Fresno Receives High Marks From Its Natives, Despite Survey Scores : Loyal Residents Are Befuddled by the Bad Rap City Gets

This city gets a bad rap and, for the life of them, most residents can’t figure out why.

Consider that even during peak traffic, it never takes more than 20 minutes to cross town. The average well-kept three-bedroom home with pool on a tree-lined street near a school costs $75,000. Residents are 45 minutes from great fishing and hiking, 90 minutes from skiing or from the beach at Cambria, two hours driving time from Carmel, three hours from San Francisco, four from Los Angeles.

Need more convincing? How about 85 identifiable ethnic groups, a fine state university and a two-year community college, two good art museums, a dance repertory, symphony orchestra, several very active theater groups and, if the Fresno State Bulldogs aren’t the final selling point, well, Mikhail Baryshnikov recently performed at the Convention Center.

Shopping for a City

Actually, most Fresnans have never thought it necessary to sell their city. People born here tend to stay, and frequently there are stories told about families that were transferred here, then decided they’d rather quit a job than ever leave. And an impressive number of young couples have actually chosen Fresno after city-shopping throughout the entire state.

But then comes Robert M. Pierce, a geographer at the State University of New York at Cortland, who has the gall to rate America’s cities in a periodical called American Demographics. And for all the world to see, there’s Fresno at 277, dead last among the urban areas surveyed. That was in 1984. This year, Pierce ranked Fresno at 288 among 329 cities listed. (Surveys like this have never been kind to Fresno. The 1981 Places Rated list published by Rand-McNally placed Fresno at 272 out of 277 cities, while on the new Places Rated list Fresno was 226 among 329 entries.)

But for some reason, it’s Pierce who’s most piercing. It’s the 277 that Fresnans will never forget.

“Quite frankly, I think it was the first time people here had an inkling that Fresno wasn’t heaven in everybody’s eyes,” said Joan Eaton, 32, a loan officer at Wells Fargo Bank, who with her husband decided to leave Los Angeles two years ago and chose Fresno over San Francisco, Denver, Sacramento and Santa Barbara.

True, Fresno has its problems, searing heat in the summer and tule fog in the winter not the least of them. There are substantial (16%) unemployment and some of the struggles of planning and human relationships that beset any urban area.

But to loyal Fresnans, their problems are no worse than any other place and, all things considered, they are better off than most. And in a somewhat paradoxical twist, residents are pushing for their city to be more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan while they brag about their city’s small-town, know-your-neighbor feeling.

Centennial Celebration

Meanwhile, 277 has become a rallying cry, a call for unity equal only to Fresno’s Red Wave for its beloved basketball team. And as Fresno celebrates its centennial this month, many of its leaders are agreeing with architect J. Martin Temple, 50, a resident since 1939 and a former president of the Chamber of Commerce. “Actually, the 277 rating is one of the better things to happen to us. It caused some introspection.”

Probably just as many residents agree with Mayor Dale Doig, commenting just as he was headed out of his office for an afternoon’s fishing in the foothills 30 minutes away.

“I’m not concerned about the adverse image ‘cause I like it here. I feel we don’t have to justify ourselves.”

Both remarks are typically Fresnan.

Fresno has always been betwixt and between, not large enough to be truly cosmopolitan and not small enough to be charming. Even today, with a population of 274,750 and second only to Irvine as California’s fastest-growing city (according to a study by the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy), Fresno remains what it’s always been: a city created by agriculture for agriculture.

Its site, smack in the middle of the richest agricultural-producing area in the world, the San Joaquin Valley, was chosen by the late Leland Stanford. Impressed by a lush 2,000-acre wheat field owned by A.Y. Easterby and irrigated by a primitive canal system from the nearby foothills and mountains, Stanford decided a town site would be built there.

At the time, the county seat was in Millerton in the foothills, but when the railroad stopped instead at this station in the flatlands, the population followed. Among them: a number of Chinese, who’d been merchants in the Millerton area. Later, there would be Armenians, Latinos and other immigrants lured by the prospect of cultivating the good life from Fresno’s rich soil. Most recently, have come the Hmongs--in the last three years some 60,000 of these Laotian mountain tribesmen have resettled in the valley, more than 15,000 in Fresno.

