COLUMN ONE : Jostling to Find a Sister City : So your town wants to show its cultural solidarity with a fledgling local government in Eastern Europe? Don’t put your hopes on Prague.

The idea struck Redondo Beach Councilman Terry Ward last month like a peal from the Liberty Bell: A constituent, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, had asked if the beachside city might be interested in becoming a sister city of Prague, the capital of his homeland.

“I thought, ‘My God, what a terrific idea!’ ” Ward said, recalling his pleasure at the thought of casting a local vote of confidence in the recent democratic reforms in Eastern Europe.

“It touched me deeply. I wanted to move as fast as I could because I was afraid some other city would get the idea, too.”

Too late.

Even as Ward was firing off an invitation to the mayor of Prague--a letter studded with congratulations to him, his city and the whole nation of Czechoslovakia--Chicago was issuing a rival proposition to Prague to become its partner in a cultural exchange.

Stirred by the developments that have swept the communist world in recent months, U.S. municipalities nationwide are vying to establish city-level diplomatic ties with the fledgling local governments of Eastern Europe, according to the Alexandria, Va.,-based Sister Cities International, which acts as a clearinghouse for the municipal affiliations.

“We’re getting inquiries about Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany,” said Tom Gittins, Sister Cities International executive vice president.

“Muscatine, Iowa, and Cedar Rapids want to develop Czechoslovakian relationships, and Bloomington, Ind., has indicated they want a relationship with an East German city. Chicago has a serious proposal out for Prague and Cleveland is interested in Bratislava. The mayor of Fort Worth (Tex.) just got back from Budapest, and Toledo, Ohio, and New Brunswick, N.J., are working on Hungarian cities.”

The heightened interest is the understandable byproduct of a year of extraordinary change worldwide, Gittins and others say. To many, a link with the communist world right now is a link with history, observers say. And in the light of reform, governments that once seemed impenetrable now feel more approachable to Americans.

Next month, he said, a team of Polish emissaries will visit 10 U.S. cities to learn the rudiments of running a local government. Meanwhile, demand is skyrocketing for affiliations with Soviet cities in the age of perestroika. Only last month, for example, Los Angeles officially adopted Leningrad, and Pasadena decided to pursue a link with Byurakan, a research center in Soviet Armenia that once was closed to foreigners.

“Three years ago, there were only six sister cities in the Soviet Union. Today there are 52, and we have about 60 pending inquiries,” Gittins said. “As you can well imagine, there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of change.”

Set up to promote cultural understanding through student exchanges and the like, sister cityhood, although generally apolitical in theory, has over the years shifted with changing global politics. When President Richard M. Nixon visited China, for example, U.S. towns rushed to find partners in that country, said Dick Oakland, director of member services for Sister Cities International. Now, in the wake of last June’s massacre at Tien An Men Square, China is out, he said.

After Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, 40 U.S. cities established ties with municipalities there. But in the wake of the Beijing bloodshed, no new links have been forged, and 18 to 20 affiliations that were being negotiated have been put on hold.

In 1979, during the American hostage crisis, Los Angeles unilaterally suspended its sister city relationship with Tehran, and did not even bother to inform its sister city’s government.

“It’s a matter of what’s hot and what’s not,” Oakland said. “And, right now, Eastern Europe is very hot.”

An offshoot of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mid-1950s “People-to-People” initiative, Sister Cities International has linked about 870 U.S. cities with about 1,400 sister cities in 91 countries, Gittins said. Los Angeles has 16, more than any other city in the United States.

The relationships typically involve official visits, pen pal programs, zoo exchanges and other symbolic gestures of friendship that give even the most isolated U.S. towns a window on the world. In return, foreign cities--which, unlike U.S. cities, can have only one sister city at a time--get the advantage of direct medical, cultural and trade exchanges.

A handful of those partnerships are in communist Europe--Chicago, for example, has been a sister city of Warsaw since the 1960s. But most of those relationships, including the Chicago-Warsaw link, have been dormant until now, officials say, partly because the communist governments were uninterested or wary, and partly because of U.S. opposition to human rights violations in the Soviet bloc.

As recently as 1984, for example, the politically conservative City Council of Vista, citing national security, turned down a local grandmother’s emotional appeal to take a Soviet community as a sister city. The woman ended up creating a U.S.-Soviet pen pal program in her San Diego County city under the auspices of a now-defunct pacifist group based in Portland, Ore.

In 1985, then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein was forced to take back her city’s invitation to Leningrad because of criticism from fellow Democrats and her city’s Jewish community. And in 1987, opposition from an anti-Soviet group killed a proposal in Costa Mesa to make its first sister city the Soviet community of Melitopol.

