COLUMN ONE : Survival Is Day to Day for Poorest : They learn to rely on networks of friends and neighbors to get by. A future away from slums and back-bending hardships is their hope.

In one San Gabriel home, poor Vietnamese children drink the juice from lemons for vitamins when oranges are too costly. In a Highland Park bungalow, an old woman cuts aluminum from soda cans to cover the holes in the soles of her shoes. In the Westlake district, poor Latino families quickly spread the news when chicken is selling for 39 cents a pound.

There are 1.3 million people living below the poverty line in Los Angeles County--$13,283 for a family of four--and they operate in a complex arena that demands inordinate patience and quick thinking. Those who know how to get by may be able to escape the slums, buy a car to land a better job, and even get their children into a private school.

How do they do it in a city as expensive as Los Angeles, where a visit to a doctor can cost $50 and the lowest advertised monthly rent is $325?

The answers can be found in a world where not a penny goes uncounted, not a soup bone goes unused and few brand names are seen on kitchen shelves.

“Recycling bottles and cans is booming among the poor; they are masters of exchanging services like free haircuts for a car ride, and they are just out there surviving in ways we rarely study and do not really understand,” said Jacque Leavitt, associate professor of urban planning at UCLA, and an author and researcher on poverty.

“Not only do the poor get through the week, but they work out what you could almost call enviable relationships with other people--relationships that we in the middle class rarely enjoy,” she said.

The poor fuel an economy of odd jobs that is neither well understood nor documented by the government. Almost any service can be bought in poor neighborhoods, from hiring a local teen-ager to watch the grocery counter for an hour to having a dented fender repaired curbside. Some of the poor lie to the government about such work in order to hang onto welfare checks that could otherwise be cut. They feel they have no other choice.

When the going gets toughest, the poor often turn to one another. An underground finance network of personal no-interest emergency loans thrives here.

The poor also have tapped into a vast network of churches and nonprofit agencies that ranks behind only the federal and county governments in supplying aid to the disadvantaged. Food, marriage counseling, legal representation--even emergency dental work--are available for free to those who know how and where to ask.

One utility official tells of the 89-year-old Highland Park woman who manages to get by on a $189 monthly Social Security check and about $40 in food stamps, thanks in part to the low rent she pays for her tiny bungalow. So poor is the elderly woman that she uses aluminum from cans as soles in her worn-out shoes, the official said.

Jack Campbell, coordinator of the Department of Water and Power’s Angel Program, which helps pay utility bills of the poor, sees this woman--whom he did not name--as a survivor who, like a soldier in wartime, ignores the odds and finds a way to live without fear.

The elderly woman, he said, has only enough money for rent and food. Her utilities are paid by the program.

Campbell met the woman while making his rounds offering aid to poor households. He said he was so touched by her poverty-ridden but dignified life that he honored her in a self-published book he wrote about local heroes.

“I have been so inspired meeting them--inspired but saddened in my heart,” Campbell said. “They are not living a life that you and I would recognize. . . . And they would be stunned to see how well we live--believe me.”

In Inglewood, Sonia Phillips, 30, appears to be stocking up for a siege. The disabled mother has stacked great boxes of detergent and Oriental noodles, huge jars of fruit punch concentrate and spaghetti, and No. 10 size cans of beans under a kitchen table and against a wall.

A master of bulk-buying and layaway, Phillips has figured out a way to buy goods in four- to six-month cycles. The long lead time allows her to scour stores for deep discounts on institutional-sized products bought with $30 to $40 saved from her assistance check.

Under Phillips’ technique, the cost of food staples is cut by more than half. She said she learned many of her tricks at St. Joseph’s Center in Venice--”my godsend”--one of scores of advocacy centers for the poor in Los Angeles.

“I plan several months ahead on everything,” Phillips said one autumn afternoon. “Like my Christmas shopping--it’s long done.”

Phillips said she does not recall stepping into a department store such as Robinson’s or Bullock’s in recent years. K mart and Payless are all she can afford.

Many poor have never been inside a private doctor’s office or a bank, much less an upscale department store.

Fabian Villa has lived with his wife and six children in the tattered Westlake district for more than a decade, but because of his poverty he cannot pay for bus rides and does not have a feel for much of Los Angeles.

“We have a car, but we do not use it because of gas prices,” he said through an interpreter, adding that the family walks almost everywhere.

He said that in the last several months, the family has used the car only twice--once to go to Hollywood and once to the Griffith Observatory.

Most nights, the close-knit family plays games on the floor of their second-story, one-bedroom apartment. The older girls tease their littlest brother, a mischievous 6-year-old who is restricted to playing indoors.

The harsh rule is unfortunate but necessary, his parents said. Less than 100 feet away, in an alley, a morose group of drug addicts has lived for seven months. Rubber tourniquets hang from their arms like so many black mourning bands, and the palefaced men and women do not seem to care who notices.

It is too sad for the children to see, Villa said, so he tries to make the world indoors more appealing. With savings built up when he and his wife had a smaller family, Villa spent $500 on an Encyclopaedia Britannica set so that the children could explore the world of books. Villa, 40, wants his progeny to escape poverty and crime. The family seems to work in unison to that end.

