6 Tell of Quest for Happiness, and Occasionally Finding Bits of It : Lifestyle: Playwright George Bernard Shaw declared that a lifetime of happiness “would be hell on Earth.” Nonetheless, the pursuit goes on.

Like a coy lover, happiness seems to dodge its most ardent suitors. For all the billions of dollars spent, advertisements placed, self-help groups joined, marriages dissected, “wounded children” uncovered--for all our national fascination with it, joy still cannot be owned.

Sketched here, however, are the lives of a few people who have managed to borrow a bit:

* Ann and Robert Echols take pleasure in their American Dream.

* Eloise Rose finds peace in her Bible, and relationship with God.

* Sheryl Unger draws satisfaction from a strong, disciplined body.

* John Kohls knows spiritual bliss in truly knowing himself.

* Steve Updegrave thrives as a family man and community leader.

* And Diane Black isn’t sure of much, but is doing her best one day at a time.

None of them claims to have found the fountain, the potion, a guaranteed recipe for happiness. Each has only a fragment, a little knowledge of what works and doesn’t in his or her own imperfect world.

LONGVIEW, Tex.--At last, Robert Echols leans back from the dinner table. A contented sigh ripples up through his suspenders and spreads out in a smile over his hound-dog face.

Only the sharp blue eyes suggest a shrewd businessman. Tonight, basking in the afterglow of shrimp gumbo and bourbon, Echols is a kid again. He is running wild hogs and raising hell at the old homestead in Kildare Junction.

It was just his daddy and him, fishing and chasing rabbits and coaxing juicy watermelons from the wild east Texas ground. No women, electricity or running water. “Young man,” his schoolteacher used to say, “you’ll never be good for anything but ditch-digging.”

Echols, now 51, pretended not to care. But inside, he took his matronly teacher’s tsk-tsking as a challenge. “Before I was 10, I said to my dad, ‘Dad, I’m gonna be a millionaire.’ ” And so he is, several times over.

He found his pot of gold in Amway Corp., a $3-billion direct sales company that markets soap and a variety of other consumer products through independent distributors who, like Echols and his wife, Ann, also recruit new distributors.

The worldwide network is identified with a zealous free enterprise philosophy and motivational meetings not unlike religious revivals. But the Echols aren’t evangelists.

“People think Amway is a cult or a huge group of cheerleaders,” says Echols, “but it’s not. It’s just a bunch of people who have a common interest. It’s just a vehicle to happiness.”

Amway profits have paid for a palatial new home done in Architectural Digest white. Hard work has earned them a swimming pool, a boat and a few sporty cars for tooling around this old oil boom town.

But do not misunderstand. “The money is not happiness. It’s been wonderful,” said Echols. “but what I’ve loved are the challenges, the people, the chance for personal growth in this corporation.”

It’s a long way from 1969, when he had two dozen W-2 forms and calluses from as many welding, pipe-cutting, carpentry and oil roughneck jobs up and down the Mississippi River. Long a die-hard Democrat--”You might say socialistic, even communistic”--Echols was disillusioned with his union, “bitter at the system” and tired of sharing a 10-foot trailer home with his first wife, their four young kids and miscellaneous relatives.

The marriage was troubled, and his future looked bleak. He had no education or high-placed friends. Not even a decent set of clothes to wear on job interviews. Echols had nothing to lose when a friend asked him to an Amway recruitment meeting. “I figured I could earn a few extra bucks.”

With Horatio Alger style, he did a lot more than that.

His wife looks on lovingly, a manicured vision, proud and protective of her husband, partner, friend. Like her pink sweater, the ballet slippers and coif, the Echols’ capitalist dream nearly seems airbrushed to perfection.

The night has worn on, and the Echols are about talked out. Over a last cup of coffee, Echols leans forward to confide, “My son died of AIDS not long ago.” The boisterous storyteller has vanished.

“He was 28,” Echols says in a near whisper, “a beautiful boy.”

“People blame their unhappiness on God, family, race, you name it. Like any of those things guarantee anything,” Echols said. “There are no guarantees. Happiness is about how well you can rise up from your knees.”

