COLUMN ONE : Perils of Small Town Dreams : Many who left Southern California seeking havens from urban ills are surprised to find some of the same problems they tried to leave behind. Some return home; others look for the next place to go.

For Ray and Susan Bolduc, Prescott seemed to be everything Southern California wasn’t: a small, congenial place, where quaint Old West-style storefronts line safe streets under azure skies.

So, when Ray retired two years ago from his civil engineering job, the couple sold their home in Cerritos and moved here.

But for the Bolducs, euphoria soon evaporated.

Prescott’s turn-of-the-century ambience turned out to be more image than reality. Utility costs are higher than in Cerritos. Two-lane roads get clogged just as fast as Southern California freeways and frequently stay clogged longer. Worse, jobs are rare, especially the well-paying kind that many California emigres leave behind.

Susan Bolduc, 43, former personnel supervisor for an international construction and engineering firm in Los Angeles, spent two humbling years in Prescott unemployment lines. Last month, she landed a sales commission job selling tax-deferred annuities--over the telephone from her home. She figures it will take months to establish herself.

“Maybe this place isn’t for us; maybe we’ll move back,” said Ray, 61. “I recently visited my son in Cerritos, and gosh, it didn’t seem as bad to me as it did when we moved.”

The Bolducs are among tens of thousands of Southern Californians flocking to small communities throughout the West, hoping to escape recession, crime, smog, congestion and racial tensions.

The West has seen migrations before. It was settled by successive waves of people seeking jobs in agriculture, timber, railroad, mining and manufacturing industries that flourished for more than a century.

But what makes these migrants different, say historians and sociologists, is that so many are giving up homes and stable jobs to chase an illusion.

Many seek the kind of small, bucolic, tight-knit, safe--and largely white--communities celebrated in sitcoms like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Mayberry, R.F.D.” But for the most part, these places exist only on the television screen, experts say.

“There is a tragedy in this story--a ludicrous tragedy,” said Patrick Jobes, a professor of sociology at Montana State University in Bozeman who has tracked new arrivals in small towns across the West for nearly a quarter century. “Eight out of 10 arrivals move away within 10 years,” many returning to their old homes, and others moving on to another “dream” spot.

“In the late part of this century, people are recognizing a terrible nagging absence of community, which is what they are looking for,” Jobes said. “The fact is, there is very little sense of community in these small towns, which are often based on carefully cultivated nostalgia.”

“They are safer, but they are not friendlier in the sense of providing a continuing, supportive, honest form of interaction,” he added. “Yet, people pile into these places like carpetbaggers and, for the most part, lose their shirts before moving on.”

Patricia Limerick, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, calls it “business as usual in the American West.”

“The definition of resources in the wide-open West is shifting from open forests and grasslands, mining, timber and farmlands to now, a place to escape from the dilemmas of the rest of the nation,” Limerick said.

But by buying into outdated myths about “the promise of the West, people set themselves up for disaster--just like those who flocked to California during the Gold Rush and then said, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ ”

Nor are these new waves of immigrants entirely welcome. Their presence is reshaping the culture and economies of small towns struggling to cope with the newcomers’ demands for shopping malls, homes, wider streets and bigger schools.

In Lander, Wyo., there is a shortage of water taps for new homes and businesses. In Santa Fe, N. M., middle-class Latinos are now outnumbered by whites and are steadily moving away from their ancestral city, where housing values are making it difficult to stay. In Ridgeway, Colo., newcomers are at war with old-timers who do not want a 25,000-square-foot supermarket built in their once-isolated mountain community.

Farther north, longtime residents of the Colorado ski resort of Breckenridge wistfully recall when the place was a remote mud-streaked nest of trailer parks. Today, increasing numbers of newcomers are turning pricey second homes into year-round residences, and are opening T-shirt, trinket and ski shops that seem to repeat themselves every 100 yards.

“To blow off a job and sell a house to find the answer to life somewhere else is not a good deal,” said Breckenridge Mayor Steve West. “We’ve seen a lot of failures here among people who opened a restaurant, for example, thinking, ‘Heck, I can run a restaurant, I eat in them all the time.’ Not true.”

The problem is underscored in northern Arizona, which has been hit by a tide of urban immigrants from Southern California, many of whom apparently fail to heed warnings about the region’s discomforting lack of affordable housing, good wages and available jobs.

“This isn’t master’s degree country--it’s picks and shovels and driving nails, and that shocks some people,” said Dennis McKnight, a counselor at the Arizona Department of Economic Security in Prescott. “Sadly, we’re seeing more and more Californians who arrive flush with cashed-out equity, go broke and then go back to put bigger bars on the windows.”

