COLUMN ONE : Bouncing Back With a Twist : As we slip out of recession, a turbulent, new California is emerging. Global competition will make our economy lean and mean. Immigration will help fuel it. Image problems may hold it back.

Don’t give up now, the experts tell us: California’s maddeningly elusive recovery is finally knocking on the door.

But the emerging era may prove as turbulent as the grim chapter that is now ending. The great slump of the 1990s has transformed a prosperous region, jarred the complacent and punctured the myth that California was immune to hard times.

“I used to go home early. I had a great tennis game. I saw my wife and children--until the economy began to strangle me,” recalls Lyn Perry, whose electronics store was destroyed in the 1992 riots.

Now in a new, suburban location, he works seven days a week and foresees little quick relief. “I don’t expect much growth in the economy until the turn of the century,” he says.

Will he be right?

In fact, new opportunities are emerging even as old ones go poof, say economists who describe an outlook as shifting and varied as California’s topography. For all the recent bad news, the state’s ever-churning business culture will continue to beckon optimists, dreamers and a restless stream of economic refugees.

The reason: California harbors more youthful, fast-growing companies than any other state. They succeed or fail dramatically, adding a volatile note to the atmosphere.

“If you want rain, you’ve got to put up with thunderclouds,” declares David L. Birch, president of Cognetics, an economic research firm in Cambridge, Mass.

The California rising up from the slump’s debris will differ from its old self in striking ways, according to interviews with business owners, executives, government officials and economists:

* Global competition is turning the business landscape into a more Darwinian arena, where only the fittest can expect to thrive.

* The state’s fate will be tied more than ever to expanding technology and service fields, as older manufacturing enterprises continue to close or move out.

* A fast-growing immigrant population will continue to inject energy and drive into the economy, but also add many thousands of workers poorly equipped to live above the poverty level.

* Crime and other quality-of-life problems could further damage the state’s bruised national image, discouraging new employers, until the troubles ease up.

“I think there’s hope,” says Frank C. Wykoff, an economist at Pomona College. “But this is a very different economy than it was in the past.”

Like any slump, California’s steepest recession since the 1930s had a purging effect: More than 43,000 vulnerable enterprises were washed down the drain between 1991 and 1993, according to Dun & Bradstreet.

Many of the survivors, stunned at the carnage, overhauled the way they do business. Companies introduced new technologies, slashed payrolls and got more aggressive.

These days many businesses scramble and compete in ways that once would have seemed absurd.

“One customer wanted 70,000 Christmas lights set up, and there was no one to do it--but we did it,” recalls Survilla Graham, who recently retired from her family’s 35-year-old electrical business in Covina.

“Nowadays, if they want a lighted Santa Claus on a chimney that’s five stories high, you better get up there and light that (thing).”

The unfolding recovery should feel different from earlier recoveries for another basic reason: Problems that gave the recession extra wallop have not entirely gone away.

Another 80,300 aerospace jobs are expected to vanish in the 1990s, according to UCLA forecasters, beyond the 155,000 lost already. The Bay Area, meanwhile, is braced to lose 81,000 jobs from military base closures by 1999.

Nestor Arellano, 40, is among the lucky ones. The El Monte resident has hung onto his job, sanding and finishing pieces at a Pomona aircraft parts factory. More than half his co-workers have received pink slips.

Just the other day, a supervisor lectured employees to make things “better, and in less time,” said Arellano, a native of Guadalajara and father of three.

But his luck teeters on a precarious base: Jobs that will pay someone with an eighth-grade education $10.20 an hour are harder to find than ever: “If I didn’t have a job, I might consider going back” to Mexico, he says.

Increasingly, California will be home to workers who, like Arellano, lack many of the skills valued in the modern economy. A harbinger: People without a high school diploma were the biggest group of working-age newcomers between 1990 and 1993, according to a UCLA analysis.

What sorts of jobs await them?

It will depend on “how successful we are at educating them--and there’s a lot of concern about that,” says Cynthia A. Kroll, an economist at UC Berkeley’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics.

Recent statistics highlight new jobs at the top and bottom--low-paying work in restaurants, amusement parks and garment factories expanding alongside more lucrative areas, such as the movies and securities brokerages.

Hopes that California will provide a good livelihood for workers on all steps of the ladder are prompted by the state’s very real strengths--strengths that have been overshadowed by the recent avalanche of bad news.

Foremost, California remains a beehive of business growth and creation. Surveys of swift-growing firms make the point dramatically.

When Cognetics tried to find what it calls “gazelle” companies--those that doubled in size between 1989 and 1993--California jumped out: San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento all ranked among the top 20 sites.

Overall, California was home to 33,263 gazelles, almost double the number in New York or Texas.

What’s more, global trends bode well. Liberalized trade rules, growing wealth in the Pacific, and closer U.S.-Mexico ties all could benefit the state.

“California has a high share and a growing share of the fastest-growing areas in the nation’s economic base,” says Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

That means one out of five U.S. jobs in high-tech, trade, entertainment, tourism and professional services is in the state. “And we don’t see any long-term evidence that its position in those sectors has been permanently damaged,” Levy says.

California enjoys yet another, key asset--a business culture that rewards the entrepreneur, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley.

Such scrappy, knowledge-intensive firms as Litronic Industries of Orange County are the sort that play a role in any cheerful scenario for the future.

Just a few years ago, aerospace contracts were Litronic’s lifeblood. Today, after a drastic shift in strategy, its fortunes are linked to information technology.

