His sometimes bumpy ascent from a grim Eastside childhood has been marked by unflagging energy, the gift of gab and a readiness to compromise with ideological foes.

By HECTOR TOBAR, Times Staff Writer

The 1969 yearbook for Cathedral High is a relic from a time when the spirit of rebellion ran so deep, it could even infect a conservative Catholic school on the edge of downtown.

Among the pictures of goateed seniors and juniors in Che Guevara-inspired black berets, there is a nondescript sophomore in a T-shirt and sweater. The young man identified in captions as "A. Villar" was known as a good talker. He was a networker long before that term became popular. He'd hold court in the hallways, making friends with the BMOC upperclassmen, organizing protests against the school dress code.

The man now called Antonio Villaraigosa still has a lot of things in common with that garrulous kid who got kicked out of Cathedral his junior year. More often than not, he's on the side of the underdog. He's talked and charmed his way from a grim Eastside childhood to the pinnacles of power. And whenever he gets himself in trouble--say, for example, with a fortysomething marital infidelity--he can still pull off a deft escape.

Until last year, he was speaker of the California Assembly. From an ornate 19th century office in the Capitol he crafted billion-dollar bonds for new parks and schools.

He was a liberal Democrat who won over many of his Republican rivals. Now he wants to be mayor of Los Angeles.

People who have known Villaraigosa marvel at the sweep of his life. The same guy who dropped out of Roosevelt High ran the Assembly, keeping rein on the egos of 80 professional politicians. The man who organized a 1992 teachers protest that nearly shut down Los Angeles International Airport hobnobbed with the big-money players who grease the Capitol machinery. Utility companies, casinos and entertainment executives have all contributed to his campaign coffers.

At 48, Villaraigosa is cashing in on personal and political capital he earned, not just during six years in the Assembly, but also during three decades of working on Los Angeles' grass-roots causes: the late nights spent on others' campaigns in the 1980s and '90s and friendships hewn in high school and college.

Nearly everywhere he goes on the campaign trail, it seems, Villaraigosa can count on the help of an old ally.

"This brother went to school with my brother back in the '60s," the Rev. Al Washington intoned recently as he introduced Villaraigosa to 300 people in an almost all-black audience at a West Adams district church. "My brother was a member of the Black Student Union at Cathedral High. And so was Antonio."

Of course, Antonio Villar wasn't running for mayor back in 1969. (He changed his name when he married Corina Raigosa in 1988). Back then, the idea that an impoverished Mexican American kid from City Terrace might one day become mayor was as fantastic as the moon bases depicted in a movie showing in theaters: "2001: A Space Odyssey."

In a city of immigrants, Villaraigosa's up-from-the-streets life story is the emotional centerpiece of his campaign, a tale complete with tattoos, street fights and a mother who "took the bus to work all of her life and never owned a home."

"I'm a poster child for the American dream," he says at most of his campaign appearances.

Some people think Villaraigosa is too willing to compromise with his foes and too eager to please his supporters--a tendency that most recently forced him to apologize for his 1996 letter to the White House on behalf of a convicted drug dealer whose father is a well-heeled political contributor.

Long before that letter became public, some pundits had tagged Villaraigosa with a label that seems to follow him wherever he goes: impulsive. A risk-taker.

"The line between fearlessness and recklessness is an elusive one, a truth Villaraigosa learned the hard way," wrote Steve Scott of the California Journal, summarizing Villaraigosa's tenure as speaker.

In his resonant retelling of the obstacles he has overcome, Villaraigosa doesn't say--at least not very often--that many of them were of his own making. For most of his life, he has ridden a roller-coaster of success, self-inflicted disaster and redemption.

Unpleasant Memories of His Childhood

Antonio Villar was 5 years old when his father left the family. The elder Villar--now a septuagenarian resident of an Eastside suburb--was an immigrant from Mexico City who worked as a butcher and taxi driver before migrating to California in 1950.

Villaraigosa's own memory of his father--with whom he has spoken only a handful of times since childhood--is of an angry, abusive man who once got beaten up in a street fight. The candidate remembers, too, nights when his father beat his mother. (The elder Villar declined to comment.)

Natalia Delgado was an orphan and a voracious reader who learned some Latin and Italian while being raised by nuns in a Hollywood convent. Like many bright Mexican American women of her generation, she expressed her grandest ambitions through her children. A leader in a civil rights group formed by Latino state employees, she took them to protest marches. At bedtime, she read them stories by Poe and De Maupassant.

"She was very cognizant that East L.A. was just a small part of the world, and she wanted us to know that too," said Deborah Villar, the candidate's sister.

Delgado worked for the California Department of Transportation and raised her family in City Terrace, down the street from the Sybil Brand Institute, the women's jail. Villaraigosa's younger half brother, Rob Delgado, remembers watching sheriff's deputies pull over pimps in Rolls-Royces who were driving to the jail for visits.

