Travels of an Activist : Nicaragua: An ardent Sandinista supporter, Alice McGrath has made 34 trips, escorting doctors, lawyers, clergymen and educators through a troubled country.

During the 1940s Alice McGrath was a passionate young advocate for the Mexican-Americans convicted in the racially fired Sleepy Lagoon murder case in Los Angeles.

At 73, she is still battling social injustice. At an age when some women cruise the Caribbean, the Ventura woman chaperones groups to war-scarred Nicaragua.

An ardent supporter of the Sandinistas, she has made 34 treks to Nicaragua since 1984, escorting doctors, lawyers, clergymen and educators throughout the troubled country.

But a trip McGrath began earlier this month could prove the most crucial. In the wake of President Daniel Ortega’s recent defeat, she is testing the political waters for future group excursions.

“I have no idea how I’m going to be received,” said McGrath, a vigorous opponent of U.S. intervention, before leaving.

McGrath is no neophyte when it comes to social activism.

Her speeches raised money during World War II for defense attorneys to appeal the convictions and ultimately free the defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon murder case, called “zoot suiters” for their distinctive pegged pants and long coats.

Only in her mid-20s then, she spent two years writing and visiting the defendants in San Quentin while the case went through the courts. She was the real-life Alice in the play and the movie, “Zoot Suit.”

“It’s the same struggle,” she said, comparing the zoot suiters and the Sandinistas. “The struggle for social justice didn’t start two years ago.”

Chatting in her hillside home overlooking the ocean, McGrath doesn’t seem like someone who has lived for nearly three-quarters of a century. She learned to swim when she was 65 and does laps every other day. She’s petite, her gray hair stylishly cut. Her brown eyes dominate her finely chiseled face. And when she talks, it’s a performance full of zest, passion and laughter.

“I love being an old lady,” she said. Pointing to the orange trees in her large, sloping yard, she told how she makes marmalade from the fruit. Then with a laugh, she adds, “But I don’t have a lot of domestic skills.”

She raves about George Bernard Shaw’s plays. “He had heroines with professions--women who were independent.” She extols the music of Bach and Mozart. “Anything past Stravinsky is unavailable to my ears.”

But issues clearly take precedence in her life. Her 70th birthday party turned into a benefit for a Nicaraguan hospital that netted about $3,500.

McGrath grew up poor in Los Angeles, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. There was no money for education past high school. She held unskilled jobs--factory worker and sales clerk--before she became involved in the zoot suit case.

“It was my college,” she said. She sat through part of the trial because one of her friends was an attorney in the case.

“I was outraged,” she said. “It was one of the most offensive trials held in the United States.”

The trial took place at a time of intense racial hostility toward Mexican-Americans. Twenty-two young Mexican-Americans were charged in the death of another youth during a gang fight near a Montebello irrigation ditch known as Sleepy Lagoon.

“The 22 young people were tried en masse in what is now recognized as one of the worst travesties of justice,” McGrath said. “The judge made no attempt to even seem to be impartial.”

The jury found 17 of the defendants guilty and acquitted five.

During the appeal, McGrath, then Alice Greenfield, went to work as executive secretary of the defense committee. At first she simply ran the mimeograph machine. Then she was asked to speak to small groups.

“I was afraid--I was quite socially timid,” she said. “By the end of the year I was going up to San Francisco talking to a longshoremen’s meeting of a thousand guys. I’d swoop onto the stage, making my presentation with gestures.”

After the convictions were overturned, she became preoccupied with raising two children. She never lost interest in social issues, but none consumed her like the Sleepy Lagoon case.

For a time she was married to a poet, Thomas McGrath, who lost his job as a teacher during the McCarthy era. In the late 1950s she married martial arts instructor and author Bruce Tegner, who died five years ago. They moved to Ventura in 1967.

McGrath has written books on self-defense and for 25 years she taught it, developing simpler and more practical methods for women.

Then in 1984 her life took a different twist. She traveled to Nicaragua with a large group of Americans on the fifth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.

“What I saw in Nicaragua was so impressive,” she said. She cited strides she said the country had made in health, education and working conditions before U.S. involvement.

“It was a country dedicated to helping the poor,” she said. “I wanted to become involved in taking people down there. It was important for U.S. people to know what was going on.”

At first she escorted groups under the auspices of the Office of the Americas and then through Operation California USA. Now she’s coordinating with a Nicaraguan research and academic institution and the Latin American Studies Assn.

She has her own theories about Violeta Barrios de Chamorro’s upset victory over Ortega for the presidency.

“It was giving the people a choice between sovereignty and bread,” she said. “They finally said, ‘We’re starving, we’re tired, we’re exhausted.’ ”

McGrath doesn’t conceal her politics on these treks, yet her traveling companions range from conservative to liberal in their views.

“My purpose is not to convert them to my point of view, but to let them see as much as possible and then come to their own conclusions,” she said.

Those who have accompanied her agree.

“I’m probably the most conservative person she’s ever taken along,” said Ventura attorney Joseph R. Henderson. “It didn’t appear to me that she was pro-Sandinista. She was just trying to introduce Americans to what is going on there.”

On his trip last June, Henderson visited hospitals, newspapers, relief agencies, farm cooperatives, and social service and economic experts--many of them on opposing sides of the country’s political issues.

Carmen Ramirez, director of the Channel Counties Legal Services Assn., has traveled to Nicaragua five times with McGrath.

“She has such a young personality and attitude toward life,” Ramirez said. “I have to run to catch up to her in airports, and I’m considerably younger.”

McGrath didn’t take her groups near any fighting, but they saw signs of it as well as graphic proof of the county’s Third-World status.

“We saw horrible things,” Ramirez said, recalling a hospital visit. “We saw a child with half his face shot off.” Bedding was sterilized in boiling vats heated by fires outside, she said.

McGrath never tires of the trips. Sometimes she is asked why she picked Nicaragua when there are so many other social causes closer to home.

“I’m paying for the millions that went to destroy that country,” she said. “I feel responsible for doing something about the damage there. Each of us chooses to work in an area that touches something in us.”