UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS--SIX MONTHS LATER : Touched by Fire / A Legacy of Pain and Hope : THE CHILDREN : Reginald Moves In With His Father, Octavio Drifts Along and Patricia Enters a Job-Training Program

For many Californians, the riots were more than a momentary blip on the screen--they were a flash point for lasting and fundamental changes in their lives. The devastation left a legacy of broken dreams for many, awakened a sense of social justice in some, unleashed anger and hatred in others, and rekindled a spirit of hope among others. Six months after the riots, Times reporters visited some of the people and places touched by the extraordinary events of last spring and on these pages we tell their stories.

Every day after lunch, a school bus picks up 16-year- old Patricia Ramos at Locke High School in Watts and takes her six blocks to a world of coulombs, potentiometers, resistors and diodes.

This world--a two-year course in consumer electronic repair and the promise of a $20,000-a-year technician job upon graduation from high school--is a rare bright spot in glum post-riot Los Angeles.

Here, six months after the upheaval triggered a slew of big promises that have yet to materialize, change is not abstract or delayed. It is being delivered.

Here, Patricia and 28 other inner-city high school students are being given a chance to construct a career out of the ashes because of what one company, Pioneer Electronics, did with uncommon speed.

Five days after the riots began, executives of the Tokyo-based corporation--whose U.S. headquarters are located in Long Beach--spent $600,000 to begin a job-training program, which meets for three hours each afternoon at a Watts housing project.

Pioneer has promised the students summer internships and jobs if they stay on course. And the students have embraced their newfound opportunity.

They shush down anyone who talks while instructor Jeff Creamer is lecturing. For weeks, bus transportation that brought them to the Watts center after their regular morning high school classes was spotty, but students who were bypassed found ways to get there on their own.

“There’s more communication between everybody in this class, compared to regular high school,” Ramos said. “We help each other. We support each other.”

Ramos comes from the kind of immigrant family that has quietly but dramatically changed the face of Los Angeles in the last two decades. Her parents moved here from Mexico shortly before she was born. Her father is a material handler at a company in Santa Monica. Her mother is a housewife. Ramos and her six brothers and sisters live in a home in Watts that their parents own.

Before a Locke High counselor approached her, Ramos had never thought about electronics, though she hoped to attend college.

But the Pioneer program intrigued her. “It sounded interesting, to learn something,” she said. Now she is considering a career in electrical engineering.

“Before the riots,” she said, “there was no progress.” Now she is optimistic about her city’s future.

Pioneer and Los Angeles school officials plan on sending 30 new students through the program every year.

Like Ramos, many of the students will become the first members of their family to attend college. Their parents “didn’t have this kind of opportunity,” she said. “For us, this is a chance to make their dreams come true.”