Doing the Grunt Work for Contenders for L.A. Mayor : Volunteers: You can find workers stamping, folding, phoning and faxing in campaign offices as the April 20 vote approaches.

By JOHN SCHWADA

Feb. 15, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Hannah Wachs addresses hundreds of envelopes in longhand because of it. Bob Pike works the graveyard shift at his regular job so he can do it. And Garrett Biggs does it during his winter break from high school.

What are these people doing? Volunteering for candidates in the Los Angeles mayor’s race.

Their names are often unknown to their candidates’ own press deputies, let alone the public. Their desks are littered with Post-it notes, maps and faxes, not to mention coffee cups and cans of Diet Coke. Their eyes tire after monotonous hours of typing data into computers.

And they are the indispensable grunts in the political trenches. If this were football, they’d be offensive linemen--all work and no glory. You can find them stamping, folding, phoning and faxing in storefront campaign headquarters mushrooming throughout the City of Angels as the municipality heads for an April 20 election to pick a new mayor.

The decor is hardly glamorous where Wachs, of Bel-Air, toils away, sitting in a windowless room on the third floor of a building in the fading Valley Plaza mall in North Hollywood. The building also houses Alpha & Omega Total Enterprises and a security firm.

But Wachs, a petite 82-year-old with short gray hair, is used to this kind of work. She’s the mother of Councilman Joel Wachs and has labored in her son’s political campaigns ever since he first ran for the Los Angeles City Council in 1971.

In that first campaign, to unseat an incumbent lawmaker, Wachs even positioned herself at busy intersections in the district and waved political signs at passing motorists.

“I’m a Jack-of-all-trades,” Wachs says, barely skipping a beat in the mind-numbing work before her--that of hand-addressing hundreds of envelopes for invitations to a $500-a-plate fund-raiser for her son.

Pinned on a wall overlooking the candidate’s mother is a handwritten sign that recalls the omnipresence of that mother’s milk of political campaigning. The message: “It’s the $”

And why in an age of computers--of which there are none in this office--is this work being done by hand? “Emily Post always says invitations should always be handwritten,” Wachs says with a twinkle in her eye.

Volunteers Susan Selan and Sabina Marfian nod in agreement.

Selan, a Northridge housewife, has known Joel Wachs since both were students at UCLA and shares the candidate’s interest in the arts, and the 80-year-old Marfian, the retired owner of a cosmetics store, believes that a Wachs mayoralty would be a boon to senior citizens.

Another volunteer, Lester Miller, a Hollywood actor in Greek fisherman’s cap, says he has never met Joel Wachs. “I’ve just had troubles getting help from other council offices,” Miller says. “But Mr. Wachs’ office has always treated me well.”

He goes back to eating a campaign-subsidized submarine sandwich--one of the rare perks of political volunteerism.

Bob Pike, 42, was living with a girlfriend 10 years ago, but their relationship went south when he took a job volunteering in a congressional campaign that tickled his political fancy.

Now, a dozen political crusades later, Pike is making another sacrifice to work as a field operations expert in Assemblyman Richard Katz’s mayoral campaign: He’s taken the 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. shift at his Jet Propulsion Laboratory job tracking satellites so he can devote his daylight hours to Katz.

“I’ve been getting 4 1/2 hours sleep,” says Pike, who’s been with the campaign for three weeks.

“I’ve known Richard for a long time and watched him grow as a political leader, especially on the issue of transportation,” says Pike, a La Crescenta resident. Katz (D-Panorama City) has pledged to turn Los Angeles into a Silicon Valley for a mass-transit industry.

Still, the Katz headquarters, despite high-tech ideals, is on auto row in Sherman Oaks.

Nissan and Honda dealerships can be spied through the campaign office’s ground-floor plate-glass windows--which are slowly being papered over with maps of council districts and notices to volunteers. “It will give us some privacy,” says Chris Levesque, the campaign’s press secretary.

In the front room, 10 people, including land-use attorney Benjamin Reznik, are seated at a round table littered with soft drink cans--not the fat stogies of political lore--outlining plans to organize a San Fernando Valley-based support group for Katz.

The headquarters’ ambience is a mixture of the practical and the whimsical. Hand-scrawled messages and announcements are taped to walls, alongside a photo clipped from a newspaper showing legendary rock promoter Bill Graham.

Among the volunteers is Jon Maas, a Westwood-based screenwriter. Maas had worked as a volunteer on the Clinton-Gore campaign and was invited to hear Katz speak last month to about 200 young professionals--many of them Clinton-Gore veterans.

Maas felt the bug of voluntarism bite him again when he heard 41-year-old Katz--exuding youthful idealism, his shirt sleeves rolled up--talk about his vision for Los Angeles. So now Maas sat at a computer keyboard on a weekday afternoon, typing away. “It’s his stand on environmental issues that impressed me most,” Maas says.

Garrett Biggs is no hard-bitten political pol, no pot-bellied job-seeker.

He’s 16 years old, wears braces on his teeth and loves politics.

The El Camino Real High School junior can be found daily during his monthlong winter break at mayoral candidate Richard Riordan’s campaign office in Encino.

“I like Richard Riordan because he’s the most conservative candidate in the race,” Biggs says. “This is my first big campaign.”

And no question about it: The political life suits Biggs fine. After suavely handling a reporter’s questions, the teen-ager returns to the phones to contact other political volunteers under the watchful eye of Riordan operative Mike Dolan, organizer of MTV’s acclaimed Rock the Vote campaign, which encouraged young people to vote.

The Riordan campaign takes full advantage of its headquarters’ location at one of the Valley’s busiest crossroads--Ventura Boulevard where the San Diego and Ventura freeways meet. The one-story building is almost obscured by sloganeering placards and lawn signs proclaiming: “Riordan: Tough Enough to Turn LA Around.”

Inside, the office is richly stocked with Riordan campaign posters, yard signs and boxes of political literature. The signs are stacked upside down, the sharp ends of the sticks pointing up. It looks like an armory at wartime.

Press secretary Annette Castro anxiously circles a reporter who has paid a surprise visit to the office to keep him from inspecting certain pieces of campaign literature. “They haven’t been mailed yet,” she says.

Brodie Broderson, an actor from Hollywood returning from gathering voter signatures, interrupts the dance between reporter and press deputy.

The voluble, 60-ish Broderson says he became a Riordan devotee after being exposed to the lawyer-businessman’s philanthropy. “He had put a million dollars or so into the East L. A. Boys and Girls Club without a lot of hoopla,” Broderson recalls. Riordan’s modesty struck him most. “I thought, ‘Here’s one helluva guy.’ ”

For volunteer Sheila Levine, a Sherman Oaks retiree, what’s charming about Riordan--who has never held political office--is that he’s not part of the City Hall crowd. “I’d like to see the outs in and the ins out,” Levine says. “Where have these politicians been for the past 20 years?”