Cross-Country Bus Trip Opens Teen-Agers’ Eyes : Education: 70 youths tour the U.S. to get a new perspective on the nation--and on their lives.

Bell Gardens High School freshman Ralph Morales has never been inside City Hall or the state Capitol. But now, he has been to the White House and met the President.

Morales, 14, was among a group of 70 youths from Los Angeles and Oakland who caught a coatless and harried Bill Clinton rushing across the hall to the Oval Office. The teen-agers were on a two-week, cross-country bus trip sponsored by a Los Angeles travel agency and the Urban League.

“When (Clinton) walked into the room, everybody went, ‘Oh, man, look.’ We were right there, and he asked us how our trip was and about our experiences,” Morales said. “He was only there five minutes. . . . I learned more than in a classroom.”

Morales’ broadened awareness is precisely what the trip’s organizers had in mind when they arranged the journey.

After last year’s riots, Noel Irwin-Hentschel, president of AmericanTours International, a Los Angeles travel agency, toured city neighborhoods with Los Angeles Urban League President John Mack. They found a lot of young people who didn’t believe they would live to age 18 and who rarely had left the Los Angeles area.

Traveling as a youth, Irwin-Hentschel said, opened her life to new possibilities. So she enlisted the help of the Korean Youth and Community Center and the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area Urban League chapters to organize a cross-country tour.

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The group, 25 Latinos, 11 Asian Americans, 25 African Americans, six whites and three Native Americans, was drawn from the Korean center and two Urban Leagues by the tour organizers. Students from diverse economic and academic backgrounds were sought.

“We wanted them to have an experience they will always remember,” Irwin-Hentschel said.

Her agency picked up $100,000 in travel expenses, she said, and Holiday Inn donated the hotel rooms at each of the 14 stops. The itinerary included visits to a slew of national parks (mostly in the Southwest and South), stops at the birthplaces of Clinton in Arkansas and Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, and tours of the Empire State Building and the White House.

For most of the students, the idea of taking a trip to New York and Washington --all expenses paid--seemed as probable as flying to the moon.

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Now, after seeing how other people live, reliving American history and spending time with youths from diverse ethnic groups, their view of the world has changed, they said.

Soo Kim, 15, said her knowledge of Texas had consisted of abstract images from television and boring history books.

But seeing the real Texas made its heritage and natural wonders come alive, said the Palos Verdes High School student.

“There was an eagle perched on the sign that said ‘Welcome to Texas.’ I said, ‘Whoa!’ I’d never seen an eagle before, except at the zoo,” Kim said.

Standing at the spot in the Dallas building where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy, she said, made the tragedy more real for her.

“All I knew was that he was a President who got shot. I didn’t know how it happened, and how he fell into his wife’s lap and that he was a family guy. I learned he was a good man,” Kim said.

Jessica Tarnay, 15, from Westchester, had never been to Las Vegas and was awed by the cityscape glittering at night.

“I thought all people lived the way I imagined, and I found out it wasn’t that way at all,” Tarnay said.

While on the bus, she said, the students did homework, participated in impromptu geography and history quizzes with chaperons and kept a journal of their experiences.

The Grand Canyon, Tarnay said, was “beautiful, like a matte painting used in the movies where the couple walks off into the sunset.”

Morales, a Native American, said he was entranced by the canyon.

“It was so big and beautiful. I’d seen pictures, but I always wanted to be there,” he said.

In New York, the group visited the theater where “Late Show with David Letterman” is taped, and heard a choir of singers from a Harlem drug rehabilitation program.

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Tarnay also got a troubling glimpse of New York’s homeless.

“Seeing all the homeless people was so sad. They were sleeping in cardboard boxes, and it was freezing. It made me feel bad,” she said.

Dorsey High School student Ramon Bailey, 15, said visiting restored slave quarters at Williamsburg, Va., gave him a sense of their strength.

“They used to eat raw clams, and since their quarters were near the water, they used to throw the shells outside to keep the ground from being so muddy,” he said. The houses were small, “and there were cracks in the walls. You could see right through them.”

Bailey said things he routinely takes for granted, like getting an education and being warm at night, would have been luxuries for the slaves. “We’re spoiled rotten compared to them. They always had to worry about being whipped, or catching pneumonia, or being sold if the overseer thought (they) weren’t working hard enough,” he said.

Spending time with the diverse group of students was also an education, said Trudette Haymon, 16, a Crenshaw High School student.

“At first, we thought each race would stick with their own. But everybody intermingled. That’s what made the trip so great. Never did I think that a black girl and a Korean boy could get together and talk. But I did it on this trip,” said Haymon, an African American.

The trip, she said, changed her life. “I saw there are other cities, other ways of life,” she said.

“In (Los Angeles, you soak up all the negative things,” said Haymon, who plans to attend an out-of-state college. “The shootings and carjackings make you get fed up. Sometimes you want to go somewhere where you don’t hear the helicopters at night, where you don’t have drive-by shootings.”

Kim said she was sorry the trip ended. “I wasn’t glad to get back home, because I met a lot of nice people. And the trip was so much fun because I was learning so much.

“It was like a history book. But when you see it for yourself, you see how much the history books leave out.”