Heroine of the Valley’s Revolution

The site of Myra Ferrante’s humiliation is a wide stretch of asphalt cut off from Balboa Boulevard in Van Nuys by a chain-link fence crowned with barbed wire. Dried glass clippings scud along the ground. Low weeds grow in pavement cracks. Ghosts man the guardhouses beyond the fence.

If, however, Los Angeles voters on Nov. 5 free the San Fernando Valley to become its own city, this barren spot might one day be memorialized as the site of the catalytic event in the new city’s founding.

It was here, at the old Air National Guard site at Van Nuys Airport, that city officials on July 18, 1998, ejected Ferrante and more than a dozen others from the Van Nuys Aviation Expo for collecting signatures on a petition for a feasibility study of Valley secession.

It was Valley secession’s Boston Massacre. Although bloodless (if you don’t count the blood that rose in Ferrante’s cheeks), it inflamed separatist passions and embarrassed the city’s power structure. More practically, it resulted in the city paying $45,000 to the cash-starved, fledgling secessionist group Valley VOTE, in settlement of a federal lawsuit. It also prompted the state Legislature, in compensation for the petitioners’ lost chance to canvass the scores of thousands who attended the air show, to give Valley VOTE an extra three months to collect signatures, which virtually assured the group would have enough to force a study and, as matters unfolded, this November’s vote.

Ferrante is a 57-year-old hairdresser who lives in Tarzana. Her native Long Island still inhabits her speech, though she and her late husband moved to Los Angeles 33 years ago, and to the Valley a year later.

On a recent morning, her tidy little BMW pulled off Balboa Boulevard at the fenced airport entrance, and Ferrante climbed out, wearing the bright red “Valley VOTE” T-shirt she wore that fated morning four years ago. Her eyes swept the empty tableau. “It looks so different now,” she said. “There were so many people here then.”

Around 11:30 a.m. that day, she arrived to find other Valley VOTE petitioners milling about the entrance. They told her they’d been kicked out. Ferrante went inside with a colleague to demand an explanation from airport police. “The police officers said they had direct orders that we were not to be on the property, not to take petition signatures, not to talk to people. We asked what would happen if we refused, and they said, ‘You will be arrested, handcuffed and placed in jail.’ Pretty incredible, huh?”

Afterward, the petitioners tried to collect signatures outside the gate, she said, “but it was chaotic. We had to be way out here”--she walked to the edge of the traffic on Balboa Boulevard--”off the property. Then they said we were blocking the exit and causing a traffic problem.

“We couldn’t use the bathroom. We couldn’t get water. It was getting hot. One woman in her 60s asked if she could use the bathroom, and a police officer told her, ‘If you want to come in, you have to take off that T-shirt.’ She said, ‘But, I’ve only got a bra on underneath.’

“Well, I’m a pretty tolerant person, but I got ticked off when they told me to leave. I got ticked off when they wouldn’t let me exercise my constitutional rights that my forefathers fought for hundreds of years ago.”

Ferrante’s secessionist convictions have roots, however, not in constitutional considerations, but in grievances that are more concrete, in some cases, literally.

Later in the morning, as a breeze mussed the leaves of the ash trees in her neighborhood four miles from the airport, Ferrante stood in the middle of Etiwanda Avenue and probed the dilapidating pavement with the toe of her running shoe. An asphalt chunk about the size of a baseball lifted from the surface.

She pointed out a large ash in front of her carefully maintained house. Its roots had badly upheaved the sidewalk. A large limb had parted ways with the trunk during a storm. City workers had simply carted the fallen bough away and left the splintered stump sticking out from the trunk like an imploring hand.

Ferrante strode up Etiwanda alongside well-kept homes and neat lawns. She stopped at a vacant lot between two houses, and walked onto it, past dry, waist-high weeds that rattled in her wake, past a torn black-and-white loveseat, past a rusted bed frame, a toppled artificial Christmas tree, a stack of concrete blocks, a pile of old wood, some of it charred. Burrs stuck to her slacks.

“I’ve called the city, the Fire Department, Building and Safety,” she said. “I’ve called and called and called. No one notifies the owner. No one can seem to catch the dumpers.

“If this is happening in a middle-and upper-middle-class neighborhood, what’s happening in the poor neighborhoods? I feel sorry for them, I really do.”

Ferrante is unconvinced by the recent flurry of city-maintenance activity she’s noticed in the Valley lately--streets being swept on Saturdays, trees being trimmed on Sundays, bushes being cropped along freeway exits “for the first time in 15 years.” All this she called “icing on a bitter-tasting cake.” If voters defeat secession, she predicted, things will return to the “same ol’ same ol’.”

When Ferrante and her husband first came to the Valley, they bought a ranch in Chatsworth. Those days are an idyll in her memory. “My daughter used to ride her pony to school,” she said. “It was safe, quiet, no graffiti, no trash.”

Beneath her concerns beats something not uncommon among longtime Valley residents as they consider breaking ties with Los Angeles. It is a feeling that the city, grown immense, its authority structure calcified and beset by numberless urban woes, has lost all regard for the care-taking ethic that has been the soul of suburban life in the Valley for 2 1/2 generations.

Secession, she has become convinced, is the only plausible remedy left. “And if it doesn’t succeed this time,” she said, “it will come back again, and I’ll be out working hard and collecting signatures all over again.”