SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : Boulevard of Dreams : From the ocean to Inglewood, Hawthorne Boulevard reflects the changing character of the towns it crosses.

The sky is still dark this early Friday, and Hawthorne Boulevard stretches like a sleeping giant through the South Bay. A single bus puffs along the quiet thoroughfare, lighted only by street lamps and fluorescent signs marking an all-night supermarket.

Dawn breaks at 5:54 a.m., and the eight-lane highway suddenly springs to life, as if someone flicked on a switch. Cars line up three to a lane on Hawthorne at Torrance Boulevard, waiting for the light to turn green while janitors spray the sidewalk in front of a Del Taco.

Over the next 14 hours, this long ribbon of asphalt will link thousands of moments, small and large, that give the South Bay its character and sense of community. On this day, family and friends will mourn the death of a 77-year-old woman while another family fetes a grandmother on her 58th birthday. A woman will take off her clothes for money while a homeless man solicits commuters for handouts. An ailing child will be soothed by a doctor while a teen-age boy, accompanied by his pregnant fiance, picks up his prom tuxedo.

There are no lazy workday mornings along this suburban lifeline, one of the busiest roads in Los Angeles County. The street starts at the ocean in Rancho Palos Verdes and lazily winds northward through the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the southern edge of Torrance. From there it extends straight as an arrow through Lawndale, Hawthorne and Lennox until it reaches Inglewood, where it becomes La Brea Boulevard. From the water’s edge to the northern border of Inglewood, the street extends 19.2 miles.

Other north-south streets may offer a quicker morning commute, but only Hawthorne Boulevard provides such a straight shot to the Santa Monica (405) Freeway on-ramp in Lawndale. And only Hawthorne Boulevard provides such a diverse array of commercial and retail outlets, from shopping malls and auto dealerships to psychic advisers and shoe repair shops.

It is not pretty.

There is something anonymous, almost inhuman, about this car-choked thoroughfare. Few people walk along Hawthorne Boulevard. Shop owners clearly have car commuters, not pedestrians, in mind when they paint garish SALE! signs in their windows.

Many of the buildings that line the roadway have all the architectural attractiveness of an airplane hangar. Vacant storefronts and office buildings stand as ruins of a once-booming aerospace industry.

But there are also signs of rejuvenation: an African American woman opens a chic coffeehouse in Inglewood, a Mexican immigrant helps build a new fountain in Torrance, a business operated by a Korean woman specializing in Japanese massage takes off.

In recent years, the barbershops and hardware stores that helped give the communities along the boulevard their small-town character have given way to a growing number of ethnic markets and shops, including a Persian market, a Vietnamese shop, a Mexican butcher and several Japanese restaurants.

This mixing pot of cultures comes alive on this Friday, just after dawn, as a group of men gather at Bally’s Holiday Spa in Torrance to take part in that quintessential Southern California ritual: the morning workout.

“Two more,” a man shouts over the blast of disco music as 16 step-aerobics students work up a sweat in a small mirrored room with a padded floor. “Arms slower, arms up!”

On the men’s side of the gym, truck driver Kevin Pore, a muscular 32-year-old blond with a Tazmanian Devil tattoo, lifts weights with several other men.

“I look forward to seeing these guys,” says Pore, who comes here several times a week before work. “We’re a close-knit family. If someone misses a day, they question your devotion.”

Not far away, Catherine Ramos, 52, is getting a workout of a different sort.

The disabled aerospace worker has just boarded the first of three buses that will take her from her home in Carson to the Lennox sheriff’s station. She makes the early morning journey to report that someone stole her bimonthly $420 state disability check right out of her mailbox.

Ramos, who wears her silver hair in a ponytail, needs the check to pay her rent. She has been on disability since March, when she slipped and broke her foot.

She disembarks at the Galleria station and paces the bus stop in a pair of green thongs, waiting for the next bus. Nearby Grant Street, a quiet residential road of 1950s-era homes, used to be a dirt road favored by fast-driving high school kids, she recalls. “The cops used to clock it all the time.”