About one-third of the people arriving in northern Arizona’s Yavapai and Coconino counties are from California. Housing starts in the two counties have skyrocketed and gross retail sales have increased 18% over the last year. A relocation agency in Flagstaff says it gets 100 inquiries a day--60% of them from Southern Californians itching to move.

But some Californians who cash out and buy homes find themselves stranded without job prospects in a place where wages average 50% less than in Los Angeles, and where people with college degrees compete with college students for minimum-wage positions.

“If you take employment out of the picture, Flagstaff can be Mayberry R.F.D.,” said Mayor Chris Bavasi. “But if you don’t have a job, or substantial savings to look for one when you get here, life goes to hell in a handbasket.”

That also holds true in Prescott, a city of 29,000 where more than 8,000 people applied for work at a Wal-Mart even before it opened two years ago. Among the desperate job seekers was Susan Bolduc, who was told she was overqualified for the clerk’s position she so badly wanted.

“I used to conduct workshops for people who were unemployed,” she said. “I didn’t realize how profound it really was until I was in that position myself.”

Also hungry for work was Lisa Clemmer, 37, a former building code inspector for the City of Newport Beach who earned $25 an hour. She lives in the tiny burg of Dewey, about 15 miles south of Prescott.

“If I don’t find a job soon, I’m seriously considering cleaning chicken gizzards at a farm down the road for $4.50 an hour,” she said.

Still, Clemmer has no intention of moving out of the large blue house trailer on a two-acre hilltop lot she calls “Ft. Clemmer,” where the only graffiti she’s ever seen said, “Go Phoenix Suns!”

“Of course, every so often I drive 90 miles to Phoenix just to visit a mall,” she said. “I haven’t gotten that out of my blood yet.”

Hoping to ensure a comfortable switch from a big city to a small town, some new arrivals pour their life savings into a small business venture--and then cross their fingers.

Paul Gordon, who raised equity by selling his home in Upland, figures he can beat the odds. He bought a Western clothing store a year ago along the downtown Prescott stretch of tourist traps known as “Whiskey Row.”

“We’ll be here for the rest of our lives,” said Gordon, 45, as visitors bound for the Grand Canyon dropped in to try on Stetson hats, cowboy boots and silver belt buckles.

“We’re surrounded by national forest and Indian reservation land; and every kid who walks in this store says ‘yes sir, no sir, thank you,’ ” he said. “And we don’t have industry or crops, which attracts migrant workers who attract crime.”

He added that “we were shocked to find that even the trash collectors and tire changers here are educated whites.”

David Epstein, 44, who runs a specialty card shop that he bought four years ago 100 miles north in Flagstaff, says he escaped a life in the San Fernando Valley that was like “Lion Country Safari for humans.”

“In Los Angeles, it was roll up the windows, lock the doors, drive fast to Disneyland and try to get home safely. Here, people don’t even lock their doors.”

Added Epstein: “Being Jewish, I was a little worried at first about anti-Semitism. But a friend here said, ‘Don’t worry, they’re too busy hating Mexicans and blacks.”

The lure of racial homogeny is a powerful, if frequently unspoken, factor in life here.

The manager of the relocation agency office in Flagstaff said the first question asked by the Southern Californians who call her each day is:

“What’s the racial breakdown there?”

“Some are so bold as to say if it isn’t the right ethnic distribution they won’t come here,” said the manager, who requested anonymity. “There’s total fear out there.”

For many middle-class escapees, the village of their dreams often turns out to be populated with people like themselves who got there a year or two earlier with the same fears, phobias and misguided expectations.

“When people first arrive in these places, I get the most enjoyable, high-flying positive interviews imaginable,” Jobes said.

“After five years, I get deep disillusionment, loss and anger,” he added.

“Occasionally, someone will point the finger of blame back at themselves,” he said. “Others go looking for another nirvana.”

Peggy Stilson, 49, moved from Lake Forest in Orange County to Prescott in August and owns and operates a gourmet gift shop on Whiskey Row.

“My husband’s mother, father, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, nephew’s wife and nephew’s wife’s mother,” she said, “are all in the process of moving here and opening small businesses.”

Stilson, however, is already thinking about greener pastures.

“People say the next place to go is Silver City, N. M.,” she said confidentially. “I hear it’s like Prescott was 20 years ago. But for God’s sakes, don’t tell anyone!”