Duel in the Sun : The County’s Grudge Match With L.A. : Is for Bragging Rights in Southland

L ay-deez and gentlemen!

In this corner, weighing in at 3.3 million people and wearing a cloak of cultural superiority . . . . She’s the land of palm trees and really big deals and the Olympics . . . . She’s more than 200 years old and is the longstanding self-acclaimed CHAM-PEEN of Southern California life . . . . You know her as the City of Angels . . . . Lo-o-o-o-os An - geles!!!!

(Pause for audience response to subside.)

And in this corner . . . . The challenger, weighing in at a conservative 2.2 million people and wearing canvas shorts and Mickey Mouse ears . . . . She hails from the confluence of the 1, the 5, the 405, the 55, the 57, the 91, the 73, and virtually every other freeway built in this century . . . . She’s just 100 years old, she’s young, she’s hungry, she gave you Disneyland, she also gave you -- well, she gave you Disneyland . . . . She’s the challenger to the ideal notion of Southern California life . . . . Let’s hear it for . . . O-range Coun-n-n-n-nty!”

(Pause for audience response to subside.)

What a fight, huh? Orange County and Los Angeles in a winner-take-all grudge match for the undisputed metropolitan Bragging Rights Championship of the Southland (that neatly excludes San Diego, among others).

Ever since a part of Los Angeles County known as the Santa Ana Valley freed itself in 1889 and became Orange County, the two have poked and needled each other.

Orange County historian and arch-defender Jim Sleeper said some accounts give the impression the separation from Los Angeles County was polite. Quite the contrary, Sleeper said in remarks delivered in October at the Conference of Orange County History at Chapman College:

“That’s a little like saying that the U.S. was created because the American colonists shook hands with George III,” Sleeper said. “The truth is, we hated the bastards. And L.A.’s esteem for us wasn’t much higher.”

But just to show that all’s forgiven, Sleeper, in a 1980 publication on county history, wrote on the 16-page outline’s inside jacket that additional copies were available at the following prices:

Natives, $1.

Old-timers (pre-1930), $2.

Newcomers (post-1930), $3.

Non-residents, $5.

L.A. People, $40.

Mark Baldassare, a UC Irvine sociology professor and public opinion pollster, said: “The big picture is that, historically, there’s been an interdependence between Orange County and Los Angeles. Over time, Orange County has become more and more of an independent entity, a separate metropolitan community.

“Historically, Orange County was a place where L.A. residents moved to in order to escape what they viewed as urban blight. . . . The Orange County attitudes toward L.A. are in a lot of ways dictated by that past interdependence. A lot of people moved here because they didn’t like things about L.A.

“People here still don’t like a lot of things about L.A. The thing that’s changed is that Orange County residents feel they have something better going than in L.A. They feel they’ve developed the version of Southern California paradise.”

An offshoot of that, Baldassare said, is that Los Angeles is becoming “increasingly irrelevant” to Orange County people.

Harriett M. Wieder has seen life from both sides of the Orange Curtain, as an aide to former Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and now as an Orange County supervisor.

“I don’t think they have the respect they should for us,” Wieder said, referring to Angelenos’ view of Orange County people.

“Our economy per capita is much better than theirs,” Wieder said. “We’re better managed because we’re learning from the mistakes L.A. made in urban sprawl.”

Wieder said hurt feelings are “very real on our part. It’s kind of like we’re saying, ‘We’re grown up, we want to stand on our own two feet and don’t ignore us.’ The big frustration is that, being situated between L.A. and San Diego, the perception is we’re a place to stop and get gas.”

While noting that many Los Angeles professional firms have established county offices, Wieder acknowledged that many Angelenos still see the county as “Hicksville.”

The county’s identity is hurt by not having, she said for example, its own highly visible, locally identifiable TV station, where Los Angeles and San Diego have several. She also good-naturedly referred to The Times’ “audacity” in still using “Los Angeles” in the newspaper’s front-page nameplate in its Orange County Edition.

The same situation exists with the county’s professional sports teams, the Rams and Angels, both of whom play at Anaheim Stadium but neither of whom has an Orange County designation.

“Orange County? That’s down near San Diego, isn’t it?” asked Peter Morrison, director of the RAND Corp.’s Population Research Center in Santa Monica.