Yet Villaraigosa and his siblings grew up sheltered from the neighborhood's darker side, pulled forward, Rob Delgado remembers, by their mother's relentless optimism.

Natalia Delgado had especially big hopes for Antonio. "He was her shining star," said Deborah Villar.

In his neighborhood, Villaraigosa early on established the pattern of his political life, using his social skills to knit together a web of friends.

"There's never been a day since I've known Antonio when he wasn't introducing me to people," said Jesus Quiñones, a childhood friend and labor attorney. "He was casting a wider net than everyone else, even as a 13-year-old."

His mother's dreams seemed close to fruition when he entered Cathedral High School.

At first Antonio was a favorite of the school's Lasallian brothers. But his grades dipped dramatically after he developed a benign tumor on his spine during his sophomore year that left him paralyzed for weeks and close to death.

"I was angry," Villaraigosa said. "And I got wild."

In his junior year he was involved in a brawl at a football game against St. Francis High in La Cañada. His grade-point average had fallen by then to 1.4. Having burned most of his bridges with the school administration by leading a student walkout the year before, he was soon expelled.

He moved on to Roosevelt High. When school officials there directed him toward vocational classes that he considered boring, he dropped out. But he remained close to a college-bound friend, Gilbert Cedillo (now an assemblyman), and was inspired by Cedillo and others to take night-school classes to get his diploma. Eventually, both were accepted at UCLA.

Arturo Chavez, a Cal State Los Angeles student activist then, remembers Villaraigosa as a "hyper" young man who always seemed to be operating on little sleep. Once he joined Chavez and other Chicano students on a 40-hour caravan from Los Angeles to Iowa for a student conference.

"Since Antonio never stopped talking, we'd switch him from one car to another every few hours so that he could keep whoever was driving awake," Chavez said. "We used to call him 'Tony Rap.' "

It was about this time too that Villaraigosa fathered his first two children. He was 21 and had known the mother of his first daughter for just six weeks before she became pregnant. He was 25 when his second daughter was born to another woman.

"I should have been more responsible," he said. Villaraigosa said he went to court and successfully sued for partial custody. Friends say the man who was abandoned as a child played an active role in the lives of his two daughters, especially as he grew older.

"I'm proud of the fact that I took responsibility for their upbringing and that I broke the cycle," he said. "I didn't do what my father did."

Still, Villaraigosa did plot an independent course.

"There was a lot of pressure in those situations to get married," said friend Quiñones. "We had a number of friends who got married at 19, 18, even 17."

Villaraigosa didn't get married. Instead, he graduated from UCLA and later from the People's College of Law. (He never did pass the bar exam, however, despite four tries.) He began working at a variety of left-leaning community organizations.

But his penchant for trouble persisted. After a fight during his 24th birthday celebration at a Wilshire Boulevard restaurant, Villaraigosa was arrested on suspicion of assault. He told a jury he had been defending his mother and sister against an abusive patron; he was acquitted.

Having escaped a jail sentence, Villaraigosa threw himself into community activism. At the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he got a job as an investigator and was elected union steward by his co-workers. He moved on to United Teachers-Los Angeles, for whom he bargained with school administrators.

The teachers union was in many ways a mirror of the social divisions in 1980s Los Angeles: bilingual teachers versus non-bilingual teachers; black versus white; older veterans versus young upstarts. Villaraigosa seemed to be everyone's friend.

"Antonio is nice-looking and he's not too big, kind of chaparrito [short]," said Arturo Selva, a teacher at Bridge Street Elementary School in Boyle Heights, of the 5-foot-7 politician. "He was not intimidating to most people. That was a big plus. He was able to go back and forth between the different groups."

Catching the Attention of a Power Broker

Working in causes far and wide beyond the union--including the American Civil Liberties Union--Villaraigosa inevitably caught the attention of Eastside power broker Gloria Molina, whose husband, Ron Martinez, was a friend from Villaraigosa's days at the EEOC.

The county supervisor appointed Villaraigosa to his first political post, on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, in 1991. He was a rare voice on that panel, speaking on behalf of bus riders' rights.

In 1993, however, he became a subject of media scrutiny when Molina's husband was awarded a $193,000 contract after Villaraigosa voted against granting the contract to two competing firms. He and Molina both said no laws had been broken, and there was no subsequent investigation.

"I'm sorry if it looks bad," Villaraigosa told The Times when the story broke. "I never meant to do anything bad."

The incident did little to slow his rapid ascent. A year later, he ran for an open Eastside seat in the Assembly. With Molina's backing, he took on the candidate supported by state Sen. Richard Polanco.

Villaraigosa was also running, in effect, against Willie Brown, who was then the powerful speaker of the Assembly. Polanco was a close Brown ally. The speaker closed off Sacramento money to Villaraigosa.

The race soon turned nasty. Campaign mailers detailed Villaraigosa's 1977 arrest, portraying him as a barrio thug. But he still managed to win the Democratic primary by 17 points, helped by veteran activists who organized his get-out-the-vote effort.

