LOCAL VIEW: PAST HOLDS KEY TO L.A. TRANSIT; RED CAR LIGHT RAIL TOOK PEOPLE WHEREVER THEY NEEDED TO GO IN THOSE BYGONE DAYS OF INNOCENCE.

Byline: RICHARD NEMEC

AS they wrestle with the future of Southern California's public transportation system, the business and political leaders composing the board of directors for Los Angeles County's Metropolitan Transportation Authority would do well to talk with my barber, Danny, a combat-tested Korean War veteran and lifelong resident of the greater Venice community, wedged between Santa Monica and Marina del Rey. He has something our governmental policy-makers often lack - perspective.

Danny can remember as a youth in the late Depression and early World War II years when whole families slept at the beach on warm summer nights with bonfires burning brightly all around, and none of them was homeless. They could enjoy the open air and the matchless climate without fear for their personal safety, or the security of the small homes they had left unlocked and unused for those hot summer and fall evenings.

When Danny's mother needed some fresh produce or meats, she would often send him to the Grand Central Market, some 15 miles inland in downtown L.A., to pick up the items. He was not old enough to drive, but he could scamper down and back in an hour or two by using the old Red Car light-rail system.

Danny was an early advocate of public transportation by necessity.

He remembers those Red Cars well. He has fading photos and drawings of some of them on the walls of his barbershop on Venice Boulevard, the same wide corridor in which the Red Cars used to run to downtown L.A., where they interconnected with lines that literally traversed all over Southern California. There is a framed map of the overall Red Line system also adorning those walls.

With some short historic text tracing the streetcar system's beginnings to the late 19th century, Danny's map illustrates a spider web of routes, stretching out from downtown L.A. to such faraway points as San Bernardino, Santa Ana, Newport Beach, Altadena, Montrose near Angeles Crest Highway, San Fernando, Canoga Park, Burbank and the coastal points of Long Beach, San Pedro, Torrance/Redondo Beach, Venice and Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

Danny recalls the mobility this gave him as a kid in those innocent days before television, shopping malls and street gangs robbed us of our youth. He remembers meeting girls at the first-run movie theaters downtown, riding to their houses on the east side and eventually beginning young romances sustained by the Red Line link that allowed east- and west-side kids to mix.

On cold winter days, Danny recalls hopping the Red Line for a trip to the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains around Angeles Crest and hitchhiking up several thousand feet in elevation to the snow at Charleton Flats. For the son of a hard-working Mexican immigrant family, Danny enjoyed the whole diversity that was Southern California in the 1940s at the very beginnings of the Cold War and air pollution.

It is painfully apparent that we cannot go back to that relatively magical time when Los Angeles was still young and still filled with unlimited possibilities and potential. But nevertheless, the spark and sparkle of the images of that bygone public transportation system, which seemed outmoded in L.A.'s post-World War II hubris, might inspire our current MTA leaders at the outset of 1998 to find a way out of their quandary over the future of a proposed 21st century rail system that will complement and supplement our region's overcrowded buses.

Like Danny, I too remember the famed Red Cars, although my memory is that of a very small child being taken by the hand (literally) and seated in rickety, swaying streetcars that seemed enormous as they snaked into a subway below the downtown streets near Pershing Square. Although never a fan of buses, which I was forced to take to a distant junior high school as a youth growing up in Highland Park, I have come to miss the Red Cars, after experiences as an adult living in places like Chicago and San Francisco and using the public transit systems, including the subways, in those two great American cities.

``You could go anywhere,'' Danny remembers, citing an era in L.A. when in most instances youngsters sought one another's companionship and then ``hung out'' together for unorganized, spontaneous activities that would be foreign to most of today's youths, who are accustomed to the tightly structured world of computer games, serious TV-watching and highly organized youth sports in football, baseball, soccer, basketball and gymnastics.

I doubt that these visions of the past mean much to the MTA board members, who are being urged by Mayor Richard Riordan's organizational turnaround expert to cut back on all but the final stages of the new Metro Line subway to North Hollywood in favor of greater numbers of buses. It seems that MTA officials have seen too much red ink to recall the old light-rail system.

Nevertheless, some of the tracks and rights of way may still be salvageable. Perhaps, if the local transportation officials can demonstrate they have a handle on past cost overruns, the federal government will be willing to help bankroll parts of the light-rail system.

To get a clearer picture of L.A.'s future, these latter-day transportation decision-makers need to catch a glimpse of the past. And if they run into roadblocks within their mind's eye, they should stop by Danny's barbershop. He has a map to show them.