Teenager Keeps Driving Toward a Set of Goals

A first car for any teenager is sacred, even if it’s a clunker that should be sent to the junkyard, such as the faded red 1982 Datsun Sentra that Ricardo Galvez drives the six miles between his home and Los Angeles Cathedral High.

He bought it a year ago for $200. It can’t go faster than 45 mph, the trunk is opened by putting a finger through a hole and the windshield wipers work only when the emergency lights are turned on.

None of his friends dares to ride shotgun.

“They fight for the back seat,” he said.

On a good day, Galvez might be able to outrun his car. His 40-yard time is 4.4 seconds, and as a junior last season he ran for 2,514 yards and scored 26 touchdowns. He was never held below 100 yards rushing in any of Cathedral’s 12 games, and three times he surpassed 300 yards.

And running with a football isn’t what he does best. Off the field, he has a 4.38 grade-point average and wants to attend Yale.

“He’s such a wonderful kid,” Cathedral football Coach Kevin Pearson said. “He’s the kind of guy you want your daughter to date. He already has a plan for life.”

When he was younger, Galvez would look to the sky at airplanes and wonder how they were able to fly. He was scared to fly but decided, “If I can’t fly them, why not build them?”

So his dream is to become an aerospace engineer and work for NASA.

That he has made it this far growing up in neighborhoods where gangs and gunshots were part of everyday life tells plenty about his determination to succeed.

He lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Lincoln Heights with his mother, Maria, whom he rarely sees because she works 10-hour shifts at a factory. When she’s coming or going, he’s either at school or asleep.

He sees life as a series of obstacles he must overcome.

“My life is kind of like a comic book,” he said. “Each square is something different, something more interesting. From childhood, growing up in an all-Mexican family, seeing violence early on, struggling through academics, then the choices I had to make and having the courage to move away from that by myself and choose something new by coming to Cathedral.”

Galvez said he witnessed his first shooting when he was 6. He was playing in the frontyard of his rented house at Vermont Avenue and 46th Street when a truck drove alongside another vehicle across the street and opened fire.

“I froze,” he said. “My brother screamed at me to duck.”

He remembers bullet holes in his front door. He remembers in middle school enduring random searches, where students would be put against a wall and checked for weapons with a metal detector. All that and more left him questioning his future.

Then he enrolled at Cathedral, a private all-boys school near Dodger Stadium with strong academics. He started to blossom.

“It was structure that I wanted,” he said. “It was discipline that I wanted.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa once attended Cathedral, where 68% of the 631 students receive financial aid to help pay the $5,990 yearly tuition.

Galvez quickly made a name for himself in football because of his speed. At 5 feet 8 and 165 pounds, he hides behind taller linemen and waits for the opportunity to bust loose into the secondary.

“Once they can’t see me, all I have to do is use that big burst of speed and fly right by them,” he said.

Last week, Galvez and his Cathedral teammates had their first practice in preparation for the upcoming season. And when school starts Thursday, no one will have to tell him to turn off the television and do his homework, or remind him to set his alarm for 6:15 a.m. so he can arrive early at school for his part-time job tutoring other students.

“I have to succeed,” he said. “Failure is not an option. I have to have a career in order to buy my mom a house and make it possible so she won’t have to work. Sometimes when I see her it makes me sad, because I know she has done so much for me and my brother.”

People have come forward to help Galvez. A student he had been tutoring, the daughter of a Cathedral teacher, saw his crooked teeth and wrote to her orthodontist asking whether he would treat Galvez for free. Now he’s wearing donated braces.

Galvez is looking forward to his senior year. He gets to take physics, and is planning to build a rocket and shoot it 150 feet into the air from the football field to fulfill one of his assignments.

As for his car, it has been nicknamed “Eleanor,” in tribute to the souped-up Mustang from the movie “Gone in Sixty Seconds.”

Eleanor has more than 213,000 miles on the odometer, the fourth and fifth gears are breaking down and a friend wrote on her dirt-stained back window, “Wash me for the love of God.”

The car stalled on him two weeks ago, and he had to push it home. But Galvez, as in life, refuses to give in.

“I love that car,” he said.

Eric Sondheimer can be reached at eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.