California: Sin City or a Luring Tinseltown?

The way Shirley Henry, a Republican delegate from East Peoria, Ill., heard it, folks are fleeing California in such great numbers that they are practically causing gridlock at the border.

“My sister told me that there are so many people moving out of California that if you want a van you have to be on a waiting list for at least six weeks,” Henry said, her voice equal parts belief and disbelief. “That’s what she told me. Not true?”

California.

Still an out-sized legend to many people around the country, despite its recent troubles. A place that holds a magnetic lure to some, represents a mess others want to stay away from.

Glimpsing the state through the eye of delegates attending the GOP convention, you get distorted little slices:

To the religious right, here at the Republican Convention in force, California is two names, Hollywood and San Francisco, and that translates into sex, sin and dissolution.

To delegates from the Midwest, it was and still remains an awesome agricultural giant, a huge force in farming.

These days, though, other states see California as easy pickings. All you have to do, it seems, is tilt the state on its side and out flow jobs, aerospace contracts, young people and, most recently, the San Francisco Giants.

Not that anyone in the rest of the nation is complaining, or offering up much sympathy.

Take Shirley Henry, for instance.

“We’re getting our people back. The people who left Illinois to go to California are coming back to the heartland. You don’t have jobs for them anymore,” she said.

Or Florida Sen. Connie Mack, the grandson of the legendary baseball manager. He has been working hard with Tampa Bay interests to steal the Giants from San Francisco.

“There are a lot of baseball teams in California, there are very few in the state of Florida. It’s hard to have a broken heart about the possibility of the San Francisco Giants becoming the Tampa Bay Giants,” said Mack.

Tapping her toes and listening to the Gatlin Brothers sing “All the Gold in California” Thursday night, Kendal Unruh, 27, a delegate from Colorado, considered the lyrics and nodded in agreement. She said some of that gold was reaching all the way to her hometown in Castle Rock, Colo., and that made her happy.

“I love California because everybody is leaving and a lot of them are coming here and driving our property values up,” said Unruh, burping her 10-month-old baby, who was decked out in a “Babies for Bush” outfit.

Unruh, a director of the Colorado branch of the Christian Coalition, said her husband would like to move to California to get into the movie industry, a passion he pursues at home in a part-time way.

“My husband’s dying to go to California, but I will fight him all the way on that,” said Unruh. Looking at her son, Cameron, she said of the state: “There’s a faster lifestyle out there. The morals are looser. Alternative lifestyles are there. I don’t think it’s any place to raise a family.”

Anjenette Updike, 18, of Provo, Utah, a freshly scrubbed teen-ager proudly showing off a sash draped across her that advertises her as Utah Miss Teen 1992, said she is happy living where she is.

“I like to live in a sheltered place like Provo, Utah, where I’m away from a lot of the evil in the world. I know about it, but I don’t have to live in it,” said Updike, the second-youngest delegate at the convention and a member of the religious right.

Los Angeles, she said, “has a lot of evil influence.”

But there are always the two sides of the coin when folks talk about California.

Whenever she tells any of her friends she is going to Los Angeles to visit family members, Updike said her friends screech: “Oh, you’re going to California! I want to go.”