Oxnard Hankering for Respect : Seashore City Looks for Motto, Brighter Image

Alas, poor Oxnard.

With nothing but uncluttered beaches, succulent strawberries and a quaint harbor to recommend it, Ventura County’s largest city might as well be Rodney Dangerfield. It don’t get no respect.

Johnny Carson maligns it. Dr. Demento raps it. Even a few residents turned on their own hometown when the Oxnard Convention and Visitors Bureau launched a contest for a new city motto last month.

One Oxnardian proposed a motto that made fun of Oxnard’s strawberry festival and former standing as the Lima Bean Capital. Another took a poke at the city’s large Latino population. A third lampooned the billboard designed to remind motorists along a rare inland stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that, yes, it’s Oxnard-By-the-Sea.

‘Ghetto by the Sea’

“Some guy sent in a motto that said, ‘Oxnard: Ghetto by the Sea,”’ recalls Robert Varley, director of the visitors bureau, who coordinated the contest. “I said, ‘Thanks a lot, pal.’ ”

Soon Oxnard will have a response of its own. In the next week or so, a winner will be culled from among 100 entrants, and Oxnard boosters once again will undo decades of derision with a few well-chosen words. Among promising slogans so far are “Oxnard: This Side of Eden” and “Oxnard: It’s Beachin”--a personal favorite of Varley.

But whether the tag will make a silk purse out of a civic whoopie cushion, and catapult Oxnard out of the ranks of such perennially abused cities as Burbank, Philadelphia and Newark, remains to be seen.

After all, the motto does nothing to remedy what most agree is the problem.

In a region where most communities bear lilting Spanish references to saints, explorers or such stunning geological formations as Palos Verdes, the city’s name conjures its roots--and a host of other things--all too vividly.

Target of Comedians

As the surname of a pair of brothers who opened a sugar beet factory there in the late 1800s, Oxnard comes off as “German and guttural,” said Harry Capehart, owner of Hornblower’s Comedy Club in Ventura and a promoter of comedians who repeatedly take the town to task for its name.

“Oxnard sounds like a beef by-product. ‘I’ll take a pound of Oxnard,’ ” Capehart said, quoting one of the comics.

“The name does seem to roll off the tongue oddly,” echoes Barry Hansen. A Sherman Oaks musicologist who is radio’s nationally syndicated “Dr. Demento,” he is responsible for what is probably Oxnard’s best known barb.

In a 1978 recording popularized on Hansen’s program, Oxnard pop duo Clark Maffitt and Brian Davies crooned about an unlikely romantic evening in “October in Oxnard,” a snide spoof on “April in Paris.”

“Seagulls up in the sky,” they sang, “were dropping little bits of joy on you and me in our lovely Oxnard-by-the-Sea.”

Name-Change Campaigns

Proposals to change Oxnard’s name have circulated over the years. Renaming Oxnard is a frequent subject of letters to local newspapers, and nary a city election is held that a candidate does not offer a suggestion, said City Councilman Manuel Lopez.

But no movement has ever gained enough steam to rename Oxnard after the nearby Channel Islands, the most popular suggestion. Varley chalks this up to reverence for the city’s 85-year history, which, outside of the perennial name-changing discussion, has consisted largely of the same sort of municipal disputes that characterize thousands of other towns.

Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, whose district includes Oxnard, has another explanation. He believes that such suggestions insult long-time Oxnard residents.

“There are people who’ve lived here all their lives and they wouldn’t want to see it changed,” he said. “It’s the name they’ve identified themselves with all their lives.”

Meanwhile, such newcomers as Timothy Carrithers, a 29-year-old editor of Cycle magazine, struggle to save face while living in a city with “a lower-order working class image. It’s like Oxnard is the Third World Country of Southern California. You can tell when you hit it on the freeway. All the BMWs turn to pickups.”

Creative Alternatives

A resident of the Silver Strand beach area, he confesses to telling people that he lives in “anything but Oxnard.”

Carrithers is not alone, according to Bill Almaraz, customer service manager for the postal service in Oxnard.

“I’ve had a lot of calls from customers and businesses who want to use Channel Islands” as their address, he said. “We don’t like to encourage it, but as long as they have the correct ZIP code, the mail will get where it’s suppose to go. We like to say we don’t allow it--but it does happen.”

Those seeking the catchy phrase haven’t been any less persistent than residents trying to wring the Oxnard out of their addresses.

Promoters three years ago christened Oxnard “The Heart of the Gold Coast” by dumping toy coins from the boat of a local developer offshore from the Colony subdivision at Mandalay Beach.

Bumper Stickers

Before that, the city’s Chamber of Commerce emblazoned pens with the slogan, “Oxnard: Only Our Name Keeps Us Humble,” and printed bumper stickers that read, “Oxnard: More Than Just a Pretty Name.”

