Prince Charming : Charles Shows Common Touch in Tour of South-Central L.A.

Eager to get a firsthand look at Los Angeles’ urban core, Prince Charles left the lush Bel-Air Hotel on Tuesday for the Crenshaw district and South-Central Los Angeles, where he talked to kindergartners at a highly praised learning center, donned protective glasses to watch mechanics fix brakes at an Urban League occupational training center and took a stroll through the broccoli and herb garden at Crenshaw High.

On the first full day of his weeklong visit, Charles moved easily from screaming crowds of children to eagerly smiling adults and won kudos from observers at all stops.

“He seems to be very comfortable here in the ‘hood,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “He’s fantastic. To be royalty, he comes across as being a regular human being. . . . He’s very relaxed with these very diversified people.”

As he watched mechanic-in-training Christopher Parr work on a brake rotor at the Urban League’s automotive training center, developed with Toyota USA in the wake of the 1992 riots, the Prince of Wales asked earnestly, “Is there a big demand out there for people in your line of repair?” Parr, a student in the brakes and suspension class, nodded vigorously.

There was an odd heckler or two--one woman across the street from the Foshay Learning Center screamed out, “Reparations for Africa!”--but mostly the people on the street wanted to get close to Charles.

In the spacious garden behind Crenshaw High, he broke from his carefully charted stroll to go over to the chain-link fence bordering 8th Avenue and chat with passersby.

“He said I had nice glasses!” said Anna Gladden, sporting enormous wire-rim frames.

As far as Charles was concerned, the only quirk of his trip was the weather.

“I left a London winter for a Los Angeles autumn and it feels like a hot British summer,” he told a crowd waiting in the warm midmorning sun at the learning center.

When you’re the Prince of Wales, everyone is waiting for you. Even at the very start of the day, the prince found waiting for him a motorcade assembled in a large driveway in the back of the labyrinth of bungalows that make up the Bel-Air Hotel. Aides chatted and exchanged details with State Department security people and motorcade drivers.

Paddy Tabor, the prince’s equerry, tried good-naturedly to explain his royal function to a reporter as he waited for the prince to begin the day.

Tabor, a major in the household cavalry, dressed in khaki military uniform with a thick braid of gold wrapped around one shoulder, is charged with carrying the prince’s diary or schedule. More informally he’s charged with carrying all the gifts proffered on the prince. (By the end of the day, he would have books and two jackets, among other items.)

“When the British newspapers report that I’m keeper of the gifts, being a military man, I find it all rather simplistic,” Tabor said.

In the prince’s car, there was a plaid backrest in the back seat and an unsmiling State Department agent with wire-rim shades behind the wheel.

Another car transported the prince’s doctor and a Belfast artist, Tom Hallifax, who was brought to sketch various scenes. Taking an artist is an old tradition with Princes of Wales, a palace aide said, and Charles, who is a painter, has continued it.

The eight-car motorcade slipped out of the hotel onto Sunset Boulevard, heading west for the freeway. Highway Patrol motorcyclists on the left escorted it, driving along in an elaborate dance, as different officers paused periodically to stop traffic at intersections.

Down two freeways and past the graffiti-scarred houses and low-rise buildings of Western Avenue, the prince traveled to the Foshay Learning Center, the first of a series of places where he hoped to see how Los Angeles has been wrestling with the problems of the inner city.

In Britain, Charles heads four charitable organizations that involve business people in poor communities and fund young entrepreneurs who would not normally get loans.