Memories of old times have drawn Cecil Hall, 73, and a group of old friends to the Formica tables at Ted’s Donuts in Hawthorne every morning except Christmas and New Year’s for 11 years.

The walls of the small shop are covered with California poppy wallpaper and faded posters of popular doughnuts. The men sip black coffee and occasionally indulge in the apple fritters, cinnamon twists and doughnuts that fill the glass case that runs the length of the shop.

Hall, who is retired from the auto repair shop he started 43 years ago, has lived in Hawthorne since 1952. When he came to the city, the motto “The City of Good Neighbors” really fit, he says.

“We never even locked our doors,” says Hall, a cheery man whose round face is shaded by a baseball cap.

But increasing crime and problems at the local schools have soured Hall and his family on Hawthorne. They eventually want to move to Bishop in Northern California. Until then, Hall says, he will spend his mornings at Ted’s, trading stories with the six or so other men who also have connections to the city’s past.

“If someone is missing, we worry about them,” says Hall’s friend Ron Engman, 62.

There’s a similar sense of fellowship at the Rancho Palos Verdes Community Room, where 14 full-sized women weigh in at the start of a meeting for TOPS, or Take Off Pounds Sensibly.

The women stand in front of their chairs and wait for the auctioneer’s call to help them determine who has lost the most in the past week.

“One-eighth of a pound, one-fourth, one-third . . . one pound,” calls out Patricia Williams, 65, the club’s president. One by one, the women who lost that amount of weight sit down.

The last one standing bears the title “Best Loser of the Week.” This time the honor goes to Barbara Weaver, 72, who lost 3 1/2 pounds. She attributes her success to the two rounds of golf she played this week. Her friends applaud her, but Weaver is humble.

“Before you get carried away,” she says, “remember that I gained more than that last week.”

The rituals that bind these women, as well as the early morning weightlifters and the doughnut house’s kaffeeklatsch, lend Hawthorne Boulevard much of its homespun character. But it is no Main Street, America.

On the edge of Lennox, near the Century Freeway, Hawthorne Boulevard takes on a seedy quality. Here, the antiseptic entrances of Torrance’s malls are replaced by shabby storefronts badly in need of paint. Here, tucked demurely between a library and a plumbing store stands Jet Strip, a “gentleman’s club” featuring nude female dancers.

The first performance is at 11 a.m., and for much of the preceding half hour, six scantily clad women crouch in a mirrored hallway, rummaging through duffel bags containing lingerie, applying makeup and fluffing their hair.

Some of the women love their work. Danielle, 31, a self-professed exhibitionist who six years ago was Miss Nude Illinois, says she is proud to be an exotic dancer. On a good day she can earn up to $400 taking off her clothes on stage.

Not all dancers, however, do as well. The luncheon crowd has thinned significantly in the last two years, largely as a result of layoffs at local aerospace companies, club managers say. And competition for the remaining customers has gotten fierce.

“I personally feel I have to work harder now than I did three years ago,” says Nicole, 31, who has considered getting breast implants to increase her draw. “You want to put on a better show, be nicer, be extra alert, extra on your toes.”

A few miles away, Papa T, a 47-year-old panhandler, has his own way of coping with recession-induced stinginess.

He paces a Hawthorne Boulevard median strip in Lawndale holding a scrawled sign reading, “Homeless, thanks for your help.” A gangly man with braided hair and a worn tan shirt, he says he hopes to earn at least $25 for his efforts--enough to check into a motel. The most generous drivers, he says, are middle-class and working-class women.

“You rarely get money from rich people. I guess that’s how they get rich,” he says.

His easy smile turns into a scowl as a man toting an 8-foot-long yellow balloon under his arm steps onto his corner. The balloon salesman will draw the attention of sheriff’s deputies, grumbles Papa T, who has been jailed at least once for loitering on that corner.

But the presence of Papa T and other homeless men and women only tells part of the story of Hawthorne Boulevard. Amid a bumper crop of vacant storefronts and closed banks, a wide array of new businesses have sprung up.

