Comeback Student Gets Dazzling Tour of Wall Street at Work : Contest: Winning essayist Rafael Castro and his host, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, are mutually impressed.

Rafael Castro--son of Priscilla Rivera, aficionado of airplanes and baseball, Rosemead High School Class of 1993--found himself being squired about the New York Stock Exchange on Friday as though he was the chief executive of Exxon.

There was lunch in the members dining club (Rafael chose chicken nuggets), a private introduction to the inner workings of the exchange, then a guided tour of the trading floor on the arm of the stock exchange’s president.

“I’m still freaking out,” Rafael confided to a stranger, clutching his yearbook, his varsity letter and a prom photo of his friend, Shelley. “I wonder how many people from Rosemead have ever been here. One? Two?”

What brought Rafael, along with his mother and her companion, Eduardo Leal, was an essay on rebuilding Los Angeles that Rafael entered in a contest sponsored by the exchange as part of its bicentennial celebration last year.

First prize was an all-expense-paid trip to Manhattan and a day at the stock exchange. And Rafael won--despite such socialistic suggestions as giving workers a stake by making them part-owners of businesses.

“Also sprinkled in there was a heavy dosage of capitalist incentives,” Robert Fisher of Wertheim Schroder & Co. hastened to point out. Fisher’s investment banking firm helped arrange the contest for the exchange, and he accompanied Rafael and his family to New York.

Rafael’s excellent adventure began Thursday evening in the Michelangelo Hotel, where he got his own room for the first time in his life. To celebrate, he hooked up his Nintendo game to the television and stayed up until 4 a.m.

Then came breakfast at the Wertheim Schroder offices in Manhattan, a tour and a meeting with the CEO. Then off to the stock exchange, and up a private elevator to lunch.

“Wow! I wonder if those are real animals,” the 17-year-old guest of honor murmured, gazing at the members’ hunting trophies--moose and bison heads--adorning a wall outside the dining room. “I mean, the hair stayed on!”

Next came a visit to the exchange’s boardroom, encrusted in gold leaf with a table the length of a New York subway car, then a briefing on the computerized system the exchange uses to monitor for irregularities in trading.

Then down to the trading floor, where officials led Rafael and his ever-expanding entourage through the chaos of flashing lights, ringing phones and frenzied buying and selling, preceded by a stock exchange photographer and video cameraman recording the event.

Suddenly, a small, balding man in a dark blue suit and aviator glasses materialized. “Where’s our winner?” asked Richard Grasso, the stock exchange president. Planting a manicured hand on Rafael’s back, Grasso steered him regally past a crowd of floor brokers.

Fisher, the Wertheim Schroder managing director, had been stunned when he met his contest winner Thursday and discovered that Rafael had transformed himself in a single year from a failing student to one with a 4.0 grade point average.

Born in Puerto Rico, Rafael spent his early childhood in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn. His parents divorced when he was 8. Fearful for her only child’s future, Rivera moved to Southern California four years ago and moved with Rafael into a one-bedroom apartment near Rosemead High School.

For three years, Rafael brought home failing grades. A copy of his transcripts, tucked in his yearbook, shows the relentless Ds and Fs. According to his mother, he was lacking in motivation; with a working mother and an absent father, she says, he was getting no attention.

He was, however, interested in business. He watched closely when his mother sold handmade clothes out of their home. When she held a yard sale, Rafael carted out his old toys. So when a school counselor suggested that he apply to a summer business program for high school students at USC, Rafael got in.

The transformation was dramatic. During his senior year, he got straight A’s. He also competed in track and made up all the courses he had failed. Having started the year with 120 credits, he finished with the 220 needed to graduate.

He plans to attend college but has not yet decided where. In the meantime, he has applied for a job at the post office. After his weekend in New York, he is off to Puerto Rico to visit his father.

Fisher, for one, was dazzled.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I guess it’s the natural fears we have of all these differences.

“You would just hope that we could in some way understand what the process was and duplicate it--over and over and over again” he mused. “But, for some reason, it escapes us. Over and over and over again.”