Checking in with the indicators.

Bruce Baltin, head of the L.A. office of PKF Consulting, has kept his laid-back demeanor even as he has become L.A.'s hotel industry guru

When after being told at age 7 you'll never walk again and then at 30 you're given 90 days to live, the rest of life tends to be kind of easy.

That's the general philosophy of Bruce Baltin, Los Angeles County's hotel industry guru and head of the Los Angeles office of PKF Consulting, a national hospitality industry consulting firm.

"I guess you can say I'm kind of laid back. I don't get upset about things. I just kind of take things as they come," says Baltin, who turns 52 on Nov. 1.

With 25 years tracking the local industry's ebbs and flows, Baltin is the area's senior hotel analyst/consultant. Baltin and his 10-person office are hired by hotel buyers, sellers and owners to figure out the market and make recommendations on buying or selling a property, or improving a hotel's performance.

The local PKF office, located in downtown Los Angeles, covers Southern California and parts of Arizona and Nevada.

As part of his coverage of the Los Angeles County market, Baltin puts out a monthly study of occupancy rates and daily room charges by the area's 1,000 hotels and motels. He also makes regular appearances on the local hotel industry meetings circuit, giving talks on where the market has been and where it's going.

He's also regularly called on by members of the media to comment on the local hotel business and the county's $9 billion tourism industry.

Baltin has been in the hotel business since he first developed an interest in the industry while working summers on the New Jersey shore.

"I started working when I was pretty young and, by the time I was in high school, I was spending summers in Atlantic City working in hotel restaurants. I liked the business and it was there I decided I wanted to get into the hotel industry," he says.

Baltin was born and raised in Philadelphia. He had one sister and one brother; his mother stayed at home and his father owned and operated first a jewelry store and then a college supply shop.

It was a middle-class Jewish upbringing that emphasized education and reading a lot of books, he says.

Things were uneventful in his life until Baltin, then 7, was sitting on a curb one day with some friends. A car came around the corner, ran over both his legs and crushed them below the knees. The doctors told him he would never walk again. But after a year of therapy, including some time in a wheelchair, Baltin started walking again.

Soon he started out on his lifelong love of basketball. By the time he got to Central High School in Philadelphia, Baltin was running track and playing basketball.

At Central, a magnet public school that requires passing an entrance exam, Baltin was class vice president and decided on Cornell University because of its school of hotel management.

Cornell rejected Baltin because of his poor math and accounting skills. He then went to Temple University, improved his math and then transferred to Cornell, where he obtained a degree in hotel administration in 1965.

At Cornell, Baltin says he studied hard, had some fun and was involved in the early days of the student movement. He admits to having smoked some pot but he says he didn't do any hard drugs.

To avoid going to Vietnam, Baltin joined the U.S. Coast Guard after college and was assigned to duty in the Caribbean picking up Cuban refugees trying to make it to the United States. After the Coast Guard, Baltin got a job working at the corporate headquarters of Sheraton Corp. in Boston, where he learned the business from well-known industry leader George Johnson.

"Like everything else in my life, I just kind of fell into the job with Johnson, but it was the best thing to happen to me. Johnson, who's now dead, was a true gentlemen who knew the business. It was a terrific experience," he says.

It was while at Sheraton that Baltin married and began a family of two sons. After four years at Sheraton, where Baltin traveled to various Sheraton properties doing market and operations analysis, he moved to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas to teach hotel management.

Baltin didn't like academia and went back into private industry two years later when he moved to Los Angeles and joined Harris, Kerr, Forster & Co., the predecessor company to PKF.

Shortly after joining Harris, Kerr, and right after he had received his C.P.A. license, Baltin was diagnosed with an advanced case of melanoma - skin cancer. His doctor gave him three months to live. That was 21 years ago and he is now considered cured of cancer.

"Being a cancer survivor definitely changes you. Without sounding too corny, you realize what's important. ... To me what's important is being a good person, enjoying life and being good to my family and friends," he says.

"I've learned not to get upset at small things. It's not worth it."

It becomes pretty clear in talking to Baltin that he doesn't take himself or life's irritants very seriously. He says he has never been one to put a lot of pressure on himself to perform or meet lofty goals.

"For me," he says several times, "things have just kind of fallen into place. I've never really gone after anything. Things have just happened and I've gone with it."

Snapshot

Bruce Baltin

Native of: Philadelphia, Pa.

Resident of: Long Beach

Age: 51

Education: B.S., Cornell University