COLUMN ONE : Invisible Poor--Whites : Anglos are the largest and least-understood impoverished group in California. Most are dispersed in rural areas where they receive little public attention.

Cockroaches crawl over the residents’ beds at night. Dirt yards are cluttered with debris. Groups of young men stand around drinking all day. Drugs are rampant, rowdiness and violence are common. There is despair and anger.

This is Del Rio Mobile Home Park, the ghetto on the riverbanks at the edge of town.

“They want the poor to stay in places like this where they won’t have to see them,” said Michelle Hammond, a 25-year-old woman who lives in a small trailer with her husband and four children.

The Hammonds, like most families who live in Del Rio, receive public aid. Most Del Rio families have something else in common. They belong to the largest and perhaps least understood poverty group in California: the white poor.

Largely dispersed in rural areas and small communities, they defy the public image of poverty as primarily a problem of blacks and Latinos in the inner cities.

While that image was reinforced by the Los Angeles riots, the 1990 census tells a different story: 1,821,146 non-Hispanic whites, 1,598,213 Latinos and 437,201 blacks lived in poverty in California. Census officials define poverty as an annual income of less than $6,310 per year for a single person, $8,076 for a couple and $12,674 for a family of four.

The state Department of Social Services uses a broader standard in determining eligibility for welfare. The latest federal standard of poverty for a family of three, for example, is an income of $10,857 per year, according to census officials. But under state Department of Social Services guidelines, a family of three that earns less than $15,396 a year is considered needy and eligible for aid, depending on taxes and other living expenses.

More Anglo families received financial aid, food stamps and other public assistance last year in California than any other racial or ethnic group. State figures show, for example, that 267,488 non-Hispanic white families were on welfare--the main program being Aid to Families With Dependent Children--compared to 262,782 Latino, 177,021 black and 49,048 Asian families.

To be sure, the large number of poor whites reflects the fact that overall there are more whites living in California than any other group. It is also true that a larger percentage of Latinos and blacks are poor--21%--compared to 9% of whites.

While nonwhite poverty in large metropolitan areas has been burned into the public consciousness, the news media and academia often overlook the white poor because they are spread out, not as easy to find and considered less newsworthy than big-city ghetto dwellers, researchers say.

Ignoring the white poor “feeds the public’s perception that the underclass is exclusively a minority problem,” according to a 1991 study by Ronald B. Mincy, senior research associate with the Urban Institute in Washington.

Even in Los Angeles, where poor Anglos are greatly outnumbered by impoverished blacks and Latinos, their ranks are not small. Anglos accounted for more than 17% of the 267,261 families in Los Angeles County who received family aid payments last year.

Throughout California, the white poor are sprinkled in vest pocket slums, in old hotels, trailer courts and run-down apartments. They live in cars on riverbanks and at roadside rest stops. Some are newly destitute because of the recession, clinging to their homes in middle-class suburbs while reluctantly seeking public aid. Others were raised on welfare and bring up their children the same way. There are old people who have worked all their lives and yet have only inadequate pensions, and young parents who toil at minimum wage jobs.

More than 400 miles north of Los Angeles, vacationers heading for Lake Tahoe on Interstate 80 drive through the foothills of the Sierra where the landscape gradually changes from scrub growth to wide oaks, tall pines and red cedars.

If travelers glance toward the side as they pass a place called Clipper Gap, they might notice a little green-and-white frame building with a steeple. The turn-of-the-century schoolhouse is as pretty as a picture postcard. It is also a sign of white poverty.

The Clipper Gap School is a Head Start headquarters. The Great Society program that is perhaps best known for giving poor, inner-city preschoolers an educational boost is in this case used primarily by impoverished, rural, white youngsters.

At the Clipper Gap Head Start, 20 children, most of them white, prepare for kindergarten by playing educational games, singing and learning to get along.

Peggy Hartman, director of the program, sometimes leaves Head Start literature on cars at roadside rest stops and campgrounds--”because,” she said, “many times we have families that have lived on the river and have gone from campground to campground and even lived in cars.”

Henry Zablotny isn’t one of those people and, in fact, was doing well enough a few years ago to own an apartment building. But now Zablotny qualifies to enroll his 5-year-old son in Head Start.

