Wednesday, January 01, 2003

A Michiganian in California

On January 1st, 1999, after several years in other places like Cincinnati, New York, Baltimore, DC and St. Louis, I moved from Washington DC to the sunny Pacific coast in Orange County, California. Thirty minutes after landing, while driving my rented convertible (American-made, of course) down Pacific Coast Highway, top down, 80 degrees on New Years' Friggin' Day, seeing lithe little California surfer chicks on their boards off Aliso Creek beach, my first thought was

THIS DOES NOT SUCK.


Lincoln Mercury had been forcefully relocated to Southern California by erstwhile Ford CEO Jac Nasser in an effort to get the cliquey Dearborn-based management and design teams out to live amidst the most finicky carbuyers in the US: Southern Californians. Lincoln-Mercury's ad agency, Young & Rubicam, saw one of their biggest accounts moving to the West Coast and immediately opened a big office in Irvine to service the account and keep the business. Y&R hired me, relocating me from the DC area to rejoin the fun in "Automotive".

As a former GM employee, I can tell you that automotive world is a relatively closed society. Whole generations will work for "the Plant". Your world becomes The Tech Center, or Dearborn, or Pontiac Truck & Bus. You know the engine specs and body styles by heart, know how to sidestep the cranes and the hi-los on The Floor, talk as much with strangers about cars as you might about sports, and live in a relatively compact, familiar world.

So in 1998/1999, a few hundred Michiganders from Ford and Y&R soon arrived in what to them was alien territory, where "automotive" wasn't the dominant industry of the area. Feeling a little out of their element, most of the transplants immediately banded together into a colony, circling the wagons in the same subdivision in Rancho Santa Margarita, and despite being in this amazing new turf, many ended up spending all their free time together. A long-time expatriate, I watched them, hoping they would "blend" more with the locals. Finally, gradually, many fanned out to explore, and, like me, started to see SoCal as home, rather than another temporary assignment.

New words crept into the transplants' vocabularies, words like "hoochy-mama", "OC", "lookieloo", "boogieboard", "Tevas" and "PCH". French place names like "Mackinac" gave way to Spanish place names like "Avenida de la Aeropuerto" and "Camino de Las Ramblas". Earthquakes replaced tornadoes as the scary reminders of Mother Nature. And suddenly, who to root for? The Tigers... or the Angels?!?

Despite the culture shock, Jac Nasser's brilliant move is history. Lincolns, once the sole domain of realtors and overweight businessmen everywhere, and Mercurys ("I wanna buy a Ford product, but, damnit, I'm VERY DIFFERENT!") are now some of the most progressive cars to come out of the Big Three. Strangely, in November 2002, Ford's new management decided to relocate Lincoln Mercury back to Michigan during 2003.

When you wake up to sunshine every single day, and the ocean breeze and billowing palms make each day feel like a tropical vacation, you start to forget the windshield scraping, ragweed summers, clouds of mosquitoes, township-sized potholes on VanDyke, and salt stains on your shoes. You start to remember and cherish the sound of a robin on a fall morning, the icy blast of January air on the chair lift, the smell of peaty, mossy soil, and true chili dogs from Lafayette's Coney Island.

California became my new home, and, dooode, it rocks. But Michigan? For myself, for several hundred residents of Orange County, and evidently, to Ford management, Michigan will always be Home.