Suburbs’ March Is Treading on Small Town Life

The son of a chicken farmer, George Beardsley moved with his folks to the Mojave Desert outpost of Hesperia in 1948. The roads were dirt, the pace slow and the nearest city, San Bernardino, took two hours to reach.

“There were 300 people here then,” Beardsley recalled, “and I knew every one of them. Not only that, I knew their dogs and the names of their dogs too.”

Forty-two years have passed, and Beardsley is now the mayor. But the sleepy burg of his youth has vanished, swallowed into suburbia by the state’s dizzying popularity.

In California’s interior, Hesperia and other vintage towns such as Modesto and Folsom were among the fastest growing American communities in the preliminary 1990 census figures released last week. Those three and many others have been transformed by the 5.6 million residents added to the state in the last decade.

It’s the story of 20th-Century California played out again--when the suburbs march outward, the old life disappears. These towns are losing their distinct flavor under the onslaught of a new generation of suburbanites who come to escape crime, urban real estate prices and the fast lane. But to many old-time residents, the newcomers bring unwanted changes.

In Modesto, home of the cruising culture glamorized by George Lucas in the movie “American Graffiti,” farm lanes where generations of high school sweethearts spent their Friday nights are being covered by back yards.

In Folsom, once a slow-moving prison town, ancient oak trees have been cleared by developers to put in new tracts for commuters to Sacramento and beyond.

Old-timers in Hesperia, which grew by 268% in the ‘80s, yearn for the clear views of the San Bernardino Mountains and the quiet that made the town a ‘50s resort for consumptives and movie stars. And they remember the Joshua trees.

“It’s hard to recognize the place these days,” lamented local historian Myra McGinnis, thumbing through an album of photos and faded news clippings. “It used to be miles and miles of Joshua trees--beautiful Joshua trees. Look at it now. It’s a concrete jungle!”

Instead of working the potato fields and stopping in at the Grange Hall on Main Street, many of Hesperia’s 49,818 residents commute daily to San Bernardino, now an easy freeway trip over Cajon Pass, or all the way to the coast, to Los Angeles and Orange County.

When they return at night, they don’t notice there are no more potato farms. What they appreciate is that houses are affordable and plentiful.

The real estate agent has replaced the desert tortoise as the ubiquitous creature of Hesperia. Twenty-nine real estate companies belong to the Chamber of Commerce, and 1,500 agents prowl the streets. Sixty new agents signed on in August alone.

Most of the new homes try to blend with Hesperia’s rural flavor, occupying lots no smaller than one-third of an acre.

But the mark of growth is indelible. A classroom full of new students enrolls in Hesperia’s schools every 10 days. Every campus runs year-round, trying to stay ahead of the crush, and three of the 14 schools are entirely portable. Teachers and textbooks are in constant demand.

What used to be a sleepy Main Street is now a busy route for commuters bound for Interstate 15, their link to the rest of Southern California. It is now bumper-to-bumper at peak times of the day.

Remnants of the old Hesperia remain. The Appaloosa Club and Future Farmers of America are still going strong. Local girls still covet the annual Rodeo Queen title.

Fifty miles of city roads remain unpaved, City Councilman Bruce Kitchen said. On weekends, some streets lead optimistic home shoppers out through a forest of yucca and simply dead-end in the desert.

But for old-timers like McGinnis, the change has been wrenching.

“I know a town can’t stand still, but I used to know everybody around here,” he said. “Now, it’s all you can do to get a smile out of somebody at the post office.”

As in other California towns bombarded by new people in the 1980s, Hesperia has felt the tension between longtime residents--who liked the town’s horsy flavor--and newcomers who want a spiffy tract home free of barnyard smells and flies.

“The best example is our famous case of the man with 85 roosters,” City Councilman Percy Bakker said. “At daybreak, those roosters go off and this guy’s neighbor goes nuts. But he’s got a right to those roosters. What can we do?”

In downtown Modesto, the tune is the same at the lunch counter of Smitty’s Coffee Shop.

“I used to know everyone in town,” lamented Bill Williams, a fruit farmer who has lived in Modesto since 1939. “Now I know hardly anyone.”

What’s left of the Tuolumne River after it leaves the Sierra Nevada trickles through Modesto, but that’s not what made this San Joaquin Valley farm town swell by 52% between 1980 and now.

Odd as it seems, Modesto is being shaped by events in San Francisco, 80 miles to the west, and elsewhere in the Bay Area.

As the Bay Area population grows, people are fleeing east in search of lighter traffic, a greater sense of safety, and affordable homes. New tracts of Bay Area refugees are popping up on the hotter, valley side of Altamont Pass in towns such as Manteca and Ripon. Modesto, farther down California 99, is getting the residents forced out of those towns and some of its own Bay Area immigrants.

