UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS--SIX MONTHS LATER : Money and Power/Making It in the Inner City : SUCCESS STORIES : ‘My youth I burned up with working.’

Veteran business people know that there are special obstacles to opening shop in the inner city. Gangbanging. Redlining. The high cost of security. In some places, graffiti removal is as much a daily routine as sweeping the floors.

Still, motivated by both love and money, people stick with it. And some manage to beat the system that seems biased against inner-city success.

These are the stories of three inner-city entrepreneurs who came up the hard way and had the business savvy and commitment to succeed.

The Beer Wholesaler

Patrick Beauchamp got his big chance during the storm of anger and guilt that followed the Watts riots of 1965.

But Miller Brewing Co. wasn’t just fighting racism and lack of opportunity when it offered its first black-owned distributorship in South-Central. It also figured a minority owner might spur Miller’s lackluster inner-city market share, Beauchamp says.

Several teams of influential blacks aggressively went after the coveted franchise. Two let Beauchamp--who then was working for another distributor--know that they would like to hire him if they got the nod.

Beauchamp thought about that. He figured he knew the distributing business as well as anyone. He decided to go after the franchise himself.

The fifth of six children, Beauchamp began accumulating business acumen at age 8, while shining shoes at the all-white Elks Club in Lansing, Mich.

After a stint in the Army and two seasons playing minor league baseball, he and a brother moved to Los Angeles in 1958.

Beauchamp had a job selling meat from the back of a truck when he read an ad for a sales and delivery position at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. He took the test on a Saturday morning, landing a job--$120 a week plus commissions--as Coke’s first black salesman in Los Angeles.

Beauchamp spent the next decade at two beverage companies, working his way up from sales representative to territorial manager.

In 1971, Miller scrutinized his credentials and agreed to make him its first black distributor.

“Only problem was,” Beauchamp says, “I didn’t have any money.”

So he offered a 66% share of the business to a rich white distributor in exchange for a $100,000 credit line.

With the loan, Beauchamp leased a site, hired help and ordered inventory. Two years later, he bought his partner out, and over the next decade built a 1 million-case-a-year business.

Today, his Compton-based company, Beauchamp Distributing, grosses $40 million a year, shuttling Miller’s, Beck’s and Samuel Adams beer to outlets from inner-city Los Angeles to the Ventura County line.

On the afternoon of the King verdict, Beauchamp surrounded his business with an extra 10 guards; they earned their pay by turning back several swarms of determined looters.

Beauchamp doesn’t hesitate to call the looters criminals. But he understands how criminals are bred.

“There’s such a lack of hope in the inner cities,” says Beauchamp, 58. “Why do you think men leave their families? Turn to crime? No opportunity, no job skills, no dignity. When a man loses those things, he is humbled to the point he runs off and hides.”

Which is why Beauchamp measures his success, at least in part, by the fact that he provides a clean workplace, with good insurance and educational scholarships, to more than 100 employees, most of whom are black and Latino.

And although rioters destroyed 218 of the businesses to which Beauchamp Distributing delivers, Beauchamp says he has yet to lay off a single person.

The Music Man

A young man, his hair in Jheri curls, runs his fingers lovingly over the dials of an expensive mixer board, his reverie of rap stardom almost audible in the quiet showroom of Reed’s Music.

Jerome Bleeker, 80, watches the potential customer with a knowing smile. A musician in the Depression, Bleeker understands, he says, the unique longing a music shop can inspire. And for 47 years, his store on the corner of 47th Street and Vermont Avenue has tapped into people’s changing musical dreams.

Yet in April, the store he spent much of his life building succumbed to the city’s collective nightmare.

Bleeker can envision that night, as hordes of looters sprinted out of his store with harmonicas, saxophones and snare drums.

But he has trouble getting a mental picture of 134 pianos disappearing into the night in a percussive stampede, as folks loaded spinets, uprights, even baby grands onto pickups--or simply pushed them on dollies down the middle of Vermont.

Bleeker bought Reed’s Music in 1946 with $5,000 in savings and a $5,000 loan from his father. During the war, manufacturers had stopped building pianos, and Bleeker figured that there were a lot of ugly old uprights out there that could use a face lift. An advertisement in the Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine brought calls from all over Southern California; Bleeker hit the road with photographs and a sample case to line up orders for his $250 remakes.

The shop restored 4,000 pianos before the boom slowed. But by then Bleeker had built Reed’s into a successful operation based on a few simple principles.

For one thing, he kept on top of musical tastes, dumping ukuleles for electric guitars as Chuck Berry edged out Arthur Godfrey, adding sophisticated mixing boards and disc jockey-type equipment when hip-hop hit.