Fresno, which is Spanish for ash, is now the acknowledged agribusiness center of the valley. If only 3% of the population is actively engaged in farming, there is nonetheless a deep awareness that agriculture directly affects the city’s economy.

Said Cathy Rehert, 45, a fourth-generation Fresnan who’s on the board of the Fresno Historical Society: “When the raisin crop fails, it affects us. When it rains, we all wonder if it will hurt the crops. It’s funny, but despite all the different people who’ve moved here, and as much as we try to think of ourselves as sophisticated, our thinking is still geared to the farmer.”

Actually, Fresno’s proximity to agriculture may be one of its lures. Of nearly 40 people interviewed, most unconnected with farming, all mentioned agriculture with what can only be described as sentimentality.

A typical view was expressed by Ken Robison, 37, an entertainment writer for the Fresno Bee who was raised in the Pico Rivera area of Los Angeles. After jobs in Tennessee and Las Vegas, he moved two years ago to Selma, a town of 10,000 and a 22-minute commute to the Bee. “Even though I’m not a farmer,” he said, “it gives me a good feeling being here, buying fruit at the roadside stands. It’s nothing for me to pick up a 40-pound box of oranges to take to my folks in L.A.

“My daughter and I can get on our bikes and in 10 minutes be in the vineyards. She can see her grandparents in their vineyards. It’s really nice to think that in these crazy times my daughter can still be a little kid in the country.”

Despite the confluence of cultures, Fresno is not exactly a melting pot. On just about any weekend there might be an Armenian dinner, a Japanese festival, a Latino fiesta. The same Chinese who are heavily supporting the Metropolitan Museum are also behind the very traditional Confucius School where Chinese children are taught about their Chinese Heritage. The school is right across the street from the Chinese Baptist Church and just down from the only Buddhist Temple in the valley. Even those Chinese who’ve moved to more exclusive areas of town, like the Fig Garden or Sunnyside districts, still return to the old neighborhood for church and social affairs.

All this, says Sharon Levy, 50, president of Fresno’s Board of Supervisors, has added to the richness of Fresno. “It’s like threads in a piece of fabric. It makes us more interesting, not homogenous.”

But Fresno’s ethnic heritage is rich with tales of discrimination. It’s hard to talk to any Armenian without hearing how in the ‘20s and ‘30s, they were scorned and denied jobs. Even when discrimination eased in the ‘40s, Armenians were still kept out of fraternities at Fresno State, restricted from buying into the more exclusive residential areas and prohibited from joining certain clubs.

Curiously, Fresno’s Armenians rarely express bitterness. “It’s just not an issue any more. They couldn’t get into fraternities; now they’re president of them,” shrugged Art Margosian, 55, a professor of journalism at Cal State University, Fresno and former editor of the California Courier, an Armenian newspaper.

“The changes came very gradually. Some people argue it was the civil rights movement. Things loosened up a lot from that. But I think it was sheer money,” Margosian continued. “There were enough who became affluent. We were good in business. We’re very frugal. We made, saved, bought land.

“Then in the 1960s and ‘70s we got into government, we got people involved in politics. Some of the people who worked their rear ends off, they decided to give money to the community.

“Now you’ve got Armenian doctors, lawyers. We’re all integrated into the community. We give lots of money away. To Armenian causes, yes, but also to the Bulldog Foundation, the Crippled Children. . . .

“I don’t know of any restrictions today,” he said, glancing around the ultra-modern lobby of the new Holiday Inn Center Plaza, ironically the site of what used to be Fresno’s “Little Armenia.”

“Of course when two people get together, there’s discrimination. . . . The Hispanics today are catching what the Armenians caught back then.”

Fresno’s Latino population has been here at least as long as the Armenians. Betty and Armando O. Rodriguez’s parents came here during the Mexican revolution. Her father was active in Fresno’s growing Mexican community.

Headed Committee

A short, cheerful woman who tends to see life in terms of challenges rather than problems, Betty Rodriguez, 55, is active in the League of Mexican-American Women and headed the committee that selected “100 Fabulous Fresnans” as part of the the centennial celebration. She also is involved with groups concerned with the needs of migrant workers where, she says, “education is the big issue.” Her husband was the city’s first Latino supervisor and later its first Latino Superior Court judge. He is now a Municipal Court judge.