But in the wake of reforms, such relationships are now being sought by even the most conservative cities, said Steven Kalishman of the Center for Innovative Diplomacy, based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Irvine.

“The people who were interested before (in Soviet bloc sister cities) felt they needed to do something because of the nuclear situation,” Kalishman said.

“Now, people are interested for different reasons--they want to be able to tell their kids and grandkids that they were part of the revolution.

“Also, with Eastern Europe opening up, there is a lot of money to be be made,” Kalishman said. “Through the sister city organizations, a lot of smaller corporations will have the opportunity for trade.”

Local officials, however, say that most recent efforts to link with Eastern Europe are based more on emotion than economics. The majority, they say, have been initiated by Eastern Bloc dissidents who emigrated here, and who are hoping to re-establish contact with their homelands after being estranged for years.

In Fort Worth, for example, the push to join with Budapest came at the behest of a pair of Hungarian-born Texas businessmen, said Toni Brown, executive director of the Fort Worth sister cities program.

One of the men was an old friend of the mayor of Budapest, who--in the age of Hungarian political reform--was anxious for an alliance with a U.S. city, Brown said. The businessman approached Fort Worth City Hall, got the go-ahead to pursue the idea, and in early December a Hungarian delegation arrived in Fort Worth.

“We took them to a ranch and a rodeo,” Brown said, “and visited some schools and companies. We met with the Chamber of Commerce, did some Rotary (clubs), had a lot of private dinners and receptions.”

At the end of the visit, the delegation from Budapest publicly invited Fort Worth to be its sister city. But “the real shockeroo,” according to Brown, came at a private dinner held just after the announcement when the notoriously reclusive pianist Van Cliburn, who lives in Fort Worth, disclosed that he wanted to celebrate the new relationship by playing a rare concert this summer in Budapest.

Brown said the union will become official with a signing ceremony the Fort Worth City Council hopes to link to the Van Cliburn concert several months from now. Meanwhile, in the spirit of the union, a delegation of Hungarian journalists has scheduled a trip to Fort Worth to bone up on U.S. political journalism.

“Hungary’s going to have their first election ever and the reporters there don’t know how to cover one,” Brown explained.

In Redondo Beach, which has no Czech community to speak of and which already has two sister cities in Mexico, a similar personal contact prompted Ward’s invitation to Prague.

Josef Kubicek, a local developer who had defected from Czechoslovakia in 1964, said the idea came to him after reforms brought his old friends from the Czech resistance into power. Forty-one years of communist rule ended on Dec. 10, when Czech President Gustav Husak resigned, swearing in a new 21-member cabinet with the Communist Party in a minority role.

“When the revolution actually happened, I knew that people in Prague needed emotional help more than anything else,” said Kubicek, 55. He thought of approaching the Los Angeles City Council, since Los Angeles is better known, he said, but his City Hall contacts were all in Redondo Beach, where he has done business for more than 20 years.

So he took his idea to Ward, hoping, he said, that it would “let the people of Czechoslovakia know that people on the other side were thinking about them.”

There were a few glitches: Ward speaks nary a word of Czech, and when he asked a friend to help him find the name of the mayor of Prague, they came up with the wrong mayor--a Communist who had just been ousted.

By the time the letter was delivered to Prague, the old Communist mayor had been replaced.

Kubicek said he ended by hand-delivering Ward’s letter late last month to the new mayor, Jaroslav Koran, who opened it on the day of his inauguration and didn’t seem to mind that it was addressed to his Communist predecessor.

Kubicek said Koran was “deeply moved,” although “I don’t think he ever heard of Redondo Beach.”

Koran sent back a letter expressing “great interest” in the offer and authorizing Redondo Beach to make a formal application to Sister Cities International. On Tuesday, Ward got a local go-ahead from the Redondo Beach City Council.

What will become of the offer is unclear. Lois Weisberg, Chicago’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said Chicago has not yet had formal contact with Prague but has already asked Sister Cities International for priority on the Czech capital.

Who will get Prague will be up to the international group, but Weisberg said Chicago is particularly anxious.

Initially, she said, her city had put in for Budapest, only to find that Fort Worth had gotten there first.

Meanwhile, in Redondo Beach, Ward said he will fly to Washington next week to lobby the Czechoslovakian Consulate.

“If we don’t get Prague, I don’t know what we’ll do. Suck our thumbs and pout, I guess,” Ward said. “It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be interested in reaching out to another (Eastern European) city though. We’ve got to teach these people what democracy’s all about.”