Marching on AIDS

The largest crowd yet walked, jogged and skated through Hollywood Sunday to raise the largest amount of money yet--$3.4 million--in the 12th annual AIDS Walk Los Angeles.

Coming singly and in groups, from corporations, government agencies and extended families, the about 28,000 walkers gathered at Paramount Studios for an opening ceremony emceed by actress Jamie Lee Curtis. Then they set out on a 10-kilometer course along Melrose Avenue, Fairfax Avenue, Beverly Boulevard and Larchmont Boulevard.

Among the walkers were 36 department heads from City Hall, prodded by Mayor Richard Riordan’s pledge to donate $1,000 for each one who participated.

“I thought there’d be about five [who would] show up,” said Riordan, who was dressed in shorts embroidered with “LAPD” and posed with Curtis for photographers. “Last year, Chief [of Police Willie L.] Williams was the only one who came.”

Williams attributed this year’s large turnout to “Mayor Deep Pockets.”

“This year it was easier to get people to help out,” said James Loyce Jr., executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles, which organizes the event. “I think there’s a real resurgence of interest among celebrities and everyone.”

On the rostrum during opening ceremonies were actresses Teri Hatcher (“Lois & Clark”), Christina Applegate (“Married With Children”) and Peri Gilpin (“Frasier”), as well as singer Eartha Kitt and others.

This year, however, the ceremonies focused on the event’s originator, Craig R. Miller, a professional campaign manager and fund-raiser who was presented an award for his work. His firm, Miller, Zeichik and Associates, has raised about $100 million for various AIDS agencies.

“I knew that I wanted to do something meaningful about AIDS,” Miller said. “And I knew how to organize.”

The son of politically active parents--a former Los Angeles city administrator and a Canoga Park High School teacher--Miller said he acquired his activist bent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, growing up in the San Fernando Valley.

He managed his first political campaign at age 21 and helped win for his candidate a state Assembly seat. At age 23 he joined the reelection campaign of Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) and two years later became Beilenson’s campaign manager.

That year, 1984, he hatched the idea of a fund-raising AIDS walk and launched the first one in 1985. About 4,500 walkers, most of them homosexual, participated.

He took extra steps, Miller recalled, to make heterosexuals comfortable with the event, enlisting then-Mayor Tom Bradley’s support, as well as that of several corporations, to help bring the event into the mainstream.

The number of participants has grown each year, organizers say. Miller said he thinks that recent news about the effectiveness of protease inhibitors in fighting AIDS has prompted a surge of interest in the walk.

“This year was the first time I heard about it,” said Marian Mora of North Hollywood. She was setting out on the walk pushing a 75-pound load of children--Christian, 3 1/2, and Joshua, 2 1/2.

It’s a fun and satisfying event, Mora said, but serious too. “I have a co-worker who might have AIDS. Anyone can get it.”