Law Clerk Makes a Business of His Peace Offerings

Manny Gonzalez has given the shirt off his back to give peace a chance.

The law clerk from West Covina has spent his life savings to start a T-shirt business that promotes harmony among gangbangers with both a medium and a message: the peace symbol.

Gonzalez is recruiting workers among youths he meets at courthouses, where his job with a downtown law firm takes him each day.

And he has recruited a lawyer to register the widely recognized, 40-year-old peace symbol as part of the trademark logo for his fledgling company, named Peace Wear.

“We found out that nobody had ever trademarked the peace sign like that before,” Gonzalez said. “So we did it.”

So far, Gonzalez’s courthouse converts have created nine designs using the peace symbol idea. A commercial shop was paid to print the shirts and the youths are now helping to market them to sportswear outlets and surf shops.

Soon, Gonzalez hopes to employ more youngsters to take over the printing and handle distribution.

Gonzalez, 25, sees the shirts themselves as symbols of peace.

“I’m trying to get these kids away from the gangster look,” he said. “That’s got to go, whether it’s the trendy look or not. It’s causing kids harm. They live by what they’re wearing.”

The shirt artwork produced by Peace Wear’s five young designers has a fluid, graphic look--most of their painting until now has been on walls, not cotton.

“Yeah, I used to be a tagger. I guess everybody nowadays was, or is,” said artist Jaime Reyes, 20, of Monterey Park.

Co-worker Ray Sandoval, 19, of West Covina said Gonzalez caught him in the act of painting graffiti outside a downtown courthouse.

“We were hanging by poles, tagging a little,” Sandoval admitted. “Manny said, ‘Would you like to do some shirts? You have to stop doing that if you do.’

“I didn’t have a job--I tagged because I was bored. So I said, ‘Sure, anything for money.’ ”

Artist Robert Centrone, 20, of Echo Park said it doesn’t bother him that the shirt designs include a symbol that can be traced to 1950s-era ban-the-bomb protests in Great Britain. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, it was also used in anti-Vietnam War protests in this country.

“That’s fine. Today the war is in the streets in our own communities,” Centrone said. “I know people who have been killed. I’ve had guns pulled on me.”

At Gonzalez’s urging, the youths agreed to donate 5% of their sales--50 cents or so per shirt--to the MacLaren Children’s Center, an emergency Los Angeles shelter for abused or abandoned children that temporarily houses about 150 youngsters at a time.

MacLaren can certainly use the money, spokesman Schuyler Sprowles said. “I hope they do well,” he said of Peace Wear.

As for Gonzalez, he has spent $14,000 on salaries for his designers, paint supplies, 2,500 blank shirts and printing costs.

“It was my wife Nora’s house money,” he said. “But that’s OK. She really supports me.”

His lawyer, Marvin Kleinberg of Century City, said Gonzalez is not trying to claim exclusive use of the peace symbol with the trademark application, filed two months ago with the Patent Office in Washington.

But it would keep others from using the world-famous circle symbol in conjunction with the words peace and wear.

“It’s an attractive symbol that has some underlying meaning,” Kleinberg said. “But I don’t know that kids will recognize it as a peace symbol, or associate it with peace.”

Gonzalez said getting a piece of the peace symbol was easier than expected.

“I figured I’d need somebody’s permission to use it. But it turned out nobody had incorporated it into a trademark logo.”