‘89 Encores : On this last day of the year, and of the 1980s, the View staff pays a return visit to some of the people who made news in 1989. : A Promise Kept

Early in 1990, at Hospital Italiano in Buenos Aires, a child will receive a vital organ in the first transplant operation under auspices of the World Children’s Transplant Fund.

It will be the realization of a dream for Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Mark A. Kroeker, a 45-year-old missionaries’ son who founded the fund to make life-saving organ transplants available to children from throughout the world, regardless of ability to pay.

Kroeker’s odyssey, which was told in View on Jan. 24, began with a visit to Argentina early in 1987 to explore a police exchange program. The memory of the warm reception from the children there remained with him and, returning to Los Angeles, he learned of a poor Argentine child, Veronica Arguello, 12, who suffered from idiopathic cirrhosis of the liver.

He undertook a multi-city effort that raised $100,000 for transplant surgery for Veronica, who had been doomed because she could not get a transplant in Argentina. In March, 1988, at a hospital in Toronto, she received a new liver, but her body rejected both it and a second organ; she did not survive a third attempt.

The World Children’s Transplant Fund was born of Kroeker’s promise to the child’s mother, Racquel, to “continue on for the other children.” One goal is to establish regional transplant centers where children from throughout the world, including needy American children whose families cannot afford the cost of a transplant in this country, will receive life-saving organs. (The cost in hospitals in many other countries is a fraction of that in an American hospital).

The fund also plans to train surgeons in other countries, provide technology and equipment, and conduct an educational campaign to encourage organ donations.

To date, the fund has raised $50,000 toward its goal of $1 million. Its board of medical advisers includes Dr. Leonard Makowka, head of surgery at Cedars-Sinai, and Dr. Robert Gale of UCLA. At a recent update luncheon, Kroeker, who went on a mission to Latin America in May, said, “Someday, we’ll be gathering like this and there’ll be a child, and we can say, ‘This child lives today because of what we did.’ ”

The World Children’s Transplant Fund is at 5809 E. Telegraph Road, Commerce, Calif. 90040.