Like most young men in Mexico at the time, Gonzalez was engulfed in the Mexican Revolution. At 15, he had been "recruited" into the revolution by Gen. Francisco "Pancho" Villa. A telegraph operator, Gonzalez was captured by Villa's men and accused by Villa of being a spy and reporting on his troops' movements to the government. But Gonzalez was not a spy.

Villa then gave the boy a choice.

"Villa said, 'Son, I either execute you, or you can go with me,' " Gonzalez recalled. Gonzalez's response: "Well, I'd rather go with you."

So he grabbed his telegraph key and spent the next seven years serving as the revolutionary general's telegraph operator.

Now, Pedro J. Gonzalez is 94 years old and fighting for his dignity and good name. That struggle will reach another level Friday when the state Board of Prison Terms reviews his request for a pardon stemming from a rape conviction more than 50 years ago. At the urging of Hispanic groups in Southern California, Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti, D-Los Angeles, has asked Gov. Deukmejian that Gonzalez be considered for a pardon of innocence. The nine-member state board will consider the case in a closed session.

This may be Pedro J. Gonzalez's last shot. Gonzalez sits in Delta Convalescent Hospital in Lodi. He is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Something of a Hispanic Davy Crockett-cum-Woody Guthrie, Gonzalez maintains his innocence and says that he was wrongly accused, unjustly convicted and singled out by corrupt officials who used him as a scapegoat in an era of underlying racial bias.

"The situation was a bad action by an enemy that never showed his face to me," Gonzalez said. "There was no motive for the thing to become the way it did, making me a foolish martyr. I suffered a lot." "This is almost a reverse role," said Gonzalez's son, Ruben Gonzalez of Valley Springs. "We're asking the state of California to pardon my dad, when it's my dad who should be forgiving the state of California."

After the Mexican Revolution ended and the Villists fell out of favor, Gonzalez emigrated to the United States. He worked for a while in the shipyards of Los Angeles, and aftering answering a newspaper ad seeking singers, Gonzalez, who often entertained co-workers on the docks with a song, found himself a pioneer in the burgeoning days of Spanish-language radio in Southern California. It was 1928, and Gonzalez, a tall, handsome 32-year-old ex-revolutionary fighter from the tiny village of Carisal in northern Mexico, became the first Spanish-speaking broadcaster in Los Angeles on radio station KMPC.

As a singer, a commercial announcer and outspoken critic of U.S. discrimination against Mexicans, Gonzalez and his band of troubadours, Los Madrugadores (the Early Risers), greeted the growing Hispanic community throughout Southern California and the Southwest each morning with corridos. He and his group recorded more than 100 songs.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Gonzalez began using his radio program to protest the treatment of Mexicans, many who had become scapegoats for a stagnant economy. Gonzalez wielded instant power over his listeners. When he announced that workers were needed to clear some land, hundr

eds of Hispanic workers arrived two hours later in downtown Los Angeles, with picks and axes. Police, assuming they were armed for some kind of uprising, responded by throwing many of them in paddy wagons. Anglos feared Gonzalez as a rabble-rouser, and attempts were made to cancel his broadcasting license.

In 1934, at the height of his popularity, Gonzalez was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison for raping a 17-year-old Hispanic girl. Gonzalez - in his dapper pin-striped suits and Rudy Valentino moustache - maintained his innocence through the trial, which was packed to standing-room-only capacity by his fans.

The girl, Dora Versus, recanted her testimony eight months after Gonzalez was found guilty, saying that she had been forced to perjure herself by the Los Angeles District Attorney and county sheriff under threat of being sent to reform school.

The judge dismissed the new evidence. However, Versus in 1939 repudiated her post-trial affidavit and affirmed her court testimony. Versus said she made the false affidavits because she tired of people begging her to help Gonzalez.

Additionally, the prosecution's corroborating witness, Rosita Mazon, also recanted her testimony in the presence of the consul to the Republic of Mexico, Ricardo G. Hill, documents show. Contacted by Board of Prison Terms investigators in 1985, Mazon affirmed her court testimony and denied ever having changed her testimony.

v Investigators have not been able to find Versus. Her recantation and repudiation of her recantation causes most doubt for those on Gonzalez's side.

"That's the whole argument there," said Roy Perez, Roberti's special assistant for Hispanic affairs. "A person's life and reputation is at stake. When someone flip-flops back and forth, you have to stop and ask how credible is their word."

Gonzalez refused all offers of probation or reduced sentence. Unwilling to plead guilty under any circumstance, he was placed in San Quentin.

