The Magnet Metropolis - The Call of the City Is Still More Powerful Than the Lure of Wholesome Rural Life

THERE IS A GROWING literature in the American press on the horrors of living in Los Angeles and the advantages of living elsewhere.

As an Angeleno, I am certainly not hostile to this trend. Anything that will discourage people from moving here will help stave off our collapse.

One needs only to visit Cairo to see what Los Angeles will become in 10 years unless more of our citizens decide to move to Oregon, Nevada, Arizona or even North Dakota.

Some years ago, my wife and I drove through North Dakota and stayed overnight at a motel in Fargo. I have never seen an American town so bleak. There was a swimming pool behind the motel, but it was uninhabited. Not only did a cold wind make the pool forbidding, but it also blew over all the deck chairs. It was a wasteland.

But North Dakota has its defenders. My old friend Rocky Spicer recalls that he grew up in Valley City, N.D., and sends me a letter written to the editor of a Valley City newspaper by a girl, Andrea Sather, 15, whose family left California to live in Litchville, N.D.

She wrote: “We used to live in California with all of its gangs, murders, drugs, etc. But now we live in North Dakota with its peaceful prairies, friendly people and a generally relaxed atmosphere.”

Ms. Sather took particular exception to an article in Newsweek called “America’s Outback,” which, she complained, made the Plains states look like “a vast expanse of desolate wasteland.”

On the contrary, Ms. Sather observed, North Dakota is “one of the safest places to live.” She points out that only a few people have bars on their windows or expensive security systems. “It’s not because we don’t care about safety, but there is just no need for them.”

She said the authors also forgot to mention the best thing about North Dakota--the people. “My 12 years in California taught me to worry about myself first, then think about other people--if I had time. But here, everybody looks out for everybody else. People here care about what happens to everyone--from the little boy next door to the 80-year-old brothers down the road who are still farming.

“I, myself, do not plan on leaving the state. When I get married and have children, I want them to be raised here.”

I hope Ms. Sather’s hopes for the future are fulfilled. I hope she can find some goal-oriented young man who is literate and not on drugs or in jail. I hope she has healthy children (though not more than two) and that they elect to stay in North Dakota and carry on its peaceful tradition.

But there’s the rub. How are you going to keep them down on the farm? Her kids, like most, will probably grow up watching six hours of television every day, will see hundreds of cop thrillers dramatizing the excitement on the streets of Los Angeles--the drug busts, the hookers, the car chases, the rock clubs, the street life--and will drop out of school and run away to L.A. to get in on the fun. Hey, isn’t everybody in the movies?

What kid with dreams of driving a Porsche or BMW will be content to plow the fields on a John Deere tractor? What kid trudging off to school in midwinter in long underwear and heavy woolen clothing with ear muffs wouldn’t rather go around in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt? What kid eating three hearty meals a day wouldn’t prefer to subsist on junk food?

Unfortunately, the big city is a magnet. Its attractions, no matter how sleazy or sinister, are always more powerful than the moral and healthful pull of rural life. The country has become urbanized, and the cities are deteriorating rapidly.

Rocky Spicer himself, like so many whose roots are in the heartland, still has an affection for it. Litchville, he says, is a hamlet of about 500 persons, 35 miles southwest of Valley City, where he grew up. Ms. Sather’s letter was sent to him by a boyhood chum who lives in Valley City.

Spicer recalls that his father, a doctor, practiced in Litchville before moving to Valley City. He had finished Rush Medical College, in Chicago, in 1903, and a brother who practiced law in a nearby town persuaded him to settle in Litchville.

“When he got off the Litchville-Dazey-Marion short line, there were three patients waiting for him on the depot platform. After tending to them, he visited an outhouse and found a $10 bill on the floor.”

“This really is the land of opportunity,” he wrote his mother, who was then visiting her mother in Santa Ana. His mother had tried to get him to come west and locate in Santa Ana, but he wrote her:

“Eva, everyone can’t live in California.”

But, as Spicer says, “They’re sure trying.”