The education of Joseph Alibrandi: Whittaker chairman envisions new worlds of aerospace, learning.

You just about to have run to keep up with Joseph Alibrandi -- chairman, president and chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Whittaker Corp. That frenetic pace is understandable considering the $160 million-in-annual-revenues aerospace company Alibrandi heads is facing one of the tightest U.S. defense budgets and one of the steepest commercial aviation slumps in recent history.

At a lean and strong-looking 64, Alibrandi doesn't show any signs of slowing down, or giving up the reins of the defense and commercial aviation company that he has headed for 23 years.

While the severe market challenges facing Whittaker are clearly on Alibrandi's mind, the passion of this Italian Catholic from Boston really bubbles when he talks about education or, more precisely, when he talks about what he considers the lack of education in modern-day public school systems.

Start any conversation with Alibrandi and he will likely steer it to school choice. Alibrandi led the drive to get the Parental Choice in Education Amendment on this coming November's ballot, and has written and campaigned for its passage. It would amend the state constitution to allow parents to send their children to any school they want.

"There's just nothing more important than education, than helping the next generation get an education. Right now, the kids are getting screwed. A lot of kids just don't have a prayer," says Alibrandi, exasperated when asked why he feels so strongly about the subject.

Alibrandi, who sometimes goes to Los Angeles schools to talk to kids about the importance of education, scurries around his office pulling out brochures and other printed materials that tout the proposed amendment and explain how it would better educate California school children.

Alibrandi doesn't boast about his role in the proposal, or point to newspaper stories that detail his role in getting it on the ballot.

It's easy to tell that, right now, Alibrandi's chief focus is the amendment. However, he also easily talks about himself and Whittaker, which has seen its net income nose-dive to $15.7 million, down more than 80 percent from its 1990 peak of $86.7 million.

But Whittaker has managed to remain in the black, unlike many local aerospace concerns, and has increased its revenues by selling off unprofitable units and acquiring smaller, distressed companies. Through acquisitions, Whittaker has been able to pick up more business, while reducing its production costs on various commercial-aircraft valves and electronic equipment it manufactures for the U.S. Department of Defense.

In the short term, Whittaker's acquisitions have cost some people their jobs, concedes Alibrandi. But the deals have saved the jobs of many more otherwise eventually would have been unemployed, he adds.

Alibrandi has seen both extremes of the societal structure of the United States. He was born in 1928 in the South End of Boston to parents who had both immigrated to the U.S. from Italy. His father worked in a laundry shop and his mother worked part time in a dress shop. Alibrandi and his brother, Pat, were raised in a working-class community that was made up mostly of Irish Catholics.

When he was 10, the family moved to an apartment in an area called South Boston, another ethnic neighborhood of the city made up mostly of working-class Irish, Italian and Polish immigrant families.

On the pre-World War II streets of Boston, Alibrandi recalls seeing some pretty nasty stuff, like the time a husband chased his wife down the street and shot and killed her. There was also the time a shopkeeper was shot and killed during a robbery.

Later, during the war years, when he was a teenager, Alibrandi recalls five brothers from the neighborhood who all went off to fight but none of them returned.

Alibrandi remembers his first job as a shoeshine boy when he was eight years old, and he remembers when he decided to become an engineer.

"I was about 14, and my uncle brought his boss over to our house. The man ran a mustard-making company and was an engineer and had gone to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He told me about all these machines it takes to make mustard, and I was fascinated. He sold me on making things and sold me on the school."

It was also about that time that Alibrandi developed an interest in flying and aircraft, which would eventually lead to his overseeing the missile division of Raytheon Co., the Lexington, Mass.-based defense contractor. While he was division manager in the 1960s, Raytheon developed several types of missiles that are still used today, including the Patriot, the anti-missile missile that became famous during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

As a student at South Boston High School, Alibrandi was near the top of his graduating class, but his family couldn't afford the $900-a-year tuition at MIT. So, he went into the U.S. Army, which stationed him in post-World War II Japan. After 15 months of service, Alibrandi left the Army and went to MIT under the G.I. Bill. Alibrandi describes that educational subsidy program as not unlike the voucher system provided for under the Parental Choice in Educational Amendment.

A few days after graduating from MIT, Alibrandi landed a job as a junior engineer at Raytheon.

"It was a time (the 1950s) when the country began to realize that, when it comes to defense, the future is in technology. The atom bomb had ended the war and had saved a lot of lives."

The turning point in Alibrandi's career came shortly after joining Raytheon, when he was given the unglamorous, low-profile job of designing a production plan for the Sparrow missile.

"I was the low man and was given this job that no one really took seriously," Alibrandi remembers. "Everyone else wanted to be in one the actual design of the missile, rather than how it could be produced."

Alibrandi says the government liked his production plan and awarded Raytheon a $13.6 million contract in 1955 to start making the missile, which is still in use.

From that point, Alibrandi received several promotions and eventually became manager of Raytheon's missile division.

In 1970, Alibrandi was recruited by Whittaker's then-President Will Duke to come in and turn around the company, which was losing $30 million a year at that time. Ninety days into his job at Whittaker, Alibrandi was named president, succeeding Duke.

"I remember reading on the plane coming out here (in 1970) a story about Whittaker, and the last line was something like: 'Therefore, Whittaker is technically bankrupt.'"

At the time, Whittaker was a decentralized monster with 147 operating divisions; now it has two -- Whittaker Controls and Whittaker Electronic Systems.

Alibrandi holds 10.8 percent of Whittaker's common stock which, based on its recent market price, is valued at more than $14 million. In addition, Alibrandi collected a salary and bonus of $635,846 last year.

He works hard for that money, and is generally well regarded in his industry. But his record is not without blemish. Probably his biggest black mark came in 1989 when Whittaker pleaded guilty to criminal charges involving kickbacks to a U.S. Marine Corps officer in connection with a Pentagon contract. Whittaker paid $3.5 million in fines and reimbursement in connection with that incident.

Alibrandi says the criminal charges involved work done by a company that had been acquired by Whittaker, and he claims the illegal activity occurred before the transaction.

Alibrandi, a soft-spoken but intense man, says he has never felt uneasy being in the weapons-making business. He considers himself a dove when it comes to military action and foresees a day, not in his lifetime, when there will be no more wars, at least on earth.

"I think we're heading toward a time when there wouldn't be any boundaries -- when the world will have one leader and there wouldn't be any wars."