Iowa Viewpoint May Tell a Lot About Our Turf

Move around and Los Angeles shows itself to be such a profusion of different places, ordeals and pleasures.

You can get the blurry-eyed shaken-up vista from over in Whittier; or you can look down on it, literally and snob-wise, from the show business estates up on Mulholland.

You can join two million countrymen on the beach, or escape them in the canyons.

You can walk four blocks from stores where $100 will not even buy you a necktie to others where $100 will clothe your entire family.

Or you can step back 1,350 miles and behold Los Angeles from the heartland of Iowa.

Some in Los Angeles have reason to do just that. They are part of a migration of political observers drawn to Iowa because it will be the first state to vote in the 1988 presidential primaries.

And along the way, Iowans seem keen to share the sentiments and wisdom they have accumulated about Los Angeles.

At a recent Rotary Club lunch in Marshalltown, Iowa, a visitor from Los Angeles is introduced. The luncheon speaker is a local social worker; his subject is child sex abuse. When members of the audience get to ask questions, they tire of the social worker.

One Rotarian clears his throat: “I hope it isn’t a breach of protocol, but while we’re on this subject I’d like to ask our visitor from Los Angeles a question about sex and morality. . . “

Child sex abuse. Los Angeles. Decadence. Unhappily, the McMartin case is known by name here in the bull’s-eye center of Iowa, and it feeds dark I-told-you-so stereotypes.

Down the street in Marshalltown is the Bored of Trade, a local saloon and evening rendezvous.

This is the kind of place that is virtually non-existent in Los Angeles: a dark, cool neighborhood bar where the menfolk, regardless of wealth and resume, gather unpretentiously and behave as themselves. The talk is placid--football, politics, weather, and--when they have it--crime.

This 5 p.m. tranquility ends when a former resident of Los Angeles is told that across the booth is a current resident of Los Angeles.

“I’ve probably got the only Rolex in town,” begins Mr. Ex-L.A.

The pleasantries of Midwestern life are shoved off the conversational table like so much cigar ash. The former Angeleno, probably without knowing it, slips back into the fast language of L.A. He is dropping names, talking cars, expense accounts, traffic at Beverly Center, economic competition, status, tribulations of flying First Class, celebrity friends. Whew.

Iowans at the bar tolerate this strange display as if their brother had succumbed to a relapse of the very condition that brought him here to Marshalltown.

Then there are restaurants. Barely one in 50 people in Iowa, from politicians to hotel clerks, will bother with the name of a steak house, pork chop house, corn-on-the-cob house when asked for a restaurant recommendation. This is because Iowans understand the unique dietary requirements of people from Los Angeles.

“I know a great Mexican place.” offered Gov. Terry E. Branstad.

“Like Thai?” asked Phil Roeder, Iowa Democratic Party press secretary.

“Tried (the nouvelle California cuisine at) City Cafe?” wondered Christy Cobb of the Iowa Republican Party.

And so on.

Most Iowans actually want to please. And they want to please their new friends from Los Angeles most of all.

For, in truth, many--many thousand--Iowans see something besides moral decay and conspicuous consumption when they look way to the West.

They see family.

Most of us in Los Angeles came from somewhere else. And when we came, we left others behind.

Tens of thousands of people in Iowa, practically everyone it seems, has waved goodby from their porch as someone jumped off the family tree and made straight for L.A.

In the last 10 years, no state has lost a greater proportion of its population than Iowa.

Governor Branstad knows.

His uncle Monroe Garland can be found over at Mr. G. men’s clothier in Beverly Hills. And Uncle Ron Meyer is out in Claremont.

But it is not all one-way Des Moines melancholy. Branstad loves to tell the story how Uncle Meyer came across a promising pair of football players out in Claremont, and used his family connections back in Iowa to get them recruited by the Iowa Hawkeyes. The two, quarterback Dan McGwire and split end Travis Watkins, now start for Iowa.

Maybe they will make it to the Rose Bowl, and bring the governor and the rest of them out to enjoy and endure Los Angeles first-hand.

There is this great steak house out in the Valley . . .