The 38-year-old carpenter and father of three was ruined economically after his wife was killed nearly five years ago in a car wreck that left one son in a wheelchair. Carpentry work is scarce these days and medical bills for his injured son are enormous. So far, Zablotny has managed to stay off welfare with occasional jobs and Social Security payments from his wife’s death.

“I fight that (welfare) as hard as I can,” he said. “I don’t want to sound like it’s bad, but me and welfare don’t mix. . . . I’d do anything I could not to, but if I had to, I’d have to.”

Brenda Howerton also has a child who attends Clipper Gap Head Start. She and her three children--3 to 14 years of age--live across the highway in a brown log cabin-like structure that appears at first to be rustic and quaint. But a closer look shows that the housing complex is a dilapidated old motel, crowded with poor whites.

The floors sag in Howerton’s apartment, which is jammed with worn-out furniture. When it rains, water runs down a bedroom wall. Outside, an old couch serves as an ineffective barricade to keep children from playing on the wooden cover of a cesspool that Howerton says reeks in hot weather.

Howerton, 30, is divorced, grew up poor and has received welfare off and on since she was about 17. She has a high school diploma, has trained to be an administrative assistant, but can’t find a job that pays enough to cover child care.

“You get a good job and you finally get off (welfare),” she said, “and then you get laid off and you have to go back on. . . . I’m not ashamed to accept it, but I don’t like it.”

A little more than 100 miles south of Clipper Gap, near the center of the state, is Modesto’s Del Rio Mobile Home Park. Here on the banks of the Tuolumne River, poor whites have gathered for generations.

The trailer park was once the site of a tent city used by migrant farm workers during the “Grapes of Wrath” era of the 1930s. Now, instead of tents, there are 30 tiny stucco cabins and 111 trailers. And, now, instead of migrant farm workers, there are families on public aid.

Michelle Hammond accepts her poverty stoically and is warm, affectionate and attentive toward her four children, each fathered by a different men.

Not without education or work experience, the 25-year-old is obviously intelligent. She grew up in a big house with a swimming pool in San Jose, graduated from high school and has held a well-paying job as a crew scheduler for an airline. But since the age of 18, Hammond has drifted from one man and one pregnancy to another, explaining that she didn’t believe in birth control.

Her current husband, Jim Hammond, whom she married in August, is a 20-year-old high school dropout with no skills. “He’s never had a job, not really,” said Michelle.

Raised in Modesto as the son of Pentecostal ministers, Jim is a short, muscular, sandy-haired man who seems intense and eager to please. Jim tried and failed to get his high school diploma through adult classes this spring. Now, he hopes to obtain a high school equivalency certificate through the community college.

In the meantime, the Hammonds live on welfare as Michelle has done, off and on, for the last five years. “I used to hate it,” she said. “At this point, I guess I’ve gotten used to it. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I used to be humiliated to hand food stamps to the checkout clerk.”

Similar stories are repeated throughout the trailer court:

* Christine Cunningham, 20, dropped out of school in the 10th grade, got pregnant at 15 and married at 16. Her ex-husband, who left her, was raised in Del Rio Mobile Home Park.

Cunningham has two children, one 4 years old and the other 16 months old, and is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. She has been on welfare 2 1/2 years. Her mother, who also lives in Del Rio, is also pregnant and on welfare. “I’m not ashamed to be on welfare,” said Cunningham. “I’m not ashamed to be where I am. I’ve been in worse places.”

As an 8-year-old, she lived for more than a year in a car with her father and a sister. The family collected aluminum cans for money; they heated food on the automobile engine and listened to the soundtracks of TV programs on a portable radio in the car at night.

And the future?

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d love to be a nurse that delivers babies. . . . God, there won’t be welfare for the rest of my life.”

* Craig Maxwell, 37, who says he lives on disability payments, is one of the men who hang around Del Rio drinking all day. “I’m idle and I do what I want to do,” he said. “I sit and I drink and sometimes I do drugs.”

* A middle-aged woman, sitting on the stoop of a stucco cabin, observed matter-of-factly: “I’m just one step away from the river.”

What she meant was that if her daughter were to kick her out she would be forced to live in the squalid camp on the Tuolumne River set up by homeless people, most of them white. Among them are a 16-year-old girl and her mother who trade sex for drug money, according to police. The girl, her mother and her grandmother have all been evicted from Del Rio for prostitution and for drug use, says the management of the trailer park. The girl has an infant of her own.

