Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : MISSION VIEJO : ‘Next time I move, it will be to Montana or Wyoming.’

Mission Viejo offered its residents a promise years ago. It was an advertising gimmick, this “California Promise” written on the sales brochures and billboards, but the words quickly became shorthand for a shared yearning.

Mission Viejo, the corporate slogan suggested, would not be Los Angeles, the city that had managed to tarnish the promise of living in the Golden State. Mission Viejo would be planned, orderly, uniformly attractive, safe.

More than anything else, as people here bemoan what they see as the breakdown of civility in Los Angeles, they now feel vindicated for choosing well. Mission Viejo is a family town, they say. They’d trade excitement for security any day, and for the most part, they have done just that.

Residents speak of their well-plotted escape from Los Angeles, and places like it, with pride. Sometimes they wonder if saying so might be in poor taste, but then they go ahead and talk about it just the same.

The distance of 50 miles or so that separates them from Los Angeles is more reassuring now.

“We feel great about our choice, especially now, and that’s sad,” says Greg Stephens, an insurance executive picnicking in a neighborhood park with his wife, Laura, and their two kids. “I grew up in Glendale, so I know all about L.A.”

Here high school students also speak warmly of their “sheltered life.” Real estate agents here in south Orange County are hopeful of a post-riot jump in home sales. Professionals say they would change companies rather than accept a job transfer to Los Angeles.

Husbands say they don’t want their wives traveling there. USC fans wonder if next season’s games will be safe.

Yet the citizens of Mission Viejo are not smug. The chorus, repeated time and again: “It could happen here.” So they are ever vigilant, on the lookout for signs of the urban cancer they see metastasizing from Los Angeles.

Mission Viejo High School, for example, has joined the ranks of schools that have adopted a policy forbidding students to wear any clothing associated with gangs. There was even a fatal drive-by shooting late last year in neighboring Lake Forest. Among those arrested were some Mission Viejo teen-agers.

If the omens become more ominous, people here say they will not hesitate to move again. Los Angeles seems to be on everyone’s mind. In the same way that the “California Promise” resonated so warmly, the name Los Angeles has become code for a nation’s seemingly intractable urban ills.

“I’m part of the white flee,” says a firefighter and paramedic who asked that his name not be used. “I grew up in L.A. I worked in L.A. I owned property in Long Beach. I’ve seen the demographics and I’m sorry, I don’t want to be part of that. . . .

“Right now, Irvine is a real good buffer zone. Next time I move, it will be to Montana or Wyoming.”

Darlene Storie, an office administrator, says she moved here from Long Beach 20 years ago when her local school district was planning to bus her children to racially integrate the schools.

“I’m not a racist,” she says. “I feel really bad about what happened up there. I don’t think most of the people here agree with the (Rodney G.) King verdict either. But what happened was scary. The hate, the fact that they hate us.”

Before the King verdicts and the violence in their wake, talk of racial differences seemed barely to surface here. The city is overwhelmingly white. Only 1% of its residents are black, fewer than 8% are Latino and 6% Asian. Now, racial attitudes appear to have hardened, with few apologies, if at all. The “they” is the other guy, of a different race.

A woman named Joyce is happy to report that now even her grandchildren are out of Los Angeles: “I left L.A. the day my children started school. It was very bad. I left in 1959. There were a lot of problems with minority groups, with education. I will not accept living in such an environment, and if it keeps it up, I will move from here. But how much more south can I go?”