Villa’s wife, Alberta, 38, is the final arbiter of what can be spent. If one child must see a doctor, the family lives on beans and eggs for the week. Villa family members said they get all of their clothing from churches, friends and relatives.

The Villa girls take odd jobs, and the family collects soda cans from litter-strewn MacArthur Park. The cans bring in about $10 a week--enough to afford a phone, which is shared by neighbors who use it on a pay-as-you-go basis.

“Mom puts change into a piggy bank every week, and before Christmas we open up the piggy bank to see how much is inside, and then we know what presents we can buy,” said Sandra Villa, 16, a straight-A student who is making plans for college.

“We kids know how to save money for Christmas and for the bills. Whenever we ask for $1 and Dad says no because he has to pay the rent, we don’t argue. We say, ‘It’s OK, Dad, we understand.’ We know that’s the way it is.”

Villa, a cook, is paid $240 for his grueling 66-hour week. His wage of $3.60 an hour--below the California minimum of $4.35--is illegal. Like thousands of other immigrants, he has not insisted on a raise to the legal level because he fears he could lose the job he has held for 13 years.

Kim Savage, an attorney for National Senior Citizen’s Law Center who has worked closely with poor families for years, said they rarely blame anyone for their poverty.

“Their attitude is very simple: I can’t afford this,” Savage said. “They accept that their life is hard, not in terms of permanence, but they understand this is the situation now, and they are constantly trying to improve it.”

Sometimes, when asked to reflect upon their lives, the poor weep openly.

Juana Lopez (not her real name) is of this troubled world. Her specialty is sales. With kids in tow, she roams the garment district, dickering with wholesale vendors for a good price on wallets to sell at suburban flea markets. At 34, poverty has forced her to overcome her natural shyness, and she wields her hard-acquired skills like a hawker on the trade convention circuit.

She pays a poor neighbor $1 to drive her to a warehouse to buy cases of soda, which she sells for a small profit, can by can.

With a newborn and two toddlers at home, Lopez is not able to take on a regular job. Through her efforts she has saved $800--nearly two-thirds of the $1,300 rental deposit she needs to get out of Skid Row.

There is an urgent edge to Lopez’s bustling. She and her five children are jammed into a studio apartment just a mile from City Hall that lacks its own toilet. The family shares a bathroom down the hall with several other families.

“I feel desperate,” she said one recent day, her eyes brimming with tears.

Lopez spoke of how the family of six sleeps on one bed and two small sofas. One son has taken to wearing gang fashions and she fears he will be seduced by the crime and drugs flourishing nearby.

Each month, she gets $694 from Aid to Families with Dependent Children and $300 from the father of her two youngest children, but that leaves little to save toward the deposit on a larger apartment.

“My oldest son is growing up very fast, he is aware of many things that teen-agers learn, and he is saying, ‘Mom, we need to move. We have to get out of this situation now.’ And he is right,” Lopez said. “The truth is, the money coming in is just not enough.”

Esperanza and Manuel Madrigal (not their real names) both work to support three children, Esperanza’s mother and three nephews. The family lives in Boyle Heights on $1,500 a month, far below the poverty line.

Once a week, to assess the budget, the Madrigals sit at the kitchen table on tiny plastic toddlers’ chairs--about the only furniture that they can afford.

“Movies, entertainment? This is impossible for us,” said Esperanza Madrigal, a domestic worker who takes the bus to her job cleaning three homes in the suburbs. She makes $120 a week. “We can go to the park, as long as we don’t have to take the bus--too much money.”

“We talk about cutting corners in any way that we can,” said Manuel Madrigal, an auto body repairman. “$500 rent is due on the 14th . . . the phone a different day. So we pace ourselves. I hope, maybe through savings, at some point to buy a home of our own by sharing it with another partner, then buying that person out. That is my plan, but it is a long ways off.”

For now, the victories are smaller. They count among their accomplishments earning enough to buy a small black-and-white television.

Nothing like that was possible during the first decade of their marriage, before the family crossed the Rio Grande in 1988. Back home, a television takes a lifetime to buy, they said.

“You live on your dreams, no?” asked Madrigal. “No matter what, the way of life here is better than in Mexico.”

The poor sometimes create their own rules to get by, including hiding their earnings from the government, in violation of welfare rules.

They lie because people on welfare who get a job also get a cut in assistance. Moreover, families who receive AFDC are not allowed to have personal property worth more than $1,000, including savings. Those without children receive General Relief and are allowed savings of only $50.

The rule is intended to make sure that welfare payments go to those who need it most, but advocates for the poor say it virtually assures that they cannot legally save enough for a rent deposit to escape the slums.

“Poor people are not allowed to have bank accounts, God only knows why, so everyone of them is forced to walk around with their cash in their pocket or hidden somewhere, and they get robbed all the time,” said Patricia Shelhamer, a family therapist for the poor at Hollywood Assistance Program, a free service. “Then we say pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that’s preposterous.”

Juana Lopez does not report her soda-selling or flea-marketing, nor do the Madrigals admit all their earnings to their social worker. Because of this, Lopez and the Madrigals were interviewed on the agreement that their real names would not be published.

