How The Hell Did I Wind Up in L.A.?

Do you recall being young and naive – emphatically stating that there were things you were never going to do – ever? Then, found yourself doing these things? That’s my story, and I am sticking to it—wondering what happened.

I’ve been on Planet Los Angeles in sunny Southern California for 31 years. I still do not understand this place. “Big L.A.” was a place where I was never going to live – ever – not because I didn’t like the place, but because I did not know the place.

Being an East Coast boy with a lot of time spent in the American Heartland, I suppose I never will understand L.A. Los Angeles is not like the rest of the world, and that’s not necessarily bad. Why does L.A. have to be like the rest of the world?

Being from the East Coast and Midwest, my DNA is of these places. I love the Midwest for its genuine charm and incredible people. Watching the farm reports in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri – and seeing weather reports and news stories with clearly pregnant newscasters in Illinois and Tennessee.

These folks, no matter their celebrity, are your neighbors and friends who become extended family. You help them move to their new house and run into them at the county fair. They are real and not too full of themselves. Having grown up in Washington, D.C., the news was always about politics and “Today on Capitol Hill…” And – like L.A. – D.C. has always been about gossip, scandal, and narcissism.

Having lived in many places and having visited 49 out of 50 states, I’ve pretty much seen it all – yet I really haven’t seen diddly. My career as an automotive journalist brought me to Los Angeles more than three decades ago. I arrived for the first time in 1990 as a feature editor with Car Craft Magazine. I worked in the old Screen Actors Guild building, a mid-century modern box on stilts along Sunset Boulevard. This dusty old building was “as built” in the 1950s, with old, wrinkled, dirty, stained carpeting and completely original black and white tiled restrooms with black open-front toilet seats. I’d sit on the mid-century “Standard” toilet thinking, “Ronald Reagan actually sat here…” Ditto for urinals that lined the tiled walls – thinking of the hordes of male celebrities who’d stood there.

Walking into that building and working on Sunset in Hollywood was culture shock for a young buck like me. It was a far cry from the American Heartland and East Coast I’d long been accustomed to. I was suddenly having lunch with editorial celebrities I’d read about in Hot Rod, Car Craft, and Motor Trend. We would sit down to breakfast nearby with Candid Camera’s Alan Funt. It was a dreamy, yet disorienting experience. I felt completely out of place.

How on Earth did I get here?!

I didn’t know it then – but I was here for the rest of my life. I had a five-year plan – to get the experience I needed, then return to the heartland, secure an editorial job, and live out my life. The Midwest was where my dreams were. However, Life had other plans for me. It isn’t that L.A. is a bad place or one big freeway, it is the difference in culture I witnessed at the time that – somehow – became the norm.

I must remember to add North Dakota to my bucket list.

I’ll have my guy call your guy and we will do something – “later…”