Across town from Del Rio Mobile Home Park, Ruthie Reeder stands behind a window in the crowded welfare office. Reeder is a small, attractive woman of 31, with large gray eyes and a wide, engaging smile. On the web of her right hand is a tattoo of a black cat’s head.

Reeder is a welfare eligibility worker for the Stanislaus County Department of Social Services, and--as is the case at many welfare offices in Central and Northern California--most of the clients are white. In this county, 8,349 Anglo families received family aid last year compared to 3,124 Latino, 533 Asian and 528 black families.

A few years ago, Reeder was on the other side of the welfare office window. Many of her aunts and cousins still are.

Reeder is the granddaughter of Lillie Mae and Wilford Henry Green, who came to California from Oklahoma more than 40 years ago in search of the good life.

What they found was better than the dirt-floor sharecropper shacks they left, but their existence remained hard. Wilford worked as a railroad laborer and the couple, along with their six children, lived for 10 years in a two-room cabin in the little Central Valley town of Riverbank before scraping up a down payment on a small house nearby.

“I said, ‘When we move up there we’re going to pay for that place if we have to eat bread and gravy,’ ” Lillie Mae recalled with a smile.

The Greens did pay for the house, which is filled with photos of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But Lillie Mae and Wilford are in their 70s now and still live on the edge of poverty. Most of their children are poor. So too are their children’s children.

Wilford Green is 70, small and gnarled by outdoor labor. He sits in a wheelchair on the front porch of the house that he worked so hard to buy. His lungs were ruined by toxic fumes released during a train derailment, and he can barely speak. He subsequently broke his hip and developed diabetes.

Lillie Mae walks out on the porch from her small living room that is filled with old furniture. She is 77, short and plump. In her long dress and kerchief, she could have stepped out of a portrait of rural Oklahoma half a century ago.

The Greens live on $1,110 a month in pension money. Their income would qualify them for food stamps, but they are too proud to apply for aid, according to their oldest daughter, Lillian Reeder.

“We’re making it good,” insisted Lillie Mae. “I’ve never been sick much in my life. That’s something to thank God for.”

The Greens even manage to loan money to their children occasionally.

When they were younger, Wilford went to work at 4 a.m. and often finished after dark. Lillie Mae cared for the children. She made their clothes, canned their food, fixed their lunches, sent them off to school and was there waiting for them when they got back home.

“I never remember coming home and my mother not being here,” said Lillian Reeder, mother of Ruthie. “Not many people can say that. We were her life.”

But hard work and love were not enough. Each of the five girls, upon turning 14 or so, ran off to get married.

“We were all pretty and got the boys,” Lillian said. She went on to say that her father had been strict when the children were small but that neither he nor her mother knew how to handle teen-age defiance.

“They would stand up and yell at him and he would give up,” she said. “They were too sweet o’ persons and they didn’t know how to handle it.”

The teen-agers left home, had children of their own, but the marriages broke up. The girls had no education or occupational training and raised their children on welfare. Now those children are raising their children on welfare.

Of the five girls, only Lillian escaped poverty when her second marriage to a successful electrician lasted 23 years. But her daughter, Ruthie, was not so fortunate.

Ruthie quit school at 16, left home at 17 and later moved in with a boyfriend. She had a child and was pregnant with her second when the boyfriend left.

“I thought we would be together forever,” she said. “He walked out the day the rent was due. . . .

“I finally got an eviction notice. I applied for welfare. I felt like I had to. I was pregnant and I couldn’t find a job. . . . I was ashamed. Because it was embarrassing--and having to use food stamps.”

That was nearly 10 years ago. Then, in 1983, at the urging of her father and with the encouragement of a concerned welfare worker, Ruthie went back to high school at night. She got her diploma within a year and, with the help of welfare and student financial aid, entered junior college.

She stuck with school even though she got pregnant again by a new boyfriend who also left her. Ruthie earned her associate of arts degree in June, 1987--the only offspring of the Greens to go so far in school--and six months later went to work for the welfare department.

Going back to school changed her, Ruthie said.

“I started feeling good about myself,” she said. “I didn’t want to raise my kids on welfare because I knew from looking at my cousins that welfare causes welfare.”