NEW ORLEANS--At midday, the drapes are drawn in Eloise Rose’s meticulous living room. Framed photos of young relatives smile out from atop the piano, the mantel, the coffee table--all of which are freshly dusted.

Miss Rose, as she is known to all, is a retired teacher whose home reflects her no-nonsense character right down to the plastic-covered ocher settee. She has never married, nor has she ever been alone.

“God is my companion,” says Miss Rose, who looks a decade younger than her 77 years. She has been up since before dawn, talking to him as she does every day. “He is my happiness. Without him, there is no lasting peace.”

“Those people on TV! I watch what they say and can’t believe they’re happy. Not too long ago, I think it was on “Oprah,” there were these couples who were into this--uh, what do they call it--swinging? It seems to me people go so far to find happiness. It’s out of hand. Go back to the Bible.”

It seems so basic, she says. But in this noisy world, the Word is harder and harder to hear, too often drowned out by cursing, angry voices, gunfire down the street. These are, she says, very troubling times.

But listen closely. There are voices like those raised each Sunday at New Zion Baptist Church. Miss Rose will have shed her plaid housedress. Gap-toothed children wear yellow ribbons in their hair.

The women of the Benevolent Society are all in white: white hats, white dresses, white gloves. The men are in coat and tie--mostly older men, some of whose sons are hanging out at the nearby strip mall, or in jail.

“We live in a society today where people feel, ‘If I want it, I’ll get it. And it doesn’t matter how,’ ” Miss Rose says. “I’m close to a lot of the young people at church. And I tell them: ‘Happiness isn’t asking, expecting, grabbing. It’s having faith. God has a plan.’ ”

The imposing, boxy red brick church is a fortress, a proud symbol of the hope and community that exist amid these run-down blocks just across St. Charles Avenue from this city’s grand Garden District homes.

“Two are better than one,” intones the Rev. K. Alfred Sloan. God at your side gives strength. Walking with Jesus means you are not walking alone. Do not walk alone. “Two are better than one.”

The congregation rises to sing, swaying together under the enormous whirring ceiling fans, voices rising and growing louder. Outside are racism and recession, children without fathers, drugs, despair. But here, two are better than one.

GREENCASTLE, Pa.--The parking lot out back of the Quality Inn off Interstate 81 is jammed with pickup trucks and well-waxed Camaros at 6:15 on Monday night. Young people have come from miles around.

They’ve come not for a Kiwanis meeting or business seminar or to tip a drink at happy hour. Like Sheryl Unger, they’ve come for the weights and track and steam rooms at the Sports Inn health club.

The men are in sweat pants, weightlifters’ belts, Stanley Kowalski-style sleeveless T-shirts and biceps made for all-star wrestling. They are draped here and there over free-weight racks, warming up and welcoming each other with high fives.

The women are mostly dressed in leotards, with headbands and blonde hair and tans purchased at a salon in the mall just down the road. Unger is taking back-to-back aerobics classes, staring determinedly into the mirror, keeping up with the instructor to the driving beat of a crossover rap song.

“It makes you feel better about yourself,” says Unger, 31, who has trimmed a good few inches from her hips and thighs. “It’s made me a lot happier. I mean, it’s what most of us want, right? A perfect man and a perfect bod.”

Unger, a wry and realistic office assistant, isn’t fool enough to count on either. Even if she had both, she figures the perfect life still wouldn’t be guaranteed. “I’d come up with some other problem. It’s human nature,” she says.

So she doesn’t shoot for the ideal. She draws satisfaction from herself in the here and now, by disciplining her body and setting sights high. Her best shot is good enough, though self-acceptance doesn’t come easy.

“I’m a very insecure person,” Unger admits. “A woman with no teeth could be standing next to me and I’d say she looks better than I do.”

It’s the self-esteem thing.

Gloria Steinem has brought it into vogue with a best-selling book. In California, they created a special government commission to promote it. Garry Trudeau has even lampooned it in his “Doonesbury” comic strip.

Unger believes there’s something to all the talk. She is feeling closer to happiness than ever before. Having a body that is “toned, much stronger, more powerful” is part of it. And so is her fiance, a guy with the Incredible Hulk’s pecs and a teddy bear’s manner. But it’s more than those things.