No one seems to know why the city abandoned those two mottoes, whose only crime appears to have been their aptness. But the “Gold Coast” distinction soon tired under wear and ultimately failed to differentiate Oxnard from its coastal neighbors, Varley said.

“Everyone from Malibu to Santa Barbara can claim to be the Gold Coast,” he complained. “We wanted something just for Oxnard.”

Of course, that is what the Raiders were supposed to be. When the Los Angeles football team moved its summer camp to Oxnard three years ago, sportswriters predicted that the sleepy little farming village was going to be catapulted into the big time. But now the Raiders are threatening to pull out of Oxnard, the hotel hurriedly built for their arrival has fallen into financial hardship and the city’s image remains unchanged.

“There’s an impression that Oxnard is a seedy farm town that you drive through on the way somewhere else,” Varley said. “Every time we do an ad, someone says, ‘I didn’t know you had beaches and a harbor.’ ”

Positive Press

But word is slowly spreading.

In an April article about the Strawberry Festival, Sunset Magazine raved about Oxnard’s “lush farm fields, sparkling in a backlit irrigation mist.”

Then this month Los Angeles Magazine listed Oxnard as home to one of California’s few true seaside resorts--Embassy Suites Mandalay Beach Resort--while Travel & Leisure magazine called it “one of the best getaway places in California.”

“No fighting here for a yard of sand on which to stake your claim,” the article continued. “Just stretch out and enjoy the peace and quiet.”

In a less glamorous but no less lucrative twist, Oxnard recently edged out San Diego for the honor of hosting the California State Men’s Bowling Championships. The event is expected to draw 1,000 bowlers each weekend through August, bringing $2.3 million to the area.

Tourism brought Oxnard $1.2 million last year in bed taxes alone. Including the money spent in hotels and restaurants, tourists pumped an estimated $74 million into the city’s economy in 1987.

Still, Varley, whose job is to court travel writers and conventioneers, has his hands full.

Stigma Survives

Surveys in recent years found that potential visitors thought of Oxnard as a dangerous place with poor restaurants and a disastrous presentation from either the dilapidated main drag--Oxnard Boulevard--or the sparsely landscaped Ventura Freeway. By contrast, notes Oxnard City Councilwoman Dorothy Maron, the freeway “looks like a botanical garden” as it cuts through Ventura.

Boosters rush to point out that the situation has dramatically improved since Councilman Lopez tried 26 years ago to sponsor a meeting of fellow optometrists. Only one hotel and one restaurant could accommodate the 40 or so attendees.

Oxnard’s supporters are proud of four major hotels in the area, two of which--the Radisson Suite and the Embassy Suites--have sprung up in past two years. But word has not spread to all corners.

At the Los Angeles Travel Show in April, for example, Varley’s entreaties to vacation in Oxnard drew guffaws from Doreen Smith, a 57-year-old Camarillo resident who teaches elementary school in Oxnard.

“I go there to work,” she said. “Going to Oxnard for a vacation tickles my funny bone.”

Lilli Sandor, a 40-year-old actress from West Hollywood who stopped by Varley’s brochure-laden table, was less amused:

“It’s OK if you live there but it’s nowhere you’d want to go,” she said. “It’s low-income and industrial.”

The city, like most others, does have its dark side. In the past year, for instance, efforts to reclaim three neighborhoods from urban blight, prostitution and drug dealers have made local headlines.

But Varley, who came to his job almost two years ago from Odessa, Tex., appears to be undaunted. After promoting tourism in the dusty West Texas oil town, trumpeting Oxnard’s virtues came as a welcome relief.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he recently told a gathering of downtown merchant associations in his distinctive Lone Star drawl.

Overshadowed by Neighbors

Varley, like many of Oxnard’s boosters, believes that the city has a bad reputation among only its more affluent neighbors in Ventura County. The rest of the world, the view goes, hasn’t heard of Oxnard, which is where the motto comes in.

But try telling that to all the wiseacres who make Oxnard grist for their mill.

Oxnardians still smart from the japes delivered over the years by no less a wit than Johnny Carson, although the jokes themselves seem to have been expunged from the collective memory both of the city and “Tonight Show” old-timers.

“I know he did a lot on Oxnard,” said former Tonight Show publicity director Joe Bleeden, “but I can’t tell you what. Fourteen years of monologues all run together.”

But more recent insults remain alive. KROQ disc jockey Jim (The Poorman) Trenton, for instance, recently joked how Oxnard “sounds like the sort of noise a pig makes when it’s having sex.”

Los Angeles Herald-Examiner music critic Todd Everett last fall slammed rock vocalist Ry Cooder by complaining that his saxophonist “might as well have been phoning in his part from Oxnard.”

And wherever Long Beach comedian Robert Jenkins plays, he dusts off the one about how Oxnard is “Wyoming with a beach.”

Then he launches into the inevitable plays on the name that “sounds so darn funny.”

“Oxnard sounds like a delicacy in the Far East,” he tells audiences. “Eat the Oxnard or you will offend them.”