Betty Rodriguez talks less about discrimination than the fact that “I’d like to see people mix more. Everyone tends to keep to their own, the Mexicans go to Mexican functions, the Japanese to theirs, the Anglos. . . . But it’s changing.”

Armando Rodriguez, 55, is less magnanimous. He points to the low percentage of Latinos in public office and among the city’s business and civic leaders. His indignation is still apparent as he talks about the old-boys club which he says he encountered when he first became a judge.

“Discrimination hasn’t changed over the years,” he said. “It’s subtle, but it’s socially very much existent. Of course there are changes, but they’re slow in coming. Professional and educational people make the change. If you’ve got the money, you can go to the club.”

Changes Possible

Even as he says this, however, Rodriguez talks of his own ability to bring about changes. He already has, after all. Fresno, it would seem from people who are so inclined, is a good place to fight the gallant fight. It’s a place where a grass-roots effort has a good chance of being successful.

Look at Sharon Levy, wife of Gottschalk’s president Joe Levy, who, inspired by the conditions she saw during a visit to juvenile hall as a member of the Fresno Junior League, decided to enter politics. She ran for the Board of Supervisors, came in second, and deciding that she needed more credibility, got herself appointed to the Planning Commission. In 1975, she ran for the Board of Supervisors again with a door-to-door campaign. She won. And she still will speak before any group that asks her.

“I want to make a difference,” she said, sitting in her small office in the county building. “When I don’t think I can make a difference anymore, I’ll retire.”

Fresno seems to inspire that attitude. Fresno Arts Center Director Robert Barrett said he and his wife, Barbara, traveled the state several years ago looking for a place to relocate from Long Beach and “Fresno appealed to us the most. . . . What we saw in Central California was a vigor,” he said.

“Nothing had been done yet, but it was going to be. If we really

wanted to make a contribution, we decided, we didn’t want to be the third generation doing things. We wanted to be the first.”

Lest anyone forget, Fresno is the hometown of the late writer William Saroyan, Mets pitcher Tom Seaver and the late, great Chicago Cubs first baseman Frank Chance (he of Tinker to Evers to Chance fame). And to a large extent, Fresno seems to exist on a “boys of summer” high; never quite losing, nor really wanting to, that “strange, weed-infested, junky, wonderful, senseless yet beautiful world” described in Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy.”

Despite Fresno’s ongoing efforts to become cosmopolitan, it’s not unusual to see five or six neighborhood youngsters, followed by just as many dogs, heading down to a corner lot for a baseball game. Or the whole family might go bicycling every weekend--after church, of course.

Joan Eaton, who contends that it’s easier to juggle a professional life and a family in Fresno than in Los Angeles, remembered her father (Guarantee Financial Corp. Chairman Lew Eaton) darting out of his downtown Fresno office in mid-afternoon to see his son in a track meet. “And he could make it back to the office within the hour.”

It’s a city liberally sprinkled with basketball hoops over garages, recreational vehicles in driveways and backyards with swimming pools.

Family-Oriented

What counts in Fresno, say people who live here--and invariably they say it’s why they live here--is the life style: informal, friendly, geared to recreation and above all, family-oriented.

“Parenting is a big thing here,” said Penny Raven, 42, society columnist for the Fresno Bee. Even among people who can afford a full-time housekeeper, she said, it would never be live-in.

“People want to see their children healthy,” said Raven. “They also want to see their children work. No matter how much money a family has, children work in the summer.”

That’s not to say that affluent Fresnans are oblivious to the more worldly temptations, say of the sort one can find in San Francisco or Beverly Hills. That’s what private jets are for, or the frequent commuter flights out of Fresno Airport. It’s so easy, after all, to zip up to the city once a month for a haircut, shopping, dinner and the theater. In Fresno, of course, there’s Normart’s for furs--they’re three generations here; and Miss LaVerne’s for couturier fashions (she’s the former manager of I. Magnin, no longer in Fresno). There’s Berkeley’s and Macy’s, which Raven says, “they’re trying to make into the Neiman-Marcus of Fresno.”

