At Your Service

As a boy, Louis Caldera would get up at 3 a.m. to help his Mexican-immigrant parents clean parking lots in Whittier. As a state legislator, he has marched to his own drummer, resisting pressures from the left and the right because, as he said, “in many cases it’s not the best thing for the people of the state or the country.” As a father, he commutes almost daily from Sacramento to Los Angeles to make sure he can tuck his little girls into bed.

If anyone can inspire members of an increasingly diverse and hardened society to help their fellow citizens, friends say it’s Caldera, the state assemblyman from Los Angeles who expects to be moving to Washington to manage the Corporation for National and Community Service, the national agency to rekindle civic engagement in an era of less government.

A Spanish-speaking graduate of West Point and Harvard Law School, Caldera is among the “new breed” of Latino legislators that has emerged not from neighborhood activist organizations, but from universities and the professions with a set of more mainstream attitudes. Because of his ability to connect as easily with the Fortune 500 executives as with the mom-and-pop entrepreneurs in his downtown district, his fans will be waving goodbye with mixed emotions.

“I guess I think of Louis as a real California treasure,” said former Deputy Mayor Linda Griego. “The last place I wanted him to go is Washington.”

From his family’s 10th floor apartment nestled among the high-rises downtown, Caldera, 41, explained that he had gone job shopping in Washington because term limits would force him out of the Assembly next year anyway. He had been looking for something substantive, but rejected running for statewide office after political veterans told him the effort would require years of fund-raising that would take him away from his wife, Eva, a lawyer he met at Harvard, and their two daughters, Allegra, 2, and Sophia Marie, 2 months.

Unruffled over Allegra’s energetic demands for attention, and with Eva watching the baby, Caldera explained that a friend in the White House suggested a newly expanded position in President Clinton’s signature initiative, the Corporation for National Service, recently reorganized to deal with criticism that some of its programs, including AmeriCorps, were costly and inefficient. As managing director and chief operating officer, he will serve as deputy to the chief executive officer, Harris Wofford, the 71-year-old former senator from Pennsylvania.

Caldera said he won over the competition partly because the Clinton administration needed Californians. Others point to his brains, his sincerity and his resume, which, as they say, “resonates.”

Another plus, said former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, is that Caldera is “clean as a whistle.” “Squeaky,” echoed longtime friend Louise C. Nelson, a Los Angeles lawyer.

Born in El Paso, Caldera is the second of five children whose immigrant parents moved first to Boyle Heights, then La Mirada and Whittier, taking on extra jobs to make the rent to live near the best public schools for their children. His father pushed him and his older sister to come home with A’s in their first two grades. “When we had a three-page book report to do, [my father] would make me write a 10-page report with drawings and a binder and a cover and a bibliography,” he said.

Caldera and his sister, Lulu, were the only two to finish four years of college. Success eluded his father, who damaged his back trying to grab falling boxes while working in a container factory. After Caldera left home, his father separated from his mother and now runs a hair salon in Mexico City. “He decided life had a lot less stress in Mexico than it did in the U.S. and he wanted to be closer to his mother, brother and sisters,” Caldera said. His mother, Soledad, lives in Santa Margarita with his older sister.

As crucial as family support, Caldera said, were the high expectations and encouragement of his teachers and the mixed, middle-class community around him. “I was a poor kid, but I had friends whose parents were doctors and professionals and you were going to go to college. That’s what smart kids did. You had those values communicated by the whole community.”

Today, he believes one of the most serious dangers facing society is allowing communities to become resegregated.

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Shy and bookish, Caldera remembers wanting to be a member of Congress when he was 10. “I thought politics was a noble calling. This was the best way to make a just and great country even better and more just. That’s what John and Bobby Kennedy were talking about.”

As a teenager, he never smoked marijuana and disapproved of the permissive society around him. What he liked best about West Point was that it had an honor code.

Coming from California, West Point was a culture shock. Senior cadets screamed at him. The weather was bitterly cold. A third of his class dropped out the first year, but Caldera said he made it because of his perseverance. “I knew the day I got to West Point that I was going to graduate. I had my mind set on it.”

There he developed leadership skills, a command voice and presence, he said. After graduation, he served five years in the U.S. Army, stationed largely at Ft. Dix, Ga., then earned MBA and JD degrees from Harvard University and Law School. By that time, he was so used to the climate and people from different backgrounds, he said he fit right into the Ivy League.

