THEY’RE OUTTA HERE : People Do Leave : Junipero Serra set the pattern for thousands of locals who yearly edge toward the county’s exits.

It’s a matter of history. People have been leaving the Ventura County area since as far back as 1782, when Fray Junipero Serra limped in to open the San Buenaventura Mission, hung around for three weeks and then limped out again to Santa Barbara.

The tradition continues. Though the county’s population is up to 668,600 and growing by about 2% a year, thousands of locals annually edge toward the exits. These are a few of their stories.

1974: County population passes 428,300. Steve Le Vine, 17, graduates from Newbury Park High School and moves with his mother to Encino, never to return.

“What can a young man do in the Conejo Valley except construction or insurance?” he asks later. “Ventura County is slow. So if you’re at all metropolitan-minded, I don’t know how you can find your place in Ventura County.”

Le Vine goes off to college and a career as a reporter. Sixteen years later, he covers Southern Asia for Newsweek magazine and takes his mail at Dean’s Hotel in the metropolis of Peshawar, Pakistan.

1976: County population passes 450,000. Tracy Mears, 18, and her boyfriend, Dave Werth, 20, give notice at their Thousand Oaks apartment. They grew up in the Conejo Valley, but $190 a month seems like too much rent for a young couple to pay for a one-bedroom apartment. They land in Phoenix, paying $135 a month, and they get married.

Fourteen years later, homeowner and stay-at-home mother Tracy Werth gets a moment away from her 5-year-old to write home that her mortgage payment is just $600. “All Thousand Oaks ever did was show us a good time as carefree kids. As adults,” she adds, thinking of the real estate market, “the area can only kick us in the teeth.”

1978: County population passes 490,000. Frances Cogswell, 22, graduates from San Diego State University. But instead of returning to Camarillo, where she grew up, she decides that she’ll stay down south. She wants a career in the advertising and entertainment fields, and she can’t imagine finding that in Ventura County.

Twelve years later, she’s working as a sales assistant at KNX news radio in Los Angeles and living in an apartment near Griffith Park.

“You have to put up with a lot,” she says, “but yeah, I like Los Angeles.” And even with Ventura County’s growth in recent years, she adds, “I can’t imagine that there are many ad agencies, let alone ones specializing in entertainment . . . But if the county continues to grow--I never say never.”

1980: County population passes 525,000. Duncan and Jacquie Campbell of Oxnard, proud new parents of baby Noelle, can’t find a quiet affordable apartment that will accept children. And Duncan, a 24-year-old construction worker with entrepreneurial instincts, can’t find a business opportunity. Off they flee to Jacquie’s family’s farm in Kansas, where they consider their options.

“I didn’t leave Ventura County because I didn’t like Ventura,” says Campbell a decade later, from his home in Honolulu. “It was basically just a matter of looking for opportunities to be an entrepreneur,” he says. “And the waves are good.”

He and his wife moved to Hawaii in 1982, returned to Ventura County temporarily in 1986 and 1987, and then returned to the islands. They now own one of the premier surfers’ hangouts on the North Shore, Cafe Haleiwa, and in addition he runs his own graphic arts business. The place is good for business and families, Campbell says, “and the waves are good.”

1982: County population passes 550,000. Darcy Haynes, 18, born at Ventura County Medical Center, raised in Oxnard, and a student at Sawyer College in Ventura, heads to Arizona to seek his fortune.

“I studied to be a computer programmer,” he explains from Phoenix eight years later, “and I thought it would be easier to break into the field in Arizona.” And so it was.

“I only intended to stay a year, but it’s such a relaxed environment that it was easier to stay . . . How many 26-year-olds in California can afford their own home? I couldn’t live like this in California.

“And,” he adds, “we have water.”

1987: County population passes 620,000. Twenty-one years after graduating from Santa Paula Union High School, and 15 years after he started teaching there, Bill Garcia quits. Soon he, his wife and two daughters are bound for Merced.

“It was just a fluke,” he says three years later. “I was at a teacher employment fair in Northern California. I was just standing around, and was spotted by one of the recruiters . . . My wife and I drove up to Merced and it was just a really pleasant experience. A lot of trees . . . a couple of creeks running through town. . . . And they made me a real good offer. They made me their librarian.”

1988: County population passes 635,000. Chris Stanley graduates from Thousand Oaks High School and enrolls at UCLA. In the fall, he moves to the dorms. A year and a half later, the phone wakes him at 9:30 on a Monday morning, and a reporter asks him to explain himself.

“It was my ‘safe school,’ ” he says of UCLA. “I applied to UC Berkeley, but I didn’t get in.”

But he likes UCLA enough that, instead of returning to Thousand Oaks for the summer, he has made plans to work and live in the university area.

1990: County population passes 665,000. Tom and Lezley Buford, with six years together in Ventura behind them and a pair of substantial jobs, light out for Michigan with their three children. Tom, who grew up in Ventura, plans to move from his own law practice to a firm that will give him more work on labor issues. Lezley moves from county planning to economic development and to a job six blocks from her front door.

The move isn’t completely out of the blue, since the two had lived in Kalamazoo for a decade in the 1970s and early 1980s, but it catches their Ventura neighbors off guard.

“They were shocked--first of all, that you would leave the weather to go back to four seasons,” says Lezley Buford five months later. “And then also, I think, people were shocked because Tom had really built up a name for himself.”

Of course, the Bufords had a few shocks awaiting them too. Rebecca Buford, a five-year veteran of California’s packed public school classrooms, found one when she started at her new school.

When the 11-year-old arrived at the classroom and found fewer than 20 children, her mother said that her daughter “kept waiting for the other half of the class to come back . . . She thought they were all out on the playground or something.”