Spreading the Good News : Hungary: Emigre in Los Angeles reprints stories from his homeland, free now of Soviet occupiers. He distributes them to fellow expatriates throughout the United States.

Hungarian-Americans hunting for scraps of news as their homeland celebrated its independence Sunday looked to an unlikely place: a downtown Los Angeles scrap yard.

Metal recycler Paul Forray spent $16,000 to reprint stories from last week’s editions of Budapest’s largest independent daily newspaper and send copies by overnight express to Hungarians across America.

He plans to do the same thing this week. Forray says he wants to help the estimated 1.5 million Hungarian expatriates in this country savor the end of more than 46 years of Soviet occupation of their native land.

The last of 100,000 Soviet troops were pulled out of Hungary two weeks ago. Budapest residents planned to mark their sovereignty with street celebrations on Sunday.

“This is the most important time in the last century for Hungary,” said Forray, 61. “There’s a freely elected government and the Russians are gone. It’s important for people to get the news.”

Hungarian-born Forray was a lawyer at the time of the Hungarian revolution. He fled to the United States in 1956 and worked at a toy factory, a restaurant and as a furniture maker before opening his Alameda Street scrap yard 14 years ago.

He got the idea for reprinting Budapest news earlier this year when he met a Hungarian Parliament member and a Budapest journalist who were visiting Los Angeles. The newspaperman asked Forray to help acquire a fax machine for his paper.

Once delivered to Budapest, the fax allowed quick transmission of newspaper stories to the fax machine in Forray’s recycling yard office. But the copies were too blurry for him to copy and give to his friends.

A local printer told Forray that the clearest copies would come from the newspaper’s original lithographic negatives. To his surprise, Forray discovered that the Budapest newspaper was willing to send them--and that the lightweight film could be inexpensively shipped to Los Angeles by an overnight commercial courier service.

To top it off, editors of the Pesti Hirlap agreed to select the top stories from last week’s daily editions and arrange them in a convenient tabloid layout form for Forray.

After quickly having 5,000 copies of the special Pesti Hirlap tabloid printed locally and delivered to his scrap yard office, Forray divided them into 150 bundles. He sent the bundles Friday by UPS to Hungarian groups and churches across the country to be handed out Sunday.

If there’s enough interest after the second edition is sent out this week, he will set up a permanent distribution system and do it every week, Forray said. If at least 1,000 readers are willing to pay $60 a year, the edition could be self-sustaining, he said.

According to Forray, other Hungarian-language weeklies, including three published in Los Angeles, mainly focus on local news. News from Hungary that they print is often old, he said. Mailed subscriptions to newspapers from Hungary can take weeks to arrive at the homes of Hungarian-Americans.

Editors of the three papers could not be reached. But other local Hungarian-Americans said they are curiously watching Forray’s venture.

Janos Dolinszky, a Mission Hills architect who took part in an independence celebration Sunday in Ontario, said he believes that existing local Hungarian-language papers already print a substantial amount of news from Hungary.

“But I’ll be reading the Pesti,” said Dolinszky, a former Hungarian freedom fighter who escaped to the United States in 1957. “It was one of the best papers before communism. It still has a good ring to it.”

Those who read the Pesti may be surprised, predicted Blanch Orban. She is a Westwood resident who for 17 years published one of the local Hungarian weekly papers.

“I hope it’s a success,” Orban said. “But what people don’t realize is they have to rediscover the country. It’s not the country that any of us left. Anybody who has lived under communist rule for 47 years can’t expect to wake on a Monday and be a good democrat. They don’t know what democracy is yet.”

According to Forray, restoration of Hungary’s independence is cause for joy, no matter how difficult the transition turns out to be.

On Sunday, he closed his scrap yard for the day and went to a Hungarian-language church “to pray for Hungary--and to distribute the paper.”