Smitty’s, where the regulars greet each other by name, now stands in the shadow of a new 14-story hotel. It dominates the city’s flat skyline like a single corn stalk in an empty field. A shopping center, jammed with department stores and boutiques, does a booming business on the outskirts of town where walnuts grew a few years ago.

The regulars at Smitty’s have been left raw by the sudden change in Modesto.

“We’ve already lost the small-town flavor--it’s gone,” Williams said.

“It’s just a crying shame,” says Brad Bondi, a retired auto mechanic. “They’re paving over prime farmland and, what they don’t pave over, they put houses on it.”

The urban refugees are drawn by Modesto’s low home prices--you can still purchase a three-bedroom house there for $130,000--and a lifestyle that seems easier than the fast lane of the Bay Area.

“I left San Francisco to get out of the rat race, the crime and the pollution,” said Tom Kortlang, a recent arrival who works for a chain of jewelry stores. “I love it here. This town is . . . very clean, it’s centrally located and the people are wonderful.”

Business has thrived on the newcomers. There is plenty of work for the building trades. Modesto’s large agribusinesses, such as E&J; Gallo Winery and Tri-Valley Growers, have prospered. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Ciccarelli expects the prosperity to continue this decade.

“Business overall has been good,” Ciccarelli said. “Agriculture has done well, the building industry is doing well. Modesto is a great place to live.”

Despite that, a backlash has formed. Just as in Hesperia, the schools have been forced to run year-round and traffic snarls are becoming common. Voters have approved just one sewer extension in the last decade, and a sewer bond issue on the November ballot is making people rethink growth.

“We’ve always been growing, but people feel the change is more dramatic now,” said Peggy Mensinger, a former mayor and leader of Modesto’s slow-growth movement. “There’s an increasing feeling we’re getting onto the big-city level.”

Folsom, a 135-year-old former railroad town on the American River in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento, can’t be accused of going big-city. The census counted 29,484 residents, a small town by California standards. Still, that is 167% more than in 1980.

“When I first moved here, Briggs Ranch was just that--a cattle ranch owned by L. B. Briggs. now Briggs Ranch is just the name of another housing development,” said Sandy Pegram, an accountant who moved to Folsom 16 years ago. “That’s the way it is all over town. So many of these beautiful hillsides where cattle used to graze are gone.”

Where she used to hear the afternoon blast of the horn at nearby Folsom State Prison calling for the daily head count, today she hears only the “sounds of growth”--the hammers and equipment of construction crews building housing tracts and shopping centers.

Pegram laments the leveling and bulldozing of the rolling hills near her home, the loss of oak groves to industrial parks, and the encircling of marshy wetlands along the American River--once a sanctuary for flocks of birds--by tract homes.

But the golden, glowing hillsides that Pegram rhapsodizes about are not remembered as fondly by Folsom Mayor Jack Kipp, who welcomes the town’s new look.

“Those hills are brown and filled with dry grass from May to September. . . . They never looked that beautiful to me,” he says.

The cattle ranches, he said, are now put to better use. He is proud of the city’s rapid increase in sales and property tax collections, the 11 new housing developments built in the last decade and the $17-million civic center under construction.

Twenty years ago, Folsom’s quaint main drag, Sutter Street, served a population of about 5,000. The town was dominated by the prison, which opened in 1880, and a single aerospace firm that provided most of the jobs.

But in this boom, which has turned Folsom into a suburb within the expanding sphere of Sacramento, high-tech firms have flooded in to take advantage of the relatively inexpensive land and plentiful housing for employees. Kipp predicts that Folsom will double in population again in 15 years.

On a recent afternoon along the American River, children sunbathed on the rocks and a fisherman cast his line, just as they have in Folsom for decades. But the scene was also different. A stream of cars crossed the graceful span of the Rainbow Bridge. On East Bidwell Street, which has replaced Sutter as the retail center of town, drivers zoomed by miles of fast-food restaurants, chain stores, strip malls and liquor stores.

“Look at this . . . we could be in San Jose, L.A. . . . anywhere,” said Grant Cloud, dismissing the scene with a wave of his hand. “The character of our town is being destroyed.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Jenifer Warren in Hesperia, Miles Corwin in Folsom and Max Boot in Modesto.

FAST GROWING COMMUNITIES Preliminary 1990 U.S. Census figures, compared to final figures from 1980, show these three communities are among California’s fastest-growing. 1. Hesperia: 1980: 13,540 1990: 49,818 % change: 268% 2. Modesto: 1980: 106,602 1990: 162,282 % change: 52% 3. Folsom: 1980: 11,003 1990: 29,484 % change: 167% Source: Census Bureau