‘Boomerangers’ Find There’s No Place Like Home--Even If It’s Hot, Smoggy L.A.

It’s the L.A. dream of the ‘90s. Cash out and leave.

But beware. Before you head out to what you think will be a kinder, gentler life in more remote spots, listen to Everett Culp, Barbara DeWitt and Lisa Kamerman.

They packed up and left behind the smog, the traffic, the high real estate prices, the crowds, the crime and the problem-ridden schools. They resettled in Seattle, Atlanta and Spokane, Wash.

And they hated it.

“People up there had minds like cement,” said Culp, who resettled in Spokane. “All mixed up and permanently set.”

For him, the relocation dream turned into a nightmare. He and his family have come back to Los Angeles. Kamerman, who had moved to an Atlanta suburb, and DeWitt, who went to the Seattle area, hope to be back soon, too.

They are the boomerang gang--people who left Los Angeles, only to find that they missed it too much, and wanted to return even if it meant taking a financial drubbing. They are a tiny minority of those who move away from the city for financial or lifestyle reasons, according to local real estate agents.

But they have cautionary tales to tell.

In 1980, Everett Culp moved to the Pacific Northwest for his health. “I was working very hard at the time, too hard,” said Culp, who lived in Glendale before the move.

“My father had a heart problem and the way I was going, he was worried I would have one, too,” said Culp, 46, who owned a successful lighting fixture and wiring supply company in Pasadena. He enjoyed the work, but the stress was getting to him. “He suggested that maybe we should leave L.A. and slow down.”

Culp and his wife had gone camping in central Oregon and loved the area. They moved north of there, just outside Spokane, Wash., (population 171,000, in 1980) because that state has no personal income tax and because they wanted to live near a city.

On many levels, their life in the Northwest was ideal. Culp’s business ventures were successful--he owned an outlet store for two years before selling the business for a tidy sum, then joined a mortgage banking firm.

The couple bought and renovated two houses, the first was a 7,000-square-foot-house on the Spokane River and the second, smaller house was on a lake.

“When I would drive to work there were clouds in a blue sky, cattle in the fields,” Culp said. “In the winter, after a snow, everything was so quiet, so beautiful. Breathtaking.

“How could you not love it?”

And Culp, who is deeply religious, thought he would fit well into the small-city atmosphere of Spokane. But fitting in was the problem.

“I am not a liberal person,” he said, “but people in general and especially the church people up there were very, very conservative. Everything outside of what they considered normal was suspect, including some Christian groups we wanted to support. They loved guilt, that’s what their religion was all about. So closed-minded.

“For example, dancing was absolutely out of the question.”

Culp said that most of their good friends were also California transplants. “It’s almost a cultural thing,” he said. “We thought about things in a different way, we talked in a different way, we wanted to be with people who were like us.”

And finally, they found that they had not really escaped some of the worst problems of the city. “If you think there are not drugs in the schools there, forget it,” he said. “It was a problem there like everywhere else.”

In 1988, the Culp family cashed out again and came back to Southern California, but buying a comparable house in Glendale was no longer possible.

“The home we had sold for $242,000 in 1980 was now probably worth three-quarters of a million,” he said. That Glendale home is 3,600 square feet and has a pool. They found a home in La Verne, near Pomona, priced at about what they got for the Glendale home, but it has 2,200 feet and there is no pool.

Culp, who went back into the mortgage business until the real estate market softened, eventually took a job as administrator of Grace Baptist Church in Glendora.

“Whenever I hear someone say they are going to sell their house and move out,” he said, “I tell them to not sell, whatever they do, for two years. They should rent out their house or even just let it sit there, but selling it is a mistake. You have to be sure that you won’t want to come back.”

Lisa Kamerman, 23, and her husband liked everything about living in Los Angeles except the high price of housing. “It was just so expensive to rent, it was eating into our money, and we felt we were getting ripped off,” said Kamerman, who was a sales clerk at a Robinson’s department store and a delivery service courier. Her husband worked for a security firm. “Buying a place was just out of the question.”

So, a year ago March they moved to a development outside of Atlanta where they bought a new, three-bedroom house on an acre of land in a development that overlooks a national forest. The price of the home--$80,000.

“We made a bit less money here, but we worked less and we had a more comfortable lifestyle, so that was fine,” she said, speaking from Atlanta. “The trouble was the people.”

Kamerman, who is English-born and lived in L.A. about five years before moving, had few nice things to say about Atlantans. “In Atlanta, everyone does everything the same way, there is no individuality,” she said, “Especially the women. They all dress in those Laura Ashley outfits, they all furnish their homes the same way, they all think the same way, which is to say they don’t think much at all.

“I call them ‘The Stepford Wives.’ ”

Kamerman, who said she has not made close friends there, admits she is not the world’s most sociable person. “But my husband can get along with anybody,” she said, “and he hated it too.”

Her husband is already back in Los Angeles, working for his old firm. She stayed behind to try to sell their house, but plans to drive out here soon, whether it sells or not. They plan to buy a condo in the Woodland Hills area, which will likely cost a good deal more than $80,000. The vast majority of condos in Woodland Hills are of the townhouse variety and they are currently going for a minimum of about $170,000, according to Susan Mervyn of Lamb Realty in Warner Center.

“The money doesn’t matter; we will deal with it,” she said. “I have been all over the world and L.A. is where I want to live. There is such a blend of cultures there. There is no one true way to be.

“You can be whoever you want to be. There is no pressure to fit in.”

Barbara Brezina DeWitt, 42, is a Southern Californian, born and bred. But after she had a daughter in 1979, she and her husband started to think about moving on. “We thought that we should go somewhere where we could have a gentler life,” said DeWitt, who was living in Redondo Beach before the move and worked as a free-lance writer, specializing in fashion and lifestyle features.

Last year they finally moved to Edmonds, Wash., outside Seattle, which DeWitt describes as “a quaint, little seaside town.”

“But all of Washington is more quaint than I thought,” she said with a laugh. “ ‘Quaint’ as in ‘provincial.’ ”

Her life is not bad there, but there are drawbacks, including the tiresome anti-Los Angeles bias prevalent in that part of the country and the gray weather much of the year. More important, she could not find full-time work in her field. But her husband has a good full-time job, the area is beautiful, the air clean and housing prices far more moderate.

Nonetheless, she is unhappy. She can’t name anything specific that causes her distress; it’s a lot of little things.

“The clothes are much more conservative, which I notice because I write about these things. It’s a little frustrating, if that is your field,” she said. “I miss my friends, my family, walking on a sandy beach on a warm night, the place I got my hair done, washing the car on a Saturday afternoon without thinking it will probably rain, anyway.”

In other words, DeWitt is homesick.

“Edmonds is a college town and it’s sort of a nifty area,” she said. “But it’s not home.

“We’ll be coming back.”