‘92 REPUBLICAN CONVENTION : Back Home, Delegates Will Try to Sell the Bush-Quayle Ticket : Politics: They face an arduous task, because the convention seemed not to offer a single theme or message to unite the nation.

Next Thursday noon, in the basement of the Church of Hope in rural Gardner, Ill., Ray Serena plans to talk to the local Lions Club about his four-day stay at the Republican National Convention.

Serena, a 53-year-old general contractor and Gardner’s mayor, said that the message he will take to his 1,350 townsfolk is one of moral renewal and individual responsibility.

That, he says, is what the Republican Party stands for. That, he hopes, is what will carry the party to victory in November.

“What I’m going to tell them is, the people have themselves to blame for the state of the country,” said Serena, chairman of the Grundy County GOP and an alternate delegate to the convention. “I don’t think President Bush should be chastised for the economy or the morals of our country. The people themselves are going to have to make the difference.”

As the Astrodome crew sweeps up the fallen confetti and the punctured balloons this morning, each of the 2,210 delegates to this week’s convention returns home bearing different messages and memories, symbols and souvenirs.

Each has the burden of transferring whatever enthusiasm he or she can muster to neighbors and friends, and of trying to define for their own communities what the Republicans offer for their future.

They have a difficult task. This cacophonous convention appeared not to offer a single theme or message to unite the nation, but rather a collection of conflicting visions, from the brimstone of Patrick J. Buchanan’s conservatism to the compassion of HIV-positive Mary Fisher.

Vincent DaSilva, for example, is a black man at a gathering where nine of every 10 delegates are white, and he hails from urban East Orange, N.J., where most people vote straight Democratic. Nonetheless, he is going home optimistic.

“The lead that Bill Clinton has is a very soft lead, and I think that lead will narrow,” he declared.

Not that DaSilva, a 34-year-old insurance man who is the East Orange GOP chairman, believes everyone has gotten the message. Yet.

“I think they are aware of what the President has done. The Cold War helped to heal some wounds, and there’s no longer the need to spend money on the military,” he said. “I think there are some who understand that and there are some who have to be convinced.”

DaSilva said he looks forward to proselytizing on behalf of his party, even in the face of the traditional support of the black community for Democratic candidates.

“I feel great about it; I’m able to take back my experience,” he said. “My firsthand example.”

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As Glen Kelly returns to tiny Falmouth, Mass., at dawn today to his real life--to run a tournament for 144 golfers this afternoon at a Cape Cod country club, to be in the wedding of a friend Saturday night and to play political leader in his town’s fight over the proposed opening of a Wal-Mart--the 30-year-old golf pro believes that he is both an outcast in the Republican Party, yet also its “only hope for the future.”

For four days, Kelly, a Buchanan delegate, has endured the strain of being a conservative in a Massachusetts delegation dominated by moderates. He claimed he has been demeaned and ridiculed because he is anti-abortion and abhors the notion of homosexual rights; he said he has seen “up front and personal” that President Bush will have a hard time convincing America that he can revive the economy.

But despite his despondency over learning there are really “two Republican parties and they are dangerously divided,” Kelly has also heard new inspiring voices of Republican leaders in Houston. He has met delegates from Indiana and Florida with whom he has more in common than with most Republicans in New England. “Someone like me is mainstream, even normal in the Midwest, whereas in Massachusetts I’m considered an extremist,” said Kelly. “I can’t wait to tell them that back home.”

The young golf pro said the party was sealing its own doom by moving away from its committed conservative core.

Kelly argued that the party’s salvation lies in Republicans like himself--Ronald Reagan Republicans with conservative social values and a willingness to get dirt under their fingernails working for the GOP--”not the elite Rockefeller Republicans like the governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld.”

“I see these two visions of my party in the future and I’m scared,” he says. “Weld saved Massachusetts from financial ruin but at what expense? He stands for homosexuals; he stands for pro-choice. Why should we sell out our country’s values?”

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As they leave this week’s hoe-down in Houston, the convention’s delegates will each have a special moment to remember and share with friends and the grandchildren back home. In the tear-jerker category, few conventioneers could top the experience of Jonathan Leonard, a delegate from South Los Angeles.

Born and reared in Houston, Leonard left Texas for California at age 17, fleeing a starkly segregated city where a black teen-ager’s odds of success were bleak. Last week, Leonard returned to his hometown for the first time in 44 years--arriving as a delegate to the Republican Convention.

A lot has changed in Houston since the 1940s, as Leonard found when he revisited his old neighborhood on the east side of town. His house at 3901 McIlhenny St. has been torn down, a victim of freeway widening, and most of his friends and neighbors are long gone.

But one symbol of his childhood remains: a pecan tree that Leonard planted as a boy of 12.

“I always loved pecans, and you know it’s the state tree of Texas,” Leonard, 61, recalled Thursday morning in the lobby of the Houston hotel where he and California’s other delegates were housed.

“I planted it right outside my bedroom window, so I could watch it,” said Leonard, pausing to brush away tears and collect his composure. “I’m sure glad I did. It’s huge now. It’s the only thing left.”

Leonard is a retired Los Angeles firefighter who doused the flames of the Watts riots in 1965. This year, the tall, silver-bearded man is also a peculiarity in his inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood--a black Republican candidate for the state Assembly.

Campaigning for Bush and the GOP in the heavily Democratic neighborhoods of urban Los Angeles would seem like a kamikaze mission. But the senior Leonard’s perspective on life allows no defeatism.

“The odds aren’t good, but my purpose is to spread the message of the party and get more Afro-Americans over on our side,” Leonard said. “Bill Clinton made a mistake early in the campaign when he said that 95% of the Afro-Americans are Democrats and he could count on their votes. I don’t appreciate that. I don’t like being taken for granted.”

Leonard said that in selling the Bush-Quayle ticket, he would remind his friends and neighbors that the Republicans “were the party of Abraham Lincoln, and the Democrats were the ones with the KKK and the poll tax to keep us Afro-Americans from voting.

“We all used to be Republicans, but when F.D.R. came along with his New Deal, which was a good deal, we left and went for the Democrats,” he said. “Those social programs were good, but now we are living with the consequences of them, and we need a change. Now it’s time to go back.”

Times staff writers John M. Broder and Cathleen Decker contributed to this story.