Back in Los Angeles, he worked at O’Melveny & Myers, served on the board of the Mexican American Bar Assn. and other volunteer organizations.

Earnest, unpretentious and dispassionate, Caldera described himself as an idealist. “It’s what gets me in trouble sometimes,” he said.

First elected to the Assembly in 1992, Caldera is best known for a bill requiring children to wear bicycle safety helmets, prompted by thousands of deaths and head injuries among California children each year. Another of his bills gave judges more discretion in deciding whether to reunify abused children with their parents. He also took a leading role in anti-gun efforts by helping introduce a package of pending bills to reduce gun violence by, for instance, banning Saturday Night Specials, strengthening laws against semiautomatic assault weapons and allowing communities to enact their own regulations.

Some other Latino legislators have resented his inclusiveness, said Jonathan Sanchez, associate publisher of a group of Eastside newspapers. “There’s an old saying: ‘Latinos for Latinos by Latinos,’ ” he said. “He has never had that kind of philosophy. His view was that there were other ways of getting support from the rest of the Legislature, not necessarily the Latino caucus.”

Caldera said he went to Sacramento as “a problem solver, not to engage in partisan politics. I didn’t want to check my brain in at the door and do what I was told to do by the Democratic leadership or anyone else.” Latino politicians who are for Latinos only are passing up the opportunity to make a difference on a large scale, he said.

He has been frustrated in Sacramento by an “inability to move policy issues because of the opposition of vested interests and the effect that the need to raise tremendous amounts of money has on whether people are willing to intellectually engage on an issue or not. I think both parties do it and it is very unfortunate and I don’t know what the solution is.”

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In Washington, Caldera will be responsible for the day-to-day management of the Corporation for National Service, a large organization created three years ago to run AmeriCorps, a stipend-for-service program with 25,000 members, and the Senior Corps, and Learn and Serve, volunteer programs for the elderly, high school and college students, and the general public.

While its programs have received more visibility from the Presidents’ Summit in April that called on volunteers to tutor, mentor, teach, protect and serve 2 million at-risk youth by 2000, Caldera said his job will include streamlining operations and proving to Congress the $606-million program is worth the expense.

“The corporation’s own existence is at risk and will live or die on how well we run this program and how well we can show this is an important national effort, that the service we deliver actually makes a difference in people’s lives,” said Caldera, whose nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.

The AmeriCorps program leverages the work of its full-time students by attracting a dozen volunteers per worker in rural conservation or inner-city mentoring or tutoring programs, he said.

AmeriCorps slots may be increased to 50,000, he said, if churches or other organizations can pay the stipend; the Senior Corps is gearing up to take advantage of larger numbers of active retirees; and a media campaign is planned to market the notion of service and volunteerism. “We want to make kids feel like it would be great to take a year off before college to be involved in some kind of service,” Caldera said.

Some programs are also needed to coordinate volunteer opportunities, he said. “You want to make the volunteer opportunity meaningful for the person so that they’re not just doing work. They need to feel the time they’re putting in is really valuable, or a lot won’t come back.”

Caldera said he’s thinking of getting involved in mentoring inner-city youth himself in Washington, as he did in a parish council when he was in the Army.

Eva said she’s looking forward to the move. The daughter of a Washington appointee, she knows the area’s suburbs and will appreciate raising kids outside of downtown. As it is now, she said, “We have to drive to Pasadena if we want to go to a park.”

Like any dual-career family, they deal with balancing work and home. Caldera said he understands his wife’s drive to work is the same as his; he’s offered to stay home for a few years with the children if she doesn’t want to.

The proposition is unrealistic now, she said, adding that the matter is part of an ongoing discussion. “You’ve got to make these trails as you go.”

Eventually, they surely plan to return to Los Angeles. Despite his frustration in Sacramento, Caldera won’t rule out running for elective office again when his children are older.

But he said he no longer believes politics is the only, or even necessarily the best, way to serve the public.

“There are important roles in civic leadership in communities and for people in the nonprofit and academic worlds. We are all in this together. There are many different ways to be of service. You can be in government and waste your time and you can be in the private sector and be a tremendous force for good.”