Working out has given Unger a sense of some control in an insecure world. Her biological clock may be ticking. The recession drags on, political upheaval continues, the environment’s health seems in decline. She can do little about any of it.

But building a healthy, strong body is something she can do.

“Working out makes you feel like you’re taking action. Even if you’re not, you feel like you are,” she says. “It’s psychological. The world’s problems don’t go away, but you feel more focused, motivated, in control.”

BIG SUR, Calif.--John Kohls, 48, already is cross-legged on the floor among a growing semicircle of strangers. His shoes are off and, briefly, in one supple motion, he stretches out his legs to touch his toes.

These are the first awkward minutes of an Esalen Institute weekend workshop in which the first exercise requires participant to complete pro-and-con assessments of their lives, known loosely as “bliss grids.”

Though a veteran of at least 30 such visits over the last 15 years, Kohls is not yet at home with the group assembling in this carpeted cottage at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Anyway, he hasn’t come for the seminar.

He’s driven five hours south from his home and psychology practice in Sacramento chiefly for a deep breath of the salty air, to hear the surf and marvel at the clots of Monarch butterflies in the cypress trees that shield this venerable human potential center from travelers along Highway 1.

It is here that Kohls first began to find himself in a cold shock of recognition back in 1978. “I came because of a New Year’s resolution I’d made. I came for a weekend and it changed my life,” he says, his blue eyes dancing behind gold-rimmed glasses. “It was like an explosion in my head.”

For a Midwestern guy who had always “done the right things,” this was a world away from convention, a world of alternative spirituality and self-awareness. It was like glimpsing reality for the first time.

“I’d married a nice Catholic girl and had three kids,” says Kohls, who spent his early years in Cincinnati under the tutelage of Jesuit priests.

“After a few visits here, I began to feel I’d misspent my life as a schmuck. What I’ve let out now is the truth. This place encourages you to go another step, to try telling the truth, even things that are goofy or scary.”

Catholic repression was out. Kohls was ready to try the gamut of therapies pioneered here. Breathing exercises and Gestalt, massage and psychosynthesis. He meditates in a special meditation room at home now, and has thrown off “co-dependency” with his wife, from whom he was divorced in 1985.

“There is a part of me that says I should have stayed with her, been more loving and caring,” he says. “But I left my home because I hated myself. We’re so accomplishment-oriented in this society. I couldn’t live in those narrow boundaries.

“Now I feel more peaceful. My feelings are like waves,” Kohls says. “Am I happy? It’s never your feelings that make you happy. It’s your feelings about the feelings. I’m comfortable with myself now.”

HAGERSTOWN, Md.--On Monday night at Nick’s, an incongruously posh bar-restaurant tucked among factories on the outskirts of town, men from the area gather for their weekly Rotary Club meeting.

They begin to drift in shortly after office closing hours, solidly middle-class men with businesses to run and families to support.

“I’ve read ‘Iron John’ and all that stuff and I’ve really tried to get in touch,” says Steve Updegrave, 44. “But this--the Rotary meeting--this is our bonding. We have a drink and talk. Beating drums? Is that really bonding?”

Not really, many men will say. Even though Robert Bly’s book has been on the best-seller list for more than a year, his theories are fantasies for the majority of men struggling to get by today.

It’s baffling enough just trying to understand their postfeminist wives and street-smart kids. Many are consumed with keeping a salary coming in and food on the table in recessionary times. Most haven’t much time for drums.

“I want to be strong, and that means repressing some things,” says Updegrave, who is married with a 17-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter’Iron John’ says get in touch with yourself. And some of that is good. But a lot of it is bull. Sometimes you just have to get on with life.”

He’s wearing a suit and snazzy tie, bottle-rim glasses and an easy manner. Updegrave doesn’t seem like a full-time Lutheran minister or the product of a strict German upbringing. But he is.

He quit his manufacturing job at 36, when he realized that he wasn’t happy.

“I still get aggravated,” he said. But that’s the point, in a way. Life ain’t like the movies or magazine ads produced on Madison Avenue. “We forget that, though,” he said.