Also, he made connections to the community: advertising in church newsletters, selling and repairing their organs, filling gospel choirs’ needs for such items as microphones and public address systems.

But the foundation of his success, he says, has been respect for the customer.

When most businesses refused credit to blacks and Latinos, Bleeker judged his patrons’ trustworthiness on what he saw in their character. When dirt-poor youngsters came in to ogle drum sets or guitars, he let them browse to their hearts’ content.

Nineteen years after Bleeker bought the store, Watts erupted in rioting. Few of the predominantly black looters edged into the then-white neighborhoods near Vermont, and Reed’s suffered only a broken window.

Twenty-seven years later, on the afternoon of the King verdict, Bleeker closed shop early. As he and his staff left, crowds already milled ominously on the streets.

For several years, the local Crip sets’ graffiti had made repainting the store’s walls a standard morning task. Now, as looters dragged off guitars and harmonicas and piano restoring machinery, the gangsters covered the inside walls with their tags and the riots’ ubiquitous slogans--”F--- the Police,” and “F--- the White Man.”

Rioters set fires throughout the building, but neighbors came from the modest apartments and houses nearby and doused them with buckets of water.

The next day, as Bleeker and two employees stepped gingerly through the wreckage, another wave of looters pushed in through the broken metal grates. Bleeker sighed, going about his grim business as the rioters scavenged openly in the rubble.

If Bleeker’s resolve was wounded that day, the 15 neighbors who showed up the next morning with brooms and dustpans helped mend it.

Bleeker used his insurance payoff to repair the damaged store and rebuild his inventory. Six months later, business is only a third of what it had been, he says. But he intends to stay.

“We have roots here,” Bleeker explains.

After the riots, a trade journal reported that Reed’s had burned to the ground. Bleeker wrote to set the record straight.

“I haven’t lost faith in human nature,” he concluded. “I didn’t intend to get emotional, but we all need music. I wish I could express how much I love this business.”

The Grocer

The man stepped out of an old Cadillac and--almost casually--started to light a Molotov cocktail. Richard Rhee’s fatigue ignited into anger.

Time after time, as caravans of looters pulled into the parking lot of Rhee’s California Market on Western Avenue, he and his brigade of friends and employees had blasted into the smoky April sky with rifles, handguns and shotguns.

This time Rhee sprinted forward, his .45 leveled. “Put that down or I’ll shoot,” he screamed.

The man dropped the bottle bomb, rushing away as Rhee moved back behind a makeshift barricade of 25-pound rice sacks--apt symbols of the success he was not about to see destroyed.

Rhee came to Los Angeles from Seoul as a UCLA exchange student in 1959. For two years, he paid his tuition by washing dishes in Little Tokyo or sweeping floors in Chinatown. Finally, his hunger overcame his appetite for knowledge. He dropped out of school and began working three jobs at a time, seven days a week, while living in a small apartment and surviving on a Spartan diet of bread and hot dogs.

He never borrowed. He never bought a new car. And, he says, he never took advantage of the kye , the Korean tradition of pooling money in a sort of informal banking network.

“If I needed money, I’d always get another job,” he says.

By the early ‘70s he had managed to save “maybe $100,000,” money he used to buy old houses that he repaired and resold in his spare time.

Real estate profits and savings funded Rhee’s first business, a women’s clothing manufacturing business that he built into a 250-employee operation before selling it in 1986.

Two years earlier, Rhee had heard that the Mayfair Market on Western was for sale. He had been watching the neighborhood change. For $2.75 million, he became the landlord; in 1986, he bought out the store’s lease.

Immediately, he thinned the array of dairy products, substituting such items as salted shrimp, salted anchovies and fish balls. He bought rice and Korean noodles in bulk and sold it cheap. Dealing directly with farmers, he brought in more fresh produce, key to the Asian diet.

Working seven-day weeks and 18-hour days, Rhee made the business boom. Over the next five years, he opened stores in Garden Grove and Gardena and on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Now 55, Rhee walks down the aisles of his first California Market, proudly showing where the product line changes from East to West.

One half of the store’s shelves are crowded with Cocoa Puffs and other such products that even immigrant Korean children can cajole their parents into buying. Elsewhere, the 24,000-square-foot store bustles with an aromatic Asian deli, a Korean bakery and a fish section loaded with delicacies such as whole, two-foot-long squid. An entire refrigerator case--where the cheese might have been--displays more than a dozen varieties of kimchi , the spicy pickled vegetables at the heart of Korean menus.

Rhee has built a house in Hancock Park, complete with a tennis court. He still visits each of his stores every day, but as long as his wife and three children are happy, Rhee says, he doesn’t mind pushing himself.

“My youth I burned up with working,” he says. “I don’t want them to work the way I did.”