Hey, just kidding, Morrison quickly added. “Orange County, to me, looks like a gigantic back-yard suburb of Los Angeles, but I know that it’s grown up into its own city and is probably strategically very well positioned in terms of the long-term future.”

Relatively new as a metropolis, Orange County will probably undergo a personality transformation as it matures, Morrison predicted. “Its future probably is going to be shaped to a large extent by the opportunities that the Pacific Rim economy will present.”

As for Los Angeles, “the rivalry is always there,” he said. “My honest impression of Orange County, looking at it as a resident of Los Angeles, is that you have horrible traffic congestion down there. My image of L.A. is that it may get as bad as Orange County.”

It is common for two neighbors to “have that needling and rivalry and stereotypes and images” of each other, Morrison said.

Sam and Pamela Goldstein have traversed both worlds, having lived in Studio City and, for the last 11 years, in Newport Beach.

“When I first moved out here and people asked me on a plane where I came from, I said I was from L.A.,” Pamela Goldstein said. “It really bothered me. I didn’t want to explain. I see myself as being very cosmopolitan, and I didn’t want to describe myself as being someone from Orange County.”

A board member of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Goldstein said she still gets miffed when county audiences “clap between movements of the symphony” and “overdress when they go places,” but she believes that the county is developing a stronger arts identity through the Performing Arts Center and the Newport museum.

Her husband, a real estate investor who also is active with the museum, spends a lot of time in Los Angeles. He believes that the county finally “has divorced itself from L.A. in that we now have a whole community.”

The need to go to Los Angeles for reasons such as cultural events, sports and big-time shopping has dissipated, Sam Goldstein said, noting that many county residents “could care less what the hell happens in L.A. It’s a real effort to go into L.A., where before it was a necessity.”

Jane Pisano lives in Los Angeles and is president of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, a group that prepared a plan for improving life in the City of the Angels.

She said she hasn’t picked up on a prevailing condescending attitude toward Orange County by Angelenos.

As for a rivalry between the areas, she said:, “I think many in Orange County would use that very word to characterize the relationship. I see Orange County and Los Angeles interconnected, for better or worse. . . . I think we have a real issue and problem in this basin in working together across county boundaries.

“I think the perceived rivalry between the counties gets in the way of a solution. Each is going to have to value the differences between them and their strengths.

“If our citizens, civic and business leaders and elected leaders can’t get together and work out problems, then Orange County is not going to be the place in the year 2000 that its residents hope it will be, and Los Angeles County won’t be the place its residents hope it will be.”

Maura Eggan, the director of marketing for South Coast Plaza, said: “Although old habits and opinions die hard, I think slowly there is an awareness in Los Angeles that Orange County is more dynamic and cultural than it was 20 years ago.”

A former Manhattan Beach resident but an Orange County resident for the last 5 years, Eggan said: “I don’t think it was ever a bitter kind of rivalry. I don’t think Angelenos were putting Orange County down in a mean, vicious way. Part of it was based on genuine ignorance. They didn’t think there was anything between Anaheim and Newport Beach. Another part of it was the self-absorption” of Los Angeles.

While some residents in West Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley still might consider Orange County “beyond the pale,” Eggan said: “I think that view is dissipating. With attention focused on Orange County because of things like the Performing Arts Center, it’s not the cultural desert it once was.”

However, she added, “it seems to me many people in Orange County really have disdain for L.A. I think there is a feeling that this is nirvana, and everything is here. I think we feel with some justification (that) what we have is a life style that others envy, including Angelenos.”

Baldassare said a June poll confirms that attitude. Of 600 Orange County residents surveyed, just 3% said they would rather live in Los Angeles, he said.

Baldassare also predicted a growing rivalry between the two counties: “I get the sense that over the last 5 to 6 years, Orange County is being taken more seriously, not only by the giant metro area to the north of us, but the state as a whole. For example, it was a big step when Caltrans said it would open an office in Orange County and not just have an office in Los Angeles.”

Los Angeles also is taking the county more seriously, he said. “There probably will be more rivalry over resources because the counties are so different. They have such different political makeup. They have some issues in common, such as terrible traffic, but in a lot of ways, they are very different in social makeup and with a different history.

“I think we’ll start to see more of a direct rivalry and competition for resources, whether it’s jobs or people or government funding, or fighting for roads.”