Lithuanian-Americans--a Quiet People Scramble to Be Heard : Public opinion: With scant experience in gaining media attention, the L.A. community struggles to find its voice to win hearts and minds for their homeland.

On the day that Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze debated the destiny of a nation that many Americans could place no more precisely than “over there,” Rachel Samolis was at home in Marina del Rey, shuttling between the fax machine upstairs and her desk phone downstairs pitching Lithuania.

To a radio talk show producer: “It’s about Lithuanian independence, a very current issue. . . . Oh, interesting, I have a perfect person for her. . . .” To another Lithuanian-American, discussing a proposed motorcade to Washington: “They’ve already contacted CNN and they’re willing to cover the launch of the motorcade. . . . But they had better hustle, they’re going to stop in every city and do something, it’s going to take months . . . yes, it’s an old ‘60s idea, it’s charming but. . . .”

To KNBC, leaving a message for reporter Jess Marlow: “My name is Rachel Samolis (she spells it out unasked) and I’m the public affairs coordinator for the Baltic American Freedom League (she says it slowly, pausing to allow for time to write it). I wanted to thank him for what he said this morning. He made a point of saying Lithuania leaving Russia is not the same as Wyoming seceding from the United States, and I thought that was wonderful. And if he wants any more information, please call me.”

Samolis is a classical pianist who operates her own public relations business for jazz artists and some “esoteric” young composers. Two weeks ago she put her clients on hold to become unpaid “public affairs coordinator”--the PR person--for the Baltic American Freedom League. She was impelled primarily by worry for her Lithuanian relatives.

But hers was a professional’s reaction, too: She volunteered on the night she saw a local Lithuanian magazine owner, clearly ill at ease on camera, being interviewed by a TV station that had barely given him time to put on a tie, much less prepare a coherent sound-bite.

That won’t happen again. Lithuania is a flash point of history right now, but it needs more than the earnest nationalism of Lithuanian-Americans, more than a recitation of a millennium of grievances, to sway the public mood. It needs boldface and bulleted press releases, crisp images, assured voices.

“We’ve got to be sure when we get that media attention we have someone who can do it properly,” Samolis said last week in between calls.

What was needed was something more aggressive than letting reporters thumb through the phone book, calling everything listed as “Lithuanian” and taking as a “spokesman” the first person they reach who speaks English.

“I said I’d help with publicity and there wasn’t really anyone (among local Lithuanian-Americans) who knew what they were doing (about PR). Their idea,” she said, “is calling the newsroom and saying, ‘This is happening.’ Then they complain they don’t get coverage. . . . I feel as if we have to catch up with some other ethnic communities who have had about 30 years of doing this, and we’ve had to do it overnight.”

The Lithuanian community in Southern California is not large compared to others, not vocal compared to others, not unified compared to others. Its active members number about 20,000, many caught up in Lithuanian scouting, folk dancing, church groups. In their work, Lithuanians are often professionals--architects, engineers. Until these latest events, theirs, like almost all emigre communities, had been riven by factionalism.

Older emigres in particular, whipsawed between Nazis and Soviets, learned early on the survival value of reticence, and are unsettled by all this protesting in public, on camera. The younger and politically active mobilized here in an effort to keep the Soviets out of the ’84 Olympics. They got some press in July, 1989, when Vytautis Landsbergis, the dissident leader who would become Lithuania’s president six months later, visited for a couple of days. They secured even bigger stories and more air time this month by marching on the Federal Building to protest Soviet pressure on Lithuania, and torching a Soviet flag to make the point.

But in L.A.’s immensity and diversity, where every minute of air time, every column of newsprint, could arguably be filled with the concerns of each of its vast ethnic communities, Lithuanian-Americans are learning the flintier realities of media-driven America: How do you win hearts and minds when marketing can seem to matter about as much as moral truths?

Fifty miles south of Samolis’ house, in Mission Viejo, Danute Mazeika, one of the co-founders of the Baltic American Freedom League, distant cousin of Lithuania’s president and granddaughter of one of the signers of its 1918 declaration of independence, could also be found doing the phone-to-fax shuffle last week, pulling in the reins of the folk dancing and scouting and church groups to a single purpose.

Her 6-year-old was born during the anti-Soviet protests preceding the Los Angeles Olympics. Her 2-year-old “can say Lithuania in Lithuanian whenever she sees the tricolor on TV.” All three of her children “demonstrate well. I don’t know how many mothers say that about their kids.”

Lithuanians have not been silent; it’s just that the rest of the world hasn’t been listening.

“We used to scream and holler at not being paid attention to by the national media,” Mazeika said, but “by the same token we’ve never really developed the PR capabilities we should have had, because most people in our communities up until these last two years were not really politically tuned in to what we’d have to do for survival of the nation and the stability of the world.”

Daiva Venckus’ parents, and her friends’ parents, are all engineers, out of the public eye. She is president of a Lithuanian youth group, and a Loyola Marymount political science student, intent on a political career and learning its rigors through her Lithuanian activism.

“When we show up on the news and we get our five seconds, we have to make those five seconds count. . . . It’s funny, it seems like we have to lobby the press--a full-time job now. It’s that whole thing with Reagan and TV, the image.”

Venckus was sitting next to the piano in Samolis’ office last Wednesday. Wednesday was supposed to be “human interest day,” the day that Samolis would flip through her red binder to pitch stories about local Lithuanians, like the refugee couple whose daughter, born on the Fourth of July, was named Freedom.

But other matters had to be tended, which is what Venckus was doing here. Lobbying state and national legislators. Organizing phone banks. Keeping the momentum going.

Within the hour, they had come up with this: On Sunday, each parishioner at St. Casimir’s, the Lithuanian church in Los Feliz, would lay a flower at the altar, one after the other.

Samolis: “We ask everyone in the community to bring a flower as a symbol of hope. I could contact the media. And I mean the people in the community who don’t go to church (too).”

Venckus: “That means me.”

Samolis: “That means me, too.”

They laughed rather guiltily.

Samolis: “I know that sounds soon but I don’t want to wait two weeks until we do something.”

By the end of the day, that idea was discarded; it conflicted with Palm Sunday. In its place, a new plan for a protest in San Diego this week when Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov speaks at UC San Diego.

Linas Vaskaukas went by Samolis’ house to pick up sheafs of signed petitions demanding from the U.S. government recognition of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia’s independence and trade pressure on the Soviet Union until it does the same. He is leading the nationwide drive, and he believes a million signatures is a good number.

He was introduced to a reporter:

“The annoying thing to me is how the U.S. government and press buys Soviet propaganda” about Lithuania’s place within the U.S.S.R. “First Gorbachev calls it a marriage--it isn’t a marriage, it’s a kidnap and a rape.”

Put that man on TV.