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 Motor Sales USA after 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.

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.

One of the eight cars in the prince’s motorcade carried his 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 explained, and Charles, who is a painter, has continued it.

Palace aides said Charles’ itinerary Tuesday was shaped by his desire to find new ways for businesses to be involve in community activities. In Britain, the prince heads four charitable organizations that involve business people in poor communities and fund young entrepreneurs who would not normally get loans.

Charles, in a khaki linen suit that got progressively more rumpled as his day wore on, went from classroom to classroom at the Foshay Learning Center in South-Central. He leaned over children drawing at tiny tables, and he quizzed 11-year-olds working on computers. He missed few details--including the silly ones.

After chatting with biology teacher John Zavalney, who sports a bushy handlebar mustache, the teacher said, “He asked me if my mustache is drooping at the end of the day.”

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His manners were impeccable, his attention to whoever spoke was unfaltering. Only when he was reduced to standing on a platform waiting through someone else’s long-winded introduction did the prince seem to stare off into the distance, the right side of his mouth curling up unconsciously, his blue eyes unblinking in the constant volley of camera flashes.

Then as soon as his introduction was made, he sprang back to life and rose to the speech at hand.

When he arrived at Crenshaw High School, he found 150 lunch guests and two dozen student owners of the successful Food From the ‘Hood salad dressing venture based at the school.

Between the tour of the students’ garden and the outdoor lunch, Charles and the other guests were serenaded by the Crenshaw High School choir. The air throbbed with their voices as they concluded with a special arrangement of “God Bless the Prince of Wales”--”the very best rendition of ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ that I shall ever hear,” Charles said.

A few hecklers lobbed slogans at the prince Tuesday. But among the invited, few if any had time or temerity to question him on the public flap caused by London newspapers’ excerpts of Jonathan Dimbleby’s new biography of Prince Charles.

“This is not an autobiography,” said one of the prince’s aides Tuesday--though Charles was allowed to read the book before publication for factual errors. “He’s read it a number of times . . . but it’s not his book.”

At the Sheriff’s Lennox Youth Activity Center at 119th Street and Vermont Avenue, Charles told Sheriff Sherman Block and Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke that he occasionally takes British business leaders through inner-city neighborhoods in London.

“Seeing is believing,” Charles said.