room. Organizers make sure that the rap groups do not have two people from the same school, to lessen the chances of having confidences betrayed.

Staff members, who have been delegates in the past and who have been trained since February for the new supervisory role, help lead discussions from a work book that instructs: “Each day of our lives we must make choices between competing alternatives,” everything from what shirt to wear to whether to go to college or to spend the tuition money on a sports car.

The discussions are intended to get the delegates to pick alternatives, explain their choices and defend them. One scenario tells the delegates to imagine they are living with a family of a different religion for a few months. When grace is said at a meal, “would you join in, sit silently or try to get them to change the grace to a more universal one?”

(A sign of how old some of the scenarios are can be seen in the question: “Which would you be most willing to do? Contribute to Biafran relief; serve in the Peace Corps; volunteer for service in Vietnam?” Obviously, a question from the 1960s).

At the rap groups, “everyone has input,” said Tara Suan, 16, who will be a senior at Foothill High School next year and hopes to go to college and major in law. Suan applied on the suggestion of a friend who was a delegate last year, but admitted that when the time came to actually board the bus, “I wasn’t sure what type of people I was going to meet up here.”

To her relief, they were fine, good enough in fact that she pronounced the camp “a great experience.” She said the days were “well-structured; we’re always doing something until very late at night.”

A writer for the newspaper and a varsity track runner, when pressed on whether she considers herself a leader Suan conceded that “I know that some people have told me they look up to me.”

Kimorie Lees, a 17-year-old from Sardis in British Columbia, didn’t beat around the bush that much. “Yes, I think I am a leader,” she said. “As president of my (school) club, I do a lot of organizing, and I talk to the student council about jointly staging fund-raisers for the club.”

Lees was invited to the camp after an Orange County youngster spent time at a Canadian leadership camp, Red Cross officials said.

George Chitty, head of the county Red Cross, said the group decided to run its own leadership camps after growing tired of being restricted to sending only four or five youths each year to the camps held by the Los Angeles County organization.

“I was one of the individuals who believed Orange County should begin to develop a lot of young people as leaders,” Chitty said. Although the great leaders of history probably have inborn qualities that propel them to the forefront, other leaders have developed because “someone took the time” to encourage them, he said.

“I think you can teach leadership,” he said. “I absolutely do. But it’s like, can you teach football? Yes, you can teach football. You can teach the mechanics of football. And you can teach the mechanics of leadership. . . .

“I am bothered when I hear people say, ‘There are no more leaders.’ I see increased numbers of leaders in Orange County. I see people in middle management positions in their companies, people who probably won’t get above that level in their jobs. But they take part in volunteer organizations and are extremely effective and actually lead people who hold higher executive positions.”

Still, it doesn’t hurt to have teen-agers hear from a holder of a high executive position, someone like Richard M. Ortwein, a division president with the Koll Co. in Newport Beach who also happens to be a graduate of a college whose main purpose in life is teaching leadership: the U.S. Naval Academy.

Ortwein told the students that at a time when “zillionaires” are trooping off from Wall Street to federal prisons around the country for committing fraud, carrying out insider trading and flouting all sorts of laws, the important thing to remember was that true leaders “have sound moral fiber and good ethics.”

“You’re in a position in your life that’s got to be one of the most exciting times. You can say, ‘Hey, I’m a leader. I can move two people, 10 people, 100 people, 200 million people.”