Wealthy Fresnans like to travel. They like to take in the shows in London, visit friends in the French wine country, see what China is like. The Cadillac (always allowed to age at least four or five years) is the car of choice--except, said Raven, among the newly rich and the newly divorced who like Jaguars and Mercedes. Visit the home of anyone half-successful in agriculture and its likely to be paid for, Raven said. There may be a mortgage on their second home, however.

Heavy Benefit Circuit

They like to party. And there’s a heavy benefit circuit. But in Fresno society, tickets seldom run more than $50 per person. “Fresnans don’t like to spend a lot for a ticket, but they’re happy to spend once they’re at the party,” said Larry Balakian, who was squeezing 1,700 people, at $30 each (before deciding to run the party two nights), into the Fresno Convention Center exhibition for the annual Fresno Arts Center “Carnivale.” Balakian, owner of a trendy clothing store, and Ann Sullivan Whitehurst, head of public relations for Saint Agnes Medical Center are, according to Penny Raven, Fresno’s trend setters when it comes to throwing benefits. Both go for what Balakian calls “big, wild and nutsy” events, and Fresno, they say, is a “fun place to try new things.”

‘A State of Mind’

Some residents, like Ronald Paul, 55, and his wife, Angela, 54, second-generation grape growers, art collectors and Francophiles, call Fresno “a state of mind, a wonderful place to come home to.” Yet it would seem their sophistication is less a product of residing in Fresno than despite it.

Architect J. Martin Temple believes that if Fresnans have become sophisticated, it’s been by way of survival--”isolated as we are from the attractions of big cities.”

This sense of isolation combined with the growing sophistication of its residents may be behind the apparent fervor for Fresno to go big-time.

Robert Barrett, 39, director of the Fresno Arts Center and a man who many Fresnans worry is “bound for greater things,” looks at the way the art center’s stark new facility was financed and built in just two years after some 28 years of relative status quo. Fund raising has not been a problem and the museum has a $500,000 operating budget, $1.5 million expansion fund and $100,000 endowment fund.

The reason, said Barrett, as he eyed the closing of the “Fresno Collects” exhibition tied to the centennial celebration, is that “the art center is a representation of how people feel about their community. People like the fact that it’s a classy act, a small jewel. It appeals to our patrons. It symbolizes their success. It proves we’re sophisticated.

“I’ll tell you something,” he added. “I needed to raise money for a catalogue. It wasn’t in our budget. So I wrote to a number of people and in the first week I had more than I needed. This community is still not aware of its potential, but there’s a strong sense of pride. In other cities, the focus is so spread out. But here, just generally, there’s a pride in developing services for ourselves.”

He smiled. He knows of the problems other museum directors have with their boards, but in Fresno, he said, “it’s not difficult to get support for the most esoteric of programs, but for civic pride reasons rather than aesthetic. There are a couple of people who are major donors who willingly concede they know nothing about art. One may not even be all that interested in art. They give, they say, because a good art museum is something they want in the community, something they want for their children.”

“My daughter,” Kay Cummings said, “is always saying Fresno is one of the greatest places to go somewhere else from.”

She laughed affectionately in the direction of Jennifer Cummings, 19, who was setting the table on the patio. “Jennifer is always showing people all the close, beautiful places around Fresno. The lakes, Yosemite, Carmel. I mean, nobody could ever say Fresno is the prettiest city around. I suppose it’s rather ugly. But there’s a real effort to make the city look better, to get away from that Blackstone look (a long street of fast-food restaurants and car dealerships which until two years ago was the only route off Highway 99 to Yosemite). We’re doing more tree-planting. There’s a real feeling that we don’t want Fresno to look like L.A.”

Eating Dinner Outside

It was a typical Fresno summer night: the temperature down to the low 70s from that day’s high in the 90s, a slight wind blowing, the sky at 8 p.m. clear enough to count the stars that were just beginning to show against the deepening blue. The Cummingses were doing what nearly every Fresno family does during the summer, having dinner outside.

Kay Cummings’ Fresno roots are strong. Her father is C. W. Bonner, who owned Bonner Packing Co., the largest privately owned raisin packer in the world. Founded in Fresno in 1890, Bonner Packing was sold to the Minneapolis-based MEI Corp. in 1983. She met John Cummings, an interior designer who was raised in the exclusive San Francisco suburb of Belvedere, in San Francisco when she applied for a job at the stained-glass firm he owned with his brother. The couple were living in Marin County when they decided to move to Fresno in 1968 because of a more advantageous labor situation here. And when Cummings pulled out of the stained-glass firm, they decided to stay because “here John could make an impact in the design field. There are plenty of designers in the Bay Area.”

An artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the Fresno and Bay areas, Kay Cummings, 45, sees Fresno as a progressively exciting place to be. “A place like Belvedere, it’s already beautiful. There’s nothing you can do to revitalize it.”

“There’s so much room for expansion here,” added John Cummings, 49. “Fresno just has a lot going for it that’s going to be developed in the next two or three years.”

The Cummingses have an acute sense of Fresno’s forward movement. For years, they’ve lived in a bouganvillea-covered, Spanish-style home in one of Fresno’s many old tree-lined neighborhoods. Now they’re building a house in the foothills at the north end of Fresno, nine acres with two ponds.

Park Completed

They believe they’re just ahead of the crowd. Give Fresno a few years and city central will probably shift from downtown all the way to Blackstone and Herndon, where Saint Agnes Medical now is, said Kay Cummings. Farther north, thanks to a gift to the city, Woodward Park has just been completed with its rolling picnic areas and walking trails along a bird reserve. Drive beyond the park and signs advertising expensive-sounding developments patchwork with farmland into the foothills.

(Securing the Woodward Park site was the pet project of Lou Eaton, chairman of Guarantee Financial Corp. and a man who many residents call “the Dorothy Chandler of Fresno.” He also established the city’s new Metropolitan Museum. The Bonner family is the prime mover behind building an amphitheater at the park.)

For now, however, Fresno is just, well, Fresno--with its block parties, neighborhood yard sales and absolutely no night life. This didn’t seem to bother Mark Cummings, a tall, quiet, 16-year-old who was home for the summer and due to attend Thatcher School in Ojai this fall. He’d been working at the home site every day.

‘I Used to Hate Fresno’

His sister Jennifer, a student at Occidental College last year who plans to try for a career as a dancer in Los Angeles, likes comparing Fresno to other cities. She was home for the summer, too, working at the Ripe Tomato--gourmet, expensive and very “in” these days on the Fresno restaurant scene.

“I used to hate Fresno,” she said in a summer interview, sipping the almond-flavored ice tea she’d made from a Ripe Tomato blend. “But since I’ve been in Los Angeles, I can really see the advantages. I mean here I can take a walk and here everyone’s into sports, recreation. I know you drive by homes and you see the motorcycles and the RVs and it all looks so middle American, but I really felt stifled in L.A. I came home this summer and I just feel healthy, you know, all the fresh vegetables.”

John Cummings had his comparisons, too. In the beginning, he’d found the Fresno State crowd to be a little cliquish and provincial. And he still doesn’t think much of Fresno’s schools, which is why his children were both sent away. But, as concerns his career, “I talk to my friends in San Francisco and I realize that here I don’t have to play games. I don’t have to socialize with my clients if I don’t want to. Here you don’t run into a bunch of pseudo-sophisticates--you can build a career here without clawing your way.”

Jennifer was still thinking about the night life. If it weren’t for Roger Rocka’s Good Company Music Hall and a few other spots down in the Tower District, there’d be absolutely nothing to do. People don’t really go to bars here, and there aren’t that many good restaurants, she said.

The answer suddenly presented itself. “If we had a Melrose Avenue,” declared Jennifer Cummings, “we’d have it made.”

“If you live in Fresno, you’ve just got to have a pool,” Cyndi Baggett said, running a critical eye over each of her children as they entered the living room of their two-story home near Fresno City College. Theirs is an old home, Jeff Baggett, added, emerging from the back porch where he’d hurriedly been drying some clothes. They’ve got a swamp cooler and what may be one of the first pools ever built in Fresno.

The Baggetts, in their 30s, are sort of a small-time version of the Partridge Family, singing Christian pop wherever they’re invited. This day they were due to perform at a wedding in an hour and they were cutting it close.

Cyndi and Jeff were raised in the San Joaquin Valley and they’ve lived in a number of West Coast cities. Portland, they say, is their ideal. Fresno is a compromise. Jeff Baggett makes a 50-minute daily commute to his family’s glass business in Tulare, while Cyndi is a roaming music teacher for the Fresno Unified School District with hopes of pursuing an operatic career. Tulare, she said, would definitely be too small for them; just not enough singing opportunities. Even Fresno seems a little small at times.

