Great post Donald!

Hi Donald,

Great points! People are taking the interviews how they want to. I think it's like watching a presidential debate in a way. It provides you with more fodder for your already held opinions. One of the things that I'm finding interesting is some of the surprise details, like the mention of an airport in Dara's or that Robyn's top adjective is a Chinese restaurant. And it's also fun to see how people's lives play out after they leave. We really appreciate the power of a single story.

Another thing too, that has surprised me, is that I haven't seen anyone mention how fantastic it is that a local Valley girl (emphasis on girl, Ivy Leagues can sometimes be seen as old-fashioned old-boys-clubs institutions) rises to reach such a vaunted position as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal! To us, that was the big grab. We're proud of her because she's one of us. Of course I had nothing to do with her achievements, but her experience at Manchester GATE, Edison, the public library, the arts and culture she does remember most certainly do. So for those of us focused on the "brain drain" debate--let's at least appreciate hard work and success in academics, instead of attention on... local girls who end up running famous prostitutions rings (Eliott Spitzer's) or marrying famous pop singers.

Echo what The Fresnan said.

I find that the people who bitch most about Fresno being devoid of entertainment are the ones who never bother to travel farther than their own neighborhoods - the ones who have never heard of the Philharmonic or even Art Hop.

If you can't find something fun to do here in Fresno many days of the week, it's because you're boring - don't try to blame Fresno for that.

Though I don't fear 'brain drain', and in fact I would encourage my own kids to go out-of-region for school or travel or job (at least temporarily--I think it's valuable),
I DO think there
ARE things in this "Brain Drain" discussion that are worth paying attention to.
Some of the posts I've read have echoed what Richard Florida said in his much-passed-around book "The Rise of the Creative Class". His studies document that often young people choose the PLACE they want to live before actually pursuing work or school. This is an important point. They're not necessarily chasing that *job* or *school* , but a job or school that's in that PLACE.
THUS,
all the discussion over these past years about making Fresno as 'unique' and 'authentic' as possible and ferreting out it's unique sense of 'place' and accentuating that.

----this would hopefully attract folks from other places-----homegrown or not---thus helping our economy and our arts scene and....a happy vicious cycle is set into motion.

p.s. I like Heather's comment about some folks being boring.
Someone once told me that 'bored people are boring people;interested people are interesting people'.
There's something to that.

Nice article, but these repeated brain drain articles are becoming a little cliche now days on all the Fresno blogger sites.

Lets face it. Most people move away because they want the bigger and better life. Lots of us did it. Even I did it moving to the bay area and taking a job at a small startup. The difference was up until recently, most people moved back. With exponentially rising costs of living, mortgage, gas, food and everything else here in the valley not to mention being in the top ten now for pollution, what reasons now are there to stay? This city takes hardly any efforts to cater to the younger crowd (okay I'm coming up to my thirties now), is littered with gangs, and worships any franchise chain that parks its rear into Riverpark yet they shout from the rooftops how they want people to build downtown.

Cmon'.

As much concern this issue does carry in me, I do find it notable that the majority of the individuals in the Chronicles are from CLovis High and seem to have graduated in the same year or two of each other. Odd? Trend? Clovis thing?

Donald responds:

To Valley Notebook: You're right about people reading their own opinions into the interviews. And talking about how to improve your city is always fair game.

Regarding Dara Purvis' editorship of the Yale Law Journal: OK, how do I say this as delicately as possible without 1) dissing Purvis, who I'm sure is an extremely bright and worthwhile individual; 2) coming across as an anti-elitist rube, which would be sort of ironic because I'm a little bit Ivy-League-fixated; and 3) contradicting my long-held views about the value of writing about and celebrating the people who live here? But here goes: By getting TOO worked up about local folks "making good," you run the risk of reinforcing the image of Fresno as provincial outpost. Fresno is BIG, relatively speaking, and at some point, odds are that the editor of the Yale Law Journal will come from California's sixth largest city. I mean, there's an editor every year, right? I think it's fine to recognize high-achieving students who go out of the area, just as we recognize high-achieving athletes who do the same. But the mere fact of going off to a classy and expensive university and doing well there isn't cause for fawning. To do so carries with it the connotation that an upbringing in Fresno is some mighty hurdle to overcome.

To Blake: I like what you have to say about ferreting out Fresno's unique sense of place. A city's planners/supporters should constantly be thinking in those terms.

To Robert: Yep, Fresno has lots of chain stores. I'm wondering if you've been to San Francisco/Los Angeles/San Jose/New York recently? Those cities are awash in chain stores, too. The U.S. is one big chain store. If we're going to retire the "brain drain" trope, as you suggest, I recommend we drop the chain-store one as well.

hey...hey...settle down here folks...retire going on and on about brain drain AND chain stores??....now you're really messing with my limited storehouse of material here, and what with us doing Sprawlzilla (see Osegueda's 10 day Forecast)
in Kingsburg this weekend....
(comment?/shameless plug?/ beating a wish-it-would-die horse?)
best,
B.

Just a sec; I want to weigh in on this debate about Fresno's lack of high culture, but first I need to finish watching all the videos of people staring at me on the beehive.

Donald:

I think you hit the nail on the head when you say Ms. Purvis lived her "childhood" in Fresno - and never really experienced adulthood in the city.

Disclaimer: I myself *went* to school with Purvis - and her twin sister - (Edison High Class of 98 here) - and lets just say they were a lot like me - academic, college bound, rather introverted and yet able to find that certain group of friends to survive the experience. Lets just say - we didn't party - we didn't go out on the town. We went to school, did extra work during lunch, after school we dived into drama, model united nations, academic decathlon and other after school activities. On the weekends we hung out at the brand new Barnes and Noble on Shaw and Blackstone - and if we were feeling cool - to the brand new Edwards Theater - not Riverpark - just the theater.

It wasn't until I went to Los Angeles for college that I realized - hey - there's stuff to do outside of school. I traipsed about for the next couple of years (big cities and small) and 3 years ago came home.

It's not *easy* to come home with "big city" expectations in your head - and then *not* have it in our own backyard. But the key is - and the successful happy boomerang knows this - is you have to actively "work" for the culture, the events, the nightlife.

At 25 - for the first time ever - I went to bars in Fresno *by myself*, peeked into the Tower District and discovered - hey it's pretty cool!, roamed the streets of Old Town Clovis, went to a Grizzlies game, the Meux Home, the Starline and Irene's , Sambas and Bb's, La Paella and Table Mountain, the downtown and uptown farmers markets. For the first time EVER I went to Roger Rockas. There are Creative Blenders, Flyp, and countless magazine release parties. There's the Rogue festival, Mardi Gras, Concerts in the Park, Shakespeare in the Park, the Wine Cornucopia