By JENNIFER NETHERBY

Staff Reporter

On a recent June evening, with family, friends and co-workers looking on, 69-year-old Young Paik walked on stage at the Century Plaza Hotel and received Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Paik noted that it meant a lot for someone who “no speak no English” upon arriving in the United States.

Today, his company, Paco Steel and Engineering Corp., is the nation’s biggest producer of patented light-steel I-beams used in the framing of everything from huge commercial buildings to big-rig tractor-trailers. It was Paik’s own innovations that revolutionized the ways in which steel I-beams are manufactured.

He chalks up his success to hard work, which he realized could get him anywhere in America. “My success is self success,” he said.

Paik’s adventure started during the Korean War when he and his family lived in a North Korean village, where his father was a farmer and village leader. He was also anti-communist.

With North Korean soldiers closing in, Paik, then in his late-teens, and his father went south for a few days to wait it out. They told his younger brother to stay with the family.

Paik made it south. His father was killed by North Korean soldiers. “If I would have stayed 30 seconds more, I would have died,” he said.

Once in South Korea, Paik begged for food and other necessities. He sold chestnuts on the Seoul streets to earn money for college. His work in school earned him a college scholarship and a ticket to Los Angeles.

He came with $50. “I knew I had a higher spirit,” he said. “I said, ‘I have to be successful here.’ ”

He initially worked in a Koreatown restaurant as a busboy, earning 75 cents an hour, which he used for living expenses while in school. He taught himself English from American television. Paik’s scholarship was for the University of Oregon; later, he transferred to the Indiana Institute of Technology, where he earned the civil engineering degree that ultimately led him to the steel industry.

During college, Paik spent his summers and vacations in Los Angeles, and after graduation, he worked as a civil engineer for several Los Angeles steel companies. It was then that Paik began winning recognition for developing new ways to mold steel beams, all in an industry not known for its ability to bend.

In 1974, with encouragement from his wife, Paik started his own company out of his home with a $10,000 loan.

He would need every bit of his considerable drive to get Paco Steel off the ground specifically, convincing companies to buy a new type of steel beam manufactured in Japan from a Korean with a thick accent.

In the Southeast, company executives wouldn’t even meet with him. So he devised a plan: Give companies a free trial with the new beams. If they liked them, they would pay, if not, they wouldn’t.

His plan took off after several years of prodding. Not only were Paco’s patented corrugated I-beams cheaper than competitors’ I-beams, they were also lighter and stronger.

In the ’80s and ’90s, he expanded Rancho Dominguez-based Paco to 10 plants across the United States. He was recognized by the Asian American Business Association, featured in Newsweek and invited to the White House. “I am very proud,” he said. “People know me as honest and a hard worker.”

Paik’s one regret goes back to the war, when he didn’t bring his younger brother south. He later learned that the brother had been executed.

“I left him behind,” he said. “I told him to stay. Now I’m living like a king.”