While some of the poor say lying is the only way to inch ahead and get off welfare for good, the government considers such acts illegal. Larry Emme, a spokesman for the county’s AFDC program, said families go through a rigorous financial screening “that is so unpleasant that many decide to get along without (welfare).”

The problem, Emme said, is that welfare funding is so tight that those who are even slightly better off must make room for those below. Yet, he concedes, “It isn’t really possible to live on AFDC alone.”

Not all of the poor work covertly while getting welfare. Many feel that they must respect the rules that sometimes bewilder them.

Ty Huynh grappled for two years with the idea of taking a job without telling her social worker. The former Saigon schoolteacher decided that would not be the best image to present to her three small children.

So Huynh, 39, of San Gabriel has chosen to live on welfare alone while she pays a $1,300 loan for her rent deposit. The loan was made by three friends who last year helped her avert homelessness.

In her intricately mapped-out strategy, Huynh will repay her debt by living as cheaply as possible. Then she will begin saving for a car, which she sees as her key to getting a decent job, attending English classes, and ultimately getting off welfare.

“There’s a couple of days that we cannot buy food--the last few days of the month and beginning of the next,” she said through an interpreter. On those days, the family lives on rice and other leftover staples.

“The thing we need the most is fruit for the three children, so we buy lemons--they are the cheapest and we stretch it with water so they can get the vitamins they need.”

To save $1.10 in bus fare, she doubles up her shopping trips with appointments to see a free lawyer at the Asian Pacific Legal Center, which is representing her in her divorce.

She and the children must walk several miles each week when the bus money runs out.

“Sometimes the children say, ‘Why do you take us to a place where we have to walk sooooo long?’ and my tears just flow from the heart,” Huynh said. “I tell them, ‘Slowly, slowly, be patient.’ ”

If she sticks to her budget, she confided with some pride, she will be able to “start thinking about getting a used car” in 1992.

Leavitt, of UCLA, said she has found in her research that the poor have a level of perseverance that most in the middle class have never had to learn.

Carmen Lima persisted for 18 years. When she finally got a decent job last year as an amnesty outreach worker, helping poor immigrants, she said she felt like an animal freeing itself from the mire of a tar pit.

Today, though still living in a housing project, she has a $1,900-a-month job and has just received a degree in social work from Cal State Northridge. Two of her children attend private Catholic schools through scholarships and her monthly contribution of $75.

Lima, 44, still uses the tricks she learned as a $3-an-hour cleaning lady who barely spoke English.

“If the electricity is due, but something is on sale, I call the power company and I say, ‘Can I pay half now and half later to buy things on sale?’ And the power company listens and says yes! You learn these things, and never forget.”

Nor can Lima forget the day someone stole from her drawer the $750 that she had painstakingly saved for a hearing aid. Today, Lima donates money to the poor who sleep at night on pews at Delores Mission Church, where she worships.

“There’s no shame in being poor,” she said. “The shame is to accept it sitting down. If you struggle to make it one day after another, there is dignity in that. I know. . . . I’m one of the experts.”

HOW DO POOR FAMILIES REALLY LIVE?

A look at the monthly income and expenses of three Los Angeles poor families. THE VILLA FAMILY BUDGET (Seven-member family): Income: $960 salary $40 soda can recycling $50-$70 odd jobs TOTALS: $1,050-$1,070 income Costs: $560 rent/parking $400 food/dry goods $70 car insurance $15 laundry/soap $10 phone $5 piggy bank TOTALS: $1,060 costs THE HUYNH FAMILY BUDGET (Four-member family): Income: $824 welfare $170 food stamps TOTALS: $994 income Costs: $610 rent/utilities $300 food/dry goods $40 loan repayment $20 clothes/shoes $10 phone $7-$10 bus fare $5 laundry/soap TOTALS: $992-$995 costs THE MADRIGAL (not real name) FAMILY BUDGET (Nine-member family): Income: $1,000 husband earnings $480 wife earnings $20 public assistance TOTALS: $1,500 income Costs: $500 rent/utilities $650 food/dry goods $80 bus fare $60 emergency set-aside $40 clothes / shoes $30 phone $30 laundry / soap $12-$24 check-cashing $3 Lotto TOTALS: $1,405-$1,417 costs

LOS ANGELES COUNTY POOR By race, adults only: Latino Immigrants: 42% Anglo: 25% Blacks: 15% American-born Latinos: 10% Asian: 8% By family type: Singles or unrelated roommates: 32% Childless couples or other relatives living together: 15% Couples with children: 23% Lone fathers with children: 2% Lone mothers with children: 28% By Age: 0 to 18: 49% 19 to 24: 8% 25 to 44: 26% 45 to 64: 10% 65 and up: 5% By employment situation: Full-time jobs: 14% Part-time jobs: 28% Not Working: 58% By housing type: Homeowners: 20% Renters: 80% Sources: The Widening Divide, 1989, UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

1990 Federal Poverty Lines* Yearly earnings for a family size of: 1. $6,617 4. $13,283 6. $17,740 9. $26,510 * Estimate, based on federal 1988 poverty line adjusted for inflation. Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.