"He became a focus of a lot of the racism that was exacerbated by the Depression," said Isaac Artenstein, who directed the 1983 PBS documentary on Gonzalez's plight, "Ballad of an Unsung Hero." "Not only the racism, but the very public figure that Pedro had become, the respected voice that he had in the community and his natural charisma and the access he had to the community."

"He was a hero for the Mexican community and the Spanish-speaking community in the Southwest," said Lorena Parlee, the associate producer of "Ballad of an Unsung Hero" who is currently writing a biography on Gonzalez. " . . . What's a little bit difficult is that I'm not sure if we can single out if his treatment was racially or economically motivated. It's a combination of the two. Definitely, there were very strong racial overtones moving against him . . . But I also wouldn't leave out the fact that he was very influential with the working class." After a steady stream of Hispanic protests - including appeals by two Mexican presidents - and support orchestrated and sustained largely by Gonzalez's wife, Gov. Culbert Olson granted Gonzalez parole in 1940 - on the condition that Gonzalez immediately be deported to Mexico.

Gonzalez re-created his radio broadcast from Tijuana, and he was not allowed to re-enter the U.S. until 1971, when he retired and moved to the border town of San Ysidro, south of San Diego.

Artenstein spent almost two years talking with Gonzalez in preparation for his PBS documentary. Last year he directed the feature film "Break of Dawn" that was based on Gonzalez's life.

After all his research, Artenstein believes that Gonzalez is innocent and that the state should acknowledge that point.

"I absolutely feel that he deserves the pardon," Artenstein said in a recent phone interview. "Otherwise I wouldn't have been involved."

Though he sits in a wheelchair, Gonzalez is strong enough to walk and has been in relatively good health lately. And his appearance belies his 94 years. His hands are strong and firm. His gray hair is neatly in place, comb marks showing.

Gonzalez insists that he is not bitter or angry. "My case was the biggest mistake on the part of a justice system that could happen on Earth," said Gonzalez. "But justice should not be viewed as wrong. It should be viewed as a firm base. I just see it as an injustice of the justice system. They judged me wrong."

Once the Board of Prison Terms reviews the case, it will make a written recommendation to Deukmejian. If the board recommends a pardon of innocence be granted, Deukmejian can either approve, deny or take no action on the request. Board investigator Ken Bybee said he could not comment on the case. And all information in the file is confidential until after action by the governor, according to Elly Ross, an administrative assistant with Deukmejian's legal affairs office.

This will be Gonzalez's fifth such review - he had others in 1939, 1940, 1942 and 1984. The board would not comment on the 1984 hearing, but, according to the governor's legal affairs office, the board updated Gonzalez's file and reviewed court transcripts six years ago and the matter was not forwarded to the governor because Gonzalez did not appear to meet the governor's policies on pardons of innocence. Two of the guidelines stipulate that such pardons be granted only where innocence is uncontroverted and where post-trial evidence shows that the applicant was mistakenly convicted.

In each of the four previous reviews, the board did not recommend that Gonzalez's request be forwarded to the governor. Instead, it suggested that Gonzalez seek a pardon of rehabilitation which would be easier to attain. But with a pardon of rehabilitation, Gonzalez must admit to the crime. He wants his name cleared.

"I think for him, knowing him, he would be only an extremely happy person knowing that his family name was cleared," said Perez of Roberti's staff. "I don't think that's asking too much."

For Gonzalez, it isn't so much the legality as it is the fact that his five surviving children and close to 100 grandchildren and great-grandchildren can know, for sure, that he is innocent.

"He wants to take that stigma away from the family; he wants to see that it's removed before he passes away," Ruben Gonzalez said. ". . . I would feel very happy for him and for the whole family, but mostly for my mother because she's the one who has carried the full burden of this."

His mother is 83-year-old Maria Gonzalez. Pedro and Maria have been married for 69 years. At one point in the Mexican Revolution, Gonzalez was among a small contingent of Villa's men who were captured by federal troops in the rocky plains near Chihauhua, in northern Mexico. A tribunal of war immediately sentenced Gonzalez to die before a firing squad.

The townspeople threw rocks at the troops, and a group of schoolgirls ran between the soldiers' gun sights and Gonzalez and freed him. A few years later, Gonzalez met a 14-year-old girl, Maria, at a dance. She said she knew Gonzalez, that she was one of the girls who saved his life.

Within three months they were married. Now, the quiet woman proudly sits by her husband. A pardon of innocence for Pedro J. Gonzalez also would mean that the man she rescued so many years ago could hold his head high. "I'd be very happy," she said.