The day after his primary victory he received a phone call that would help lay the groundwork for his later success in Sacramento. Brown was on the line, calling to congratulate him.

Villaraigosa played it smart. He thanked Brown for not officially endorsing his opponent. The conversation ended with Villaraigosa telling Brown: "I want to know how I can help you."

Months later, at a reception for new legislators, Villaraigosa made a show of shaking Polanco's hand. His willingness to play peacemaker and smooth over the rougher edges of Sacramento politics would define his six years in the Legislature.

"You've always got to look to the next issue," Villaraigosa said in an interview. "And on every issue, there is a different set of allies and friends. You can't hold a grudge in politics any more than you should in life."

But the rising star had also committed an indiscretion that would cost him dearly. He had an affair that became the talk of the Eastside political elite. His wife filed for divorce just one day after he won his first election.

The infidelity cost Villaraigosa the friendship of Molina, among others. Two years later, Corina Villaraigosa took her husband back, but Molina continues to keep her distance.

"The personal stuff has not healed," Molina said. They remain just "political associates," she added.

Even a polished negotiator like Villaraigosa might never have risen so quickly in the Assembly, were it not for two words that defined a new political reality in Sacramento: term limits.

When he arrived in November 1994, the Democrats had just lost control of the Legislature. Villaraigosa wrote a number of bills that got nowhere with the Republican majority--most notably, one to make it legal for mothers to breast-feed in public.

Two years later, when the Democrats took back the Assembly, Willie Brown was gone, as were most of the lower house's senior legislators. Villaraigosa emerged as a contender for the speakership. He threw his support to Cruz Bustamante, who made him floor majority leader.

A Legislative Triumph

In 1997, Villaraigosa scored a big legislative triumph when he sponsored a bill--eventually signed into law by Gov. Pete Wilson--creating the Healthy Families program for uninsured children. It was the largest new medical program in the state since Congress launched Medicaid--called Medi-Cal here--in 1965.

By then Villaraigosa was well-known in the Capitol as both a sharp dresser and a consensus builder, though there were still many Republicans who were wary of him.

"His role on the floor is to be the heavy, which he plays with relish," John Nelson, a spokesman for then-Republican Leader Curt Pringle, told The Times that year.

Some Democrats complained privately too when Villaraigosa became speaker in 1998. They felt that he had forced the Legislature's first Latino speaker, Bustamante, to step down a few months earlier than planned. (Bustamante has, however, endorsed Villaraigosa's mayoral bid.)

As speaker, Villaraigosa threw himself into a typically frenetic round of bill-writing and deal-making, much of it cleverly calculated, according to some observers--to make a strong impression on Los Angeles voters in 2001.

In general, the consensus among Sacramento pundits was that Villaraigosa's two-year speakership was a model for the post term-limits era, his authority based in large measure on his willingness to reach out to the minority party.

"He understands that, while his philosophy may be more liberal than other people, the primary role of government is to solve problems," said state. Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), then Republican leader in the Assembly. "I can't say enough good things about him."

In 1998, Villaraigosa pushed through a $9-billion school bond measure with an elegantly crafted compromise: fiscally conservative Republicans got a cap on certain fees paid by developers; liberal Democrats were won over when a large share of the money was earmarked for the renovation of urban schools.

At the same time, Villaraigosa took risks that surprised some observers. He put the full weight of his speakership behind a bill outlawing discrimination against gay high school students in 1998, but suffered an embarrassing defeat when moderates in his own party wouldn't vote for it.

And he was roundly criticized for losing a safe Democratic seat in Oakland to the Green Party; Villaraigosa decided not to bankroll the campaign of the Democratic candidate, a former Oakland mayor.

By 1999, it was obvious that Villaraigosa was running for mayor. Still, he managed to get one more big project to the governor's desk: a $2-billion park bond issue, the biggest ever enacted by the Legislature. The initiative earmarked a large share for urban parks, including at least $90 million for "greening" the Los Angeles River.

Two years later, leaders of the Sierra Club's Angeles Chapter would cite the parks measure as one of the central reasons they endorsed Villaraigosa for mayor.

The candidate is running his campaign the same way he's conducted his life--with manic intensity, beginning his days before dawn by exercising up and down the hills of his Mount Washington neighborhood. In debates he sometimes stumbles over his words because he's in such a hurry to list his accomplishments, as though the contest itself rests on who talks the most.

The same man who networked his high school has built a broad coalition behind his mayoral bid, racking up a fistful of endorsements from the county's largest labor, environmental, gay and women's groups.

True to form, at the same time he suffered his worst setback: the revelation that five years ago he wrote to the White House on behalf of convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali, calling Vignali's sentence unjust. Villaraigosa says he didn't bother to find out more about the charges against Vignali before drafting the letter, a stunning mistake, even for a political novice.

He acted at the behest of Vignali's father, who "had been a friend," Villaraigosa said in an interview. "He spoke to me as a father. He said, 'My son is innocent.' . . . I went with my heart instead of my head."