SPOTLIGHT KYLE PETERSON : One Last Point . . . George Bush More Than Fulfilled This Campaign Promise

Outside on Pennsylvania Avenue, there was grim political reality: Work crews were putting the finishing touches on the reviewing stand for Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade. For most of this month, in fact, George Bush has been able to measure his time left by the progress being made on the two-story enclosure rising outside the front door of the White House.

But inside the ceremonial East Room last Thursday, the real world could be shut out for one last George Bush kind of moment.

It was time for the very last Point of Light.

Here was a campaign promise not only kept, but exceeded.

Recall how the words of speech-writer Peggy Noonan resonated through Bush’s successful acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in August, 1988: “I will keep America moving forward,” Bush told us, “always forward, for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand Points of Light.”

Well, in the end he gave us 1,020. The last: Kyle Peterson.

Pundits thought it sounded hokey in 1988, that a reliance on a thousand Points of Light to help America’s neediest was vaguely reactionary and anti-government. Wouldn’t it just turn into another Republican code phrase, an excuse not to spend more money on the poor?

But today, despite all the cynical turnabouts on so many policies in his Administration, it’s difficult to remain hardhearted about George Bush’s thousand Points of Light.

But give the man his due: George Bush stuck to the Points of Light. It wasn’t something he would discard as easily as “Read My Lips, No New Taxes.”

Bush has always been a man drawn to the small acts of personal conduct, not the grand sweep of public policy, and so a thousand Points of Light to him symbolized how a handful of motivated volunteers could accomplish more than a legion of sluggish government bureaucrats.

“It’s what happens when ordinary people claim the problems of their community as their own,” Bush said last week. “People, not programs, solve problems.”

Thus, day in and day out, since November, 1989, the White House has been rewarding individuals and organizations for their community service and charitable works by naming them daily Points of Light. (Each one announced after a discreet background check, including a quick run of their names through the FBI computer.)

The first was, of all things, a newspaper, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. It was awarded Nov. 22, 1989, for accepting Bush’s challenge to the media to recognize local volunteers in its news pages in a series it called “A Thousand Points of Light.”

Later, there were a few celebrities--sports stars involved in their communities like golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez, basketball star Kevin Johnson and baseball standout Harold Reynolds.

But for the most part, the Points of Light program stuck to its goal of providing recognition to average Americans working hard in relative obscurity. There was Eleanor Hermanns of Chula Vista, point No. 340, who has served as foster parent to almost 50 children. There was Walda Sylvester, of Elkhart, Ind., point No. 451, who founded a local program to help abused women. There was Jesse Chambers of Las Vegas, No. 936, a diabetic eighth-grade student who volunteered his time at a hospice for the seriously ill.

The White House’s daily Points of Light rarely got much national media attention. But at the grass-roots level, the program proved so popular that by last year the White House was getting 200 nominations a week. It was so deluged with mail that it went to a seven-day-a-week schedule last spring to try to accommodate it all.

So even when Bush was overseas, the traveling White House would issue a daily Point of Light press release. It went right through the Persian Gulf War (No. 354, Arbor House Day Program of Albany N.Y., came as the air war began Jan. 16, 1991) and through the bitter days of the presidential election (No. 942, Loi Van Nguyen of Grand Rapids, Mich., came on Nov. 3, 1992).

There was, White House aides insist, never any thought given to pulling the plug on the Points of Light after Bush’s defeat. Never any thought to stopping at 1,000, either, which came on Dec. 31, and which was awarded to Gang Peace of Dorchester, Mass., and its founder, Rodney Dailey, who works to help get troubled kids off the streets and out of gangs.

And there would have been plenty more, too, if the election had gone differently. There was a grim determination to keep it going until the end.

“We were planning to go on indefinitely,” says Shelly Reid, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of National Service, which ran the Points of Light program and selected its winners.

The last daily Point of Light announced last week is for Wednesday, Jan. 20: Inauguration Day. It will go down in the books that Kyle Peterson and his Mariucci Inner City Hockey Starter Assn. of St. Paul, Minn., was No. 1,020--and last.

There was apparently no special reason why Peterson, 61, was chosen to be the last. He’s not well-known, and he even had to send in the Point of Light application himself. “Maybe they just got us in under the wire,” Peterson observed.

But Peterson has been doing good stuff. A marketing executive with a love of both hockey and jazz, Peterson realized that his two worlds never met; the black friends he made as a jazz enthusiast didn’t play hockey. What was worse, their children didn’t play hockey in a city that is hockey crazy.

So Peterson, a longtime children’s coach, set up a free program. For eight years running, he has taught 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds how to skate and play, providing equipment and ice time, and also arranging games against other teams. Now, he has 63 kids in his program, one that not only helps keep them off the streets but that gives them a window on the world of a sport that is still virtually all white.

And so last week, Kyle and his wife, Marilyn, paid their own way from Minnesota to attend a brief ceremony honoring the entire Points of Light program and recipients representing all 50 states. After shaking hands with George and Barbara Bush, Kyle and Marilyn were back outside on the White House lawn with time to think.

It was a moment little noted by the White House press corps, but it clearly was a highlight in Kyle Peterson’s life. And perhaps it was also one of those individual moments, both for a President and for America’s regular Joes, that the media is so often scorned for ignoring.

“I think this was a great idea. I hope the Clinton Administration thinks up a similar program, thinks up a new name and triples the size of it,” Peterson says. “It’s a concept that isn’t even debatable. Bush took a little heat for the Points of Light, but that is too bad. He was a good man.”

But Peterson declined to say whether he voted for him.