Take Five: Name that city

I want to sell La Cañada Flintridge. I don’t mean sell as in public relations or advertising “selling.” Our chamber does a fine job promoting LCF. What I mean is selling the entire city. Before you tune me out, please read the rest of this column, which has been carefully thought out.

Here’s the deal:

Recently, the newspapers and the ubiquitous sports media used front-page space and valuable air time to ballyhoo the proposed Farmers Football Stadium in downtown Los Angeles.

What a brilliant idea. Find a big bank account sugar daddy to fork over gazillions of dollars for years and years and years — just to be able to hoist their signage on the top of the stadium and around gladiators in the arena.

Stay with me here. USC has the Galen Center, UCLA has Pauley Pavilion. Staples has Staples.

All of the above leads me to urge our city honchos to consider this masterful stroke of financial acumen.

Let’s sell LCF. Just think of the cash-flow enrichment. This is a real-world idea. How about Google’s La Cañada Flintridge?

Unlike vacant stadium fields and huge droves of locations that are locked-up in all seasons, La Cañada has thousands of residents actively moving about and around.

We’re driving, filling our gas tanks, eating meals in restaurants and buying food in dozens of establishments.

This Harvard MBA idea is 100% commercial. You won’t find one microscopic nub of altruism. Not one.

Buyers abound. My first buyer prospect is the federal government. But that thought is completely unusable. The management in Washington, D.C., has no extra cash for anything other than nonsense stuff. And I use the term management loosely.

No, the feds are off my list. I don’t want them to know our city exists. Or me, either.

May I try these big brands on you?

Union Oil 76’s Foothill Boulevard has a good ring to it, doesn’t it? Chevron’s Chevy Chase. Not bad, either.

We can set up Coke and Pepsi in a bidding war for Descanso Gardens.

A huge soft-drink can could be tilted sideways at the entrance. Talk about your brand image.

But the topper to buy the entire city is this idea: Google’s La Cañada. They pay millions of dollars each year into our city’s treasury account. I thought of Microsoft first, but I’m mad at them for Windows 7.

There’s nothing to do for now, other than perhaps pitting Google and Apple against each other to own us.

I’m not asking for a finder’s fee or an ongoing commission, but how does this idea come across? How does “Gene Pepper’s Apple’s La Cañada Flintridge” sound?

C’mon, it was my idea.

GENE PEPPER is a published author and writer. E-mail: gpep@aol.com, or phone: (818) 790-1990.