The Costa Mesa firm, with 55 workers, now plans to hire 100 engineers, technicians and programmers in the next two years at annual salaries as high as $75,000. Its sales are expected to zoom 30% this year and another 50% in 1995.

For all the questions about crime, red-tape costs and the quality of life, “In cable and communications, of course California is the leader,” declares Kris Shah, Litronic’s president.

Alas, California also stands out in ways that never will be featured on a chamber of commerce brochure.

When Lyn Perry owned a consumer electronics store in Los Angeles, he was burglarized 14 times in 14 years. In the riots, the entire shop was cleaned out--except for a popcorn machine.

“I never drove back. I never saw it again,” Perry, 49, says of the business on Western Avenue.

He thought about escaping to a small town near Fresno, even changing careers. But an unexpected opportunity popped up near his home in Thousand Oaks, and Wilshire TV & Stereo West was born.

It’s hard to compete with giant retailers like Circuit City, and Perry hasn’t paid off all his debts and start-up costs. Still, he hopes to expand in a few years. “I’m not making money yet, but I know I will,” he says.

That kind of enthusiasm has long been part of the California atmosphere, where promises of gold, gushers and real estate have fueled a turbulent history of boom and bust. The defense crunch is just the latest chapter.

These days, the state’s status as a capital of the global economy fires up the fantasies of entrepreneurs like Jackson Lan, 43, a Tawian native who launched a computer equipment store in 1991.

His dream: to turn his PC Club into a giant retailer. “You can’t just look at Taiwan or at the U.S.,” declares the City of Industry businessman. “You have to think worldwide.”

Lan also personifies the global trade links that are part of California’s future. He relies on “friends, classmates and co-workers” in Taiwan’s web of low-cost, high-tech factories to supply his store with competitively priced merchandise.

Yet he is not certain that Southern California is the right place for his family to settle. Recently, three of his Chinese counterparts in the computer industry have been followed home by robbers who forced them to return to work, where the thieves cleaned out their warehouses.

So he toys with moving to Seattle: “We’re frightened,” says Lan, president of the Southern California Chinese Computer Assn. “Somebody may break into your house and hurt you. It’s not worth it.”

California State Bank embodies other big changes that will define the new business era. Like countless enterprises, it grew up at a time when land and investment were links in a chain of ever-growing prosperity. No one expects the episode to repeat itself.

“It was a hard time to fail,” recalls Richard J. Jett, senior executive vice president at the bank, which opened in a beige trailer in Covina in 1979. “Somebody could come to you with a piece of land and say, ‘I’m gonna build 10 houses on this land.’ By the time the houses were ready to sell, the price had gone up 20%.”

Then came the great recession and a great adjustment: Businesses cut workers, tossed out old habits, loaded up on new technology.

New computer and communications equipment enables the bank to get as much done with 180 workers as it did with 240, Jett says, from writing letters and contracts to delivering them by fax.

“You run a branch today with eight to 10 people that you ran with 12 to 14 people just three years ago,” he says.

Doing more with less, he adds, “is the way it will be forever--certainly in my lifetime.”

Such attitudes point to another peculiarity of the recovery. It will feel different from earlier ones. Words like thrift and caution may be uttered a lot more often than that ‘80s cliche-- boom.

And with reason, perhaps. UCLA economists expect joblessness in the state to exceed the nation’s until more Californians move away, quit the work force or settle for jobs that pay less.

Whether or not that view is too gloomy, signs of a less ostentatious period are emerging.

Giant national discount stores are infusing rough competition into a retail world identified with trendy boutiques and specialty stores. Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target, to name a few, have been breaking ground here.

Already, the ripples of economic insecurity are changing politics.

Legislators, prodded by Gov. Pete Wilson, last year moved to cut costs for workers’ compensation, provide tax incentives for investment and trim red tape.

Local politicians, meanwhile, are courting employers with new ardor, dangling financial incentives for them to stay put. “We’re seeing (city council) decisions that five years ago might not have been accepted at all,” says Gary Heathcote, a Thousand Oaks architect and chairman of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce, referring to streamlined approval of a mall renovation and other actions.

Yet even some who applaud pro-business moves view them as limited in scope. Transcendent public issues--crime, education, environment, social harmony--should ultimately mean more for the economy’s health than a narrow definition of employer concerns.

“Businesses don’t just come here for nice rules and fast permits,” says economist Levy. “They can demand first-class higher education. They can demand first-class infrastructure, and they can demand a high quality of life.”

In our agenda, he continues, “California is still at risk.”

Sitting in the living room of Survilla Graham’s home, 22 miles east of Los Angeles, such concerns seem remote.

Graham has seen Covina evolve from “orange groves, big ranches and little villages” in the 1950s to a suburb of more than 43,000.

She also has traveled the ups and downs of the state economy, as owner of an electrical construction business that once kept 10 crews busy in a region from the San Gabriel Valley to San Diego.

The most recent slump was tougher than the others, says Graham: It was harder to get work, harder to get financing for the work and harder to get paid after the work was done.

And nowadays, the Texas native says, “You have to work harder for the same amount of business.”

Outside the window, beyond the pink peach and nectarine blossoms, a California landscape looms up against the sky--hills and a creek where her son once chased after blackbirds and frogs, hills now dotted with the homes of others who also found a comfortable life in the Golden State.

Graham’s son is at work a few miles away, running the family business known as Southwest Constructors, which--like countless others--stands to benefit as the recent bust fades into history.

Somehow, on this spring day of California’s nascent recovery, gloom just doesn’t fit the picture. “You can’t stop progress, and that’s what it is,” Graham says of the 1990s’ hard-work ethic. “It’s progress.”