A Tale of Two Cities

In the stir over L.A.’s awkward love-me campaign, best characterized by the win-together banner hanging like wet laundry down the side of City Hall, one hardly notices the tiny like-me campaign emanating from Lancaster.

They’re doing what we’re doing, utilizing the media in an effort to boost their collective ego, attract tourists and/or business and flash a big, friendly smile to the rest of the world.

This seems a little strange in L.A., where you can’t stop at an ATM machine without first posting an armed guard, but honesty is not a necessary element of civic boosterism. Who’s going to come to a place that boasts, “Together we’re the worst”?

Lancaster, with its sister city, Palmdale, tries to make you forget for the moment that they are located in the middle of nowhere by luring you with good schools, a low crime rate and thoroughfares with names like Nice Avenue and Safe Street. Really.

I became aware of the Lancaster-Palmdale booster campaign just about the time L.A. was beginning to wow the world with “Together we’re the best,” a slogan utilizing the themes from both an old World War II poster (“Together we win”) and General Telephone’s “It’s amazing what we can do together.”

The war poster seems more appropriate to L.A.’s current situation, depicting as it does armed men charging toward an unseen enemy . . . a familiar sight in many sections of the city even today.

A slightly altered version of the GTE logo might also fit here: It’s amazing what we can do together, as long as we’re doing it to each other.

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I became interested in Lancaster through its 60-second spot radio commercial that featured a lot of cheering and subtle suggestions that maybe it’s time to move out of the big city and into Paradise.

I was further intrigued by its potential through an episode of “Tales From the Crypt” in which Lancaster was the scene of a fictional story that involved madness, murder, media and sexual perversion. That’s no big deal in L.A., but in a small town it’s bound to cause a stir.

Since I am naturally drawn to those kinds of things, I said to myself, heck, let’s take a look at the town where fun was born.

Madness, murder, media and sexual perversion, however, were not on the minds of Lancaster’s mayor, George Runner, or its primary booster, Vern Lawson, who is executive director of the Lancaster Economic Development Corp. They think only in terms of clean and honest civic love.

I spent a pleasant hour or so with them learning why the high desert, where the wind blows hot and dry, is the place to be, whether you’re a business thinking of getting out of L.A. or a homeowner tired of living with bars on your windows and a 9-millimeter Beretta under your pillow.

Both Runner and Lawson are 42 and both were raised in Lancaster, so they come by their positive tendencies naturally. They spoke with one voice, sometimes literally, about the advantage of living there. It was the first time I had ever heard civic pride expressed a cappella.

Runner-Lawson remember shooting jack rabbits in Lancaster as kids and expressed their satisfaction with the area’s growing sophistication by observing almost dreamily, “I can remember when the first McDonald’s opened here. Now we have Black Angus.”

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Well, actually, that’s not the total extent of its sophistication. Lancaster also boasts a new, $12-million Performing Arts Center, of which both men are, as one, justifiably proud.

But they are prouder still of the cash incentives being offered to lure the world to North Valley: $2,000 per employee to businesses relocating there and $10,000 housing discounts to the workers buying homes there.

Lawson--or was it Runner?--told me about one woman who cried with joy because, under the program, she was able for the first time in her otherwise wretched life to own her own home.

“It was a very human situation,” Runner-Lawson said.

Both men agree that the Lancaster-Palmdale area doesn’t have a bad image, it has no image at all. They’re trying to give it one, and doing very well at that.

Lancaster is not exactly Paris and Palmdale sure isn’t Vienna, but they’re better than what I expected. There was a bumper sticker out once that said “Anyplace but L.A.,” and I guess the two cities constitute Anyplace.

The only problem is, like most Anyplaces, someday they’ll be discovered too. Then crowds will come and gangs and drugs and lawyers and real madness and murder and media and all the rest.

Eventually we’ll be wearing buttons that say “Anyplace but Lancaster,” and mosey off once more on a never-ending quest for Paradise.