When L.A. seems a million miles away.

Los Angeles has produced some great newspaper columnists: Jack Smith, Jim Murray, A1 Martinez, and Dennis McCarthy. Ever since my adolescent days as editor of the Mark Twain Junior High Riverboat, I always wanted to be one of them.

But along with my plans to be a star power forward for the Lakers or bedazzle critics by writing the Great American Novel (OK, I'd have settled for top 10), it was not to be.

Because I moved to the Valley in 1971 and have operated my own firm here since 1982, Business Journal Editor Jason Schaff thought I might have something to say about where our changing Valley has been and where it may be headed. This column will focus on business trends and opinion, and comment on current business issues. So here goes ...

The Valley: A City in All But Name

The Valley's business community owes its success, in large part, to our love of cars and our hatred of the roads on which we drive them.

The mystique of the late, lamented "Car Capital of the World" title we once claimed is long dissipated, as is the pleasure of the Sunday afternoon drive; the sneaking into the car dealer the week before the official unveiling of the new models; weekend cruising on Van Nuys Boulevard; and the thrill of decking, shaving, pinstriping or flaming our 350-horsepower muscle cars.

Much as we loved those gas-guzzling vehicular behemoths, our inability to provide the roads to handle them doomed (or blessed) us with the imperative of creating a society we could get to without spending our lives behind the wheel.

Cheap post-World War II housing brought hundreds of thousands of ambitious young people to the Valley. But by the early '60s, the Cahuenga Pass, Old Sepulveda Boulevard (there never was a New Sepulveda Boulevard), and a few windy canyon roads, were all that was available for on-the-rise executives to get to their downtown, mid-Wilshire or Westside jobs.

How we rejoiced when, in 1962, the 405 freeway arrived to set us free. But our own unchecked growth, resulting from inexpensive housing coupled with the thirst others had for our endless summers and the potential for movie stardom, taught us that suburbia can choke on its own traffic just as well as can urban centers. And the upstream developments from the likes of Santa Clarita, Thousand Oaks, and Lancaster didn't help.

It became increasingly challenging to get to jobs in that storied metropolis known as "over the hill." So we brought the jobs here to the Valley ... and the people that went with them.

We created restaurants in which to feed them, hospitals in which to cure them, schools in which to educate them, and retail stores to satisfy their consumerist urges. And we built office buildings along Ventura Boulevard, Warner Center, the Burbank Media Center, and others, including, to our everlasting urban design shame, the strip mall.

We realized that the necessities of business life were all to be had without venturing into that city of which we were a part, but from which we were becomingly increasingly alienated.

We talked about "going into the city" for a meeting or social engagement as if we were not part of Los Angeles, but a separate entity. In fact, many here felt that they lived and worked in a separate city, in all but law.

And so we come to the threshold question, "Are we part of Los Angeles or not?" We've all heard the canards about the Valley being the nation's sixth-largest city if we were a separate metropolis, how we are underrepresented in the corridors of City Hall, that we provide the city more in tax dollars than we receive in city services.

But are we truly ready to be a separate city? Where is our avenue of art galleries, performance centers, or art museums? Can you name just ten major philanthropists who support the Valley's growth and development? Have we really created a separate and distinct identity? Can we ever create a "downtown" of the Valley?

Our biggest companies, Boeing, Disney, and Amgen exist not to meet the needs of the Valley and its people, but the nation and the world.

But despite our lack of many of the amenities of a large metropolis and major home-grown industries, perhaps we really are a separate city, with our own institutions, our own traditions, and our own future.

Maybe secession is a state of mind, a point of view. More than 50 percent of us voted to be our own municipality. Perhaps we've become a separate city (made up of many communities) simply because it became so easy to live and work here. While taxes and government tie us to Los Angeles, perhaps we've become a separate city in our hearts and minds ... and maybe that's what matters most.

Maybe we should stop worrying about what Los Angeles is doing to us and start focusing on what we can do for ourselves. The result of too many people--and their cars--is that we've created our own de facto city. So let's get on with building it.

Let us not curse the late-but-not-lamented Caltrans diamond lanes, slides in Coldwater Canyon, or Sigalerts (named after my late friend, KMPC Radio's Lloyd Sigmon)--without them we'd still be working ... "over the hill."

"Our vast progress in transportation, past and future, is only a symbol of the progress that is possible by constantly striving toward new horizons in every human activity. Who can say what new horizons lie before us if we can but maintain the initiative and develop the imagination to penetrate them--new economic horizons, new horizons in the art of government, new social horizons."

--Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.

Martin Cooper is Chairman of Cooper Beavers, Inc., marketing and communications. He is currently Chairman of VICA and Past President of the Public Relations Society of America-Los Angeles Chapter and the Encino Chamber of Commerce.