Candi Baggett, 12, who had the lead in a local production of “Annie,” said she’d like to live in Hollywood and sing and dance or maybe be a clothing designer. Her brother Jon, 11, with whom she attends Computech High School, one of the city’s magnet schools for gifted children, and sister Carah, 9, were running shy this day. They guessed they like Fresno.

Cyndi Baggett eyed her eldest daughter skeptically. “I think we’d probably get more chances to perform here than if we were in a larger city,” she said. “If we were someplace like Los Angeles, if we wanted to do even what we’re doing now, we’d probably have to go big-time.”

No way around it, it does get hot here. Dry heat, often upwards of 100 degrees, every summer. No one even pretends it’s among Fresno’s charms; rather, it’s something you just live with:

--”I hate it,” grower Ron Paul said. “Most people, they’re inside with their air conditioners. But farmers, we’re out there. You’d think I’d get used to it. But I never have.”

--”I just throw water all over myself and go back out again,” Kay Cummings said, describing her routine at the construction site of her family’s new home.

--”Heck, it’s cooler here than the rest of the world,” said Joe Levy, chairman of Gottschalk’s, the valley’s largest independently owned department store. “We’ve got no humidity. Besides, we’re safe--no earthquakes, no floods. Of course we do have the tule fog. That can be kind of depressing.”

‘Very Definite Seasons’

--”I don’t mind it so much,” Cathy Rehert said. “It’s sort of nice the way the pace changes. In the summer, everything moves slower. You get up earlier and get things done in the morning. In the winter, when the fog comes in, you adapt your life to the shorter day. What it comes down to is we have very definite seasons.”

--”You go from your air-conditioned home to your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned office, and every errand you run through the day, the place is air-conditioned. You come home and leap in the pool. . . . So where’s the heat?” J. Martin Temple asked.

--”I’m stuck. If I could sell my property and get out of here, I would,” griped Larry Raven, 46, husband of society writer Penny Raven and owner of an alcohol distillery. “In the winter, I don’t see sunshine for 30 days of the year and in the summer, it’s 30 days of 100 degrees. . . . There are nice areas in Orange County. I’d like to go where there are more freeways.”

--”We put up with the heat and the fog,” said the Fresno Bee’s Ken Robison, “because that’s what keeps us from becoming another Los Angeles.”

It’s hard to peg the quintessence of Fresno. As one resident complained, “there’s nowhere I can stand and say this is my home.”

The problem is the curse of so many cities these days--urban sprawl. The downtown mall, one of the first in the nation, is hustling at noon and empty at 5:30 p.m. Two decades ago, Cal State Fresno, at the north end of town was considered the middle of nowhere. Now it’s the hub for office buildings, shopping centers and the city’s most expensive housing.

Fresno’s residents, even its leaders, seem to be watching almost unbelieving. As more than one person interviewed observed, “Planning is not our strongpoint.”

Somehow, though, Fresno’s sprawl has not deterred its feeling of community. Residents seem satisfied that they still know half the town and that it’s still easy to get involved.

Candid Comments

And it’s probably part of Fresno’s charm that its residents are candid about themselves. Lew Eaton, one of the centennial’s “100 Fabulous Fresnans,” said he established the Metropolitan Museum because “I figured if Fresno lacked anything, it lacked sophisticated cultural activities.” Joe Levy, 53, also a Fabulous Fresnan, admitted chagrin that “we’re still in the backwaters. It’s easier for the Red Wave (CSUF’s athletic program) to make money than the museum.”

And still another Fabulous Fresnan, Roselen Kershaw, who was involved in founding many of the organizations in town, wants to see a broader base of leadership, both in city government and civic organizations. “Certain of us have been the corps of Fresno for far too long.”

Mayor Doig worries about the city’s high (16%) unemployment rate. Cathy Rehert laments that while its great that “land here is cheap and there’s plenty of it, that’s one reason why downtown is deteriorating.”

But even as residents talk about these concerns, there’s the conviction that somehow, sometime, something will be done. After all, says Cathy Rehert, “no place is perfect. But Fresno is better than most.”