“It’s all these expectations. Thirty years ago in the Lutheran ministry, you gave the Word and the sacraments. Now everyone expects you to be a family counselor and child psychologist and general referee. We expect perfection, perfect happiness.”

In a frenetic world in which “everyone has Carnation Instant for breakfast and dinner on the fly,” it’s the time together with family and good friends that sustain Updegrave.

“We’re lucky to have dinner together once a week,” he said. “But we’re a family that tries. Everybody nowadays is blaming somebody. My whole thing is, get a grip. I did a lot of blaming till I had kids. Then I realized how easy it is to screw up. And how important it is just to stick together.”

His teen-age son and daughter are part of what Updegrave calls “the entitled generation.” Children of baby boomers who take for granted the self-awareness and self-fulfillment their parents fought to claim and grandparents rarely considered.

What they don’t know and will likely discover the hard way, Updegrave says, is what he discovered for himself through trial-and-error self-education after serving in Vietnam and returning to make his way through the “Me Decade.”

“The yuppies have discovered it, too. You go after money and material possessions. That’s the end. But what happens when you achieve that end? And what happens if you don’t?” Updegrave asks rhetorically.

“Either way, you probably won’t be happy. You can’t measure happiness. Nobody’s happy,” he says. “You have to find contentment, ask yourself if you can deal with the day-to-day. If you can, then you’re closer than many.”

SAUSALITO, Calif.--It is another in a string of deep blue days in Marin County. The San Francisco Bay is bright and Alcatraz Island rises out of it, brown and barren and faraway from Diane Black.

And not so far away. The abandoned federal prison, once considered one of the meanest, is now only a banal tourist attraction, the friendly shadow of a fearsome place. It is a little like the shadow that exists in her life.

Black may be perched on a quiet spit along this Disneyland town of tourists and tasteful souvenir shops near the Golden Gate Bridge. She may be wearing a conservative sweater, her hair swept neatly back in a headband.

She may look like any number of creamy-complexioned young women working in this real estate office, that boutique. Her fiance might drive one of the BMWs or Mercedes that keep passing by. But like the silhouette of that faraway penitentiary, her life’s landscape has its shadows. In a way, she’s done a lot of time.

At 33, Diane Black is battling a heroin addiction. The daughter of a “good family” in this well-to-do area, she is an unemployed widow. Her young husband died not long ago. An overdose. “He knew better,” she says.

“My husband and I, we both grew up in nice families. We had good upbringings, advantages. We should have been A-OK,” she says. “But Americans have a way of being miserable. Especially younger ones.”

“Our parents gave us so much that we’ve had to look elsewhere for some wrenches to throw in,” says Black, lighting up a cigarette. She is part of a generation that grew up amid material plenty and the promise of spiritual bliss. What started 30 years ago as a small, cutting-edge human potential movement has today spread throughout the culture.

In the city projects, people are tuned in to hear about incest on “Oprah.” In the airports, businessmen and women snag a copy of Gloria Steinem’s best-selling “Revolution From Within,” hoping to glean something from the famous feminist’s journey to self-esteem. In temples, converted Buddhists and Muslims follow a spiritual path away from Western tradition. Therapeutic couches in suburbs and small towns are filled with people--more than three times as many as ever before--seeking counsel and healing.

“You look at it all and wonder, maybe ignorance really is the key to bliss,” Black says, only half-joking. “I’m an addict in recovery. I’ve tried self-help, appealed to the subconscious mind. I’ve tried it all. My parents don’t believe in any of that crap. Are they happier?”

The vexing thing is, it’s beyond calculation.

What is one person’s “denial” is another’s “let sleeping dogs lie.” What is one person’s freedom is for another an economic impossibility. It’s hard to drop out and “find yourself” when you’re living on the streets.

“I’ve had the chance to know so much about myself. I’ve learned about the power of positive thinking and the power of the subconscious. Has it stopped me from using (heroin)? No. Has is made me happier? I don’t think so.

“I don’t have any better control of happiness or unhappiness,” Black says. “I just understand myself better. I understand why I’m miserable.

“Sometimes that helps,” she says. “And sometimes you just feel like crap.”