Kenneth B. Pitchford & Sons Family Mortuary in Inglewood, which has signs in Spanish and Chinese painted on the walls around the entrance, has done a brisk business in its first year of operation.

The first service this Friday is for Ruth Liggins Davis, a schoolteacher and choir director who died at age 77. Mortuary owner Kenneth Pitchford prepares for the 11 a.m. service by gently placing pink and white carnations on top of the coffin. He checks the blue folding chairs set in neat rows and dims the lights.

About 20 mourners file into the chapel. They pray, share some memories and listen intently to the minister’s admonition that, with God’s help, they can “spend life eternally in a land where the hearse wheels don’t roll.”

Later, the mourners climb into several mortuary limousines. Pitchford gently swings the doors shut and watches the procession as it moves south on Hawthorne Boulevard.

Along its route, the solemn procession passes the Lennox Pre-School, a low-slung, bright green building that has operated on Hawthorne Boulevard for 41 years.

Inside, schoolteacher Elizabeth Mantell peers over the top of her glasses at a little boy squirming on a cot near the window.

“You don’t think I can see you but I can,” chides Mantell in her Louisiana drawl.

The child freezes at the sound of the firm words. But the children know Mantell has a softer side too. Later, the teacher sweeps a weepy kindergartner into her arms and coaxes out a smile.

Wearing a floral dress pinned with a cameo and her braided silver-gray hair in a pile on top of her head, Mantell is a casting director’s dream for school headmistress. She has taught several generations of students, some of them the children of her earliest pupils. Portraits of her graduates--handsome soldiers in uniform and girls in confirmation dresses--cover the bulletin boards in the main hall.

After their nap, the children plant bright yellow marigolds in pots and color Mother’s Day cards. Mantell, who has seen it all in her 35-year career, looks lovingly at her little charges.

“They’re more aware and better socialized” than their predecessors, she says, adding that they’re also more sophisticated.

Just a few blocks away, seeming more grown up than her years, Jennifer Schaefer, 16, who is four months pregnant, sits quietly in a chair at Yurindy’s Exclusive Bridal and Tuxedos in Lennox. The athletic high school sophomore is waiting for her fiance, Pedro Aquino, 18, to pick up his tuxedo for that night’s prom.

The couple, both students at Hawthorne High, wanted to get married at the prom, but school officials vetoed the idea out of fear it would “encourage teen-age weddings,” Schaefer says.

Instead, they plan to marry in two weeks at Circus Circus in Las Vegas, less than a year after they met while standing in line at the school cafeteria. Three months later, Aquino will leave for boot camp in the U.S. Marines.

His tuxedo slung over his arm, Aquino rushes toward the door. He has to pick up his brother from school before they can go home and prepare for the night’s festivities.

Time is also running out for Juan Villagrana, a busboy at the Fino Restaurant in Torrance, who has just finished laying out his first set of silverware and is busy folding about 200 napkins.

The 25-year-old Lawndale father of two earns $4.25 an hour at a restaurant where main courses alone cost $16.95. More than once he has almost slipped while hauling a 30-pound tub of dirty dishes down the stairs.

One day Villagrana would like to work as a chef in a French or Italian restaurant. But he doesn’t complain about this job. The tips can be substantial, and he receives a free meal every night he works.

Soon, office buildings close for the night, and Hawthorne Boulevard once again fills up with cars. Unlike the morning crowd, these commuters wear tired, haggard expressions and frustrated grimaces as they slowly progress, stoplight by stoplight, toward home.

Friday night revelers begin to shoulder their way into local bars. El Torito in Torrance is so crammed with diners that Shirley Sittel, who is celebrating her 58th birthday, has to wait for a table with her husband, Paul, their children and grandchildren.

In her festive mood, Sittel doesn’t mind the wait. She is happy “just having everybody here together,” she says.

While they dine, the sky turns pink, then darkens, and street lights flicker on. In a couple of hours, the Sittel family will say good night and climb back into their cars. And the lights of Hawthorne Boulevard will guide them home.