Joy Is Mixed With Prayers for Patriots : Festivities: Thousands of Baltic-Americans from Orange County celebrate and salute those who didn’t live to see their independent nations.

Hours after President Bush opened full diplomatic relations with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, a Mission Viejo couple and their three small children visited Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles to offer prayers of thanks to the children’s great-grandparents--Lithuanian freedom fighters who died without seeing their country liberated.

Holding red and gold chrysanthemums and tiny Lithuanian and American flags, Baltic-American activists Anthony and Danute Mazeika and their children--Conrad, 8, Andy, 7, and Alina, 3--bowed their heads in the high-walled mausoleum and recited the Lord’s Prayer in Lithuanian.

By the filtered blue light from a stained-glass window, they prayed for Danute Mazeika’s grandmother, Bornsilava Smeyte, a revolutionary newspaper editor and 1920s suffragette, and for Smeyte’s husband, history professor Mykolos Birziska, one of the original signers of Lithuania’s Declaration of Independence in 1918.

“God Bless Lithuania, and God Bless America!” exulted Anthony Mazeika as the small ceremony ended.

His wife, Danute, who was by turns tearful and jubilant that her homeland was finally free, added: “I told grandpa (in prayers): ‘We won! We won! We won! Our country has a home!”

The Mazeikas were among about 1,500 Orange County Lithuanian-American residents Monday who rejoiced at the news that their homeland had finally gained U.S. recognition as an independent nation.

They were joined throughout Southern California by thousands of other Baltic-Americans, who jammed phone lines, fired off telegrams and held hasty celebrations in the living rooms of suburban homes.

In Glendale, Aivars L. Jerumanis, a health-insurance executive, dusted off the Latvian visa stamp given him four years ago when he took over as Los Angeles’ honorary Latvian consul.

In Los Feliz, hundreds poured into the parish hall of St. Casimir’s Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church for an impromptu Baltic festival, filling the air with champagne toasts and back-to-back accordion renditions of “America the Beautiful” and “Lietuva Brangi” (My Dear Lithuania).

In Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire district, home to the city’s lone Estonian community center, word was that the Estonian festivities had gone on the road. Rather than hang around town, a good chunk of the local Estonian-American population had gone on an annual fishing junket to Bass Lake, where, presumably, the official recognition of Estonia would be marked in the great outdoors.

“It is a time of jubilation,” said Jaak Treiman, a Canoga Park real estate lawyer and Estonia’s honorary consul in Los Angeles. “But a lot of us will also remember the people who died and suffered during the past 50 years.”

Bush’s decision Monday was viewed by local Baltic-Americans as a milestone for them as well as for their relatives back home. The Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian communities are well-established in Los Angeles, which has for nearly 50 years been the only city in the United States to have honorary consulates from all three Baltic states.

Activists estimate that there are about 50,000 Baltic-Americans in Southern California, and until the past decade, ethnic activism within their ranks consisted mainly of church groups, folk dancing and Scouting groups. Small in numbers and factionalized by nationality and history, the Baltic-Americans made few waves in Los Angeles’ melting pot until younger activists mobilized to keep the Soviets out of the 1984 Olympics.

In the ensuing years, however, demonstrations and protests by Baltic-American groups gathered steam along with independence movements in the three republics.

And Monday, the emotion that had gathered over the decades crested in a burst of jubilation. Lithuanian-born Aerospace engineer Vaidas Baipsys of Costa Mesa was so excited at the news that he hung an American flag next to the large green, yellow and red Lithuanian flag on his garage.

“I thought it was great news,” he said. “This will give the Lithuanians a tremendous shot in the arm and send a very strong message to the reactionaries in the Soviet Union.

Baipsys said his only disappointment was that U.S. recognition for Lithuania had not come sooner. “The President seemed to dillydally,” he said. “I had expected it since a year ago.”

Baipsys, who planned to celebrate with other Lithuanians at St. Casimir’s church in Los Angeles on Monday night, added that he hoped that some of his relatives in Lithuania would now find it much easier to visit the United States.

Also delighted was Aldona VariakojisQ, a real estate saleswoman from Villa Park. She spent her Labor Day visiting friends and celebrating at St. Casimir’s--”dancing, carrying on, everything you do when you are overjoyed,” she said.

Variakojis said she already is looking forward to next spring, when she hopes to carry out plans that she had made some time ago--to travel with her mother to Alytus, the Lithuanian village that her father had loved, and to bury his ashes next to his parents’ grave.

And yet for all the joy at Monday’s news, there were moments tinged in bittersweet.

Because of their revolutionary work, Danute Mazeika’s grandparents were forced to flee Lithuania for their lives in the 1940s when the Soviet Union took over. They died in the United States about 30 years ago--decades before their country knew freedom again.

So at her grandparents’ tomb, Danute Mazeika wanted the Lithuanian flag placed high beside their marble crypts, a final tribute to her grandparents’ struggle and to the victory that they did not live to see.

“The yellow symbolizes the sun,” Mazeika said, “the green for the forest and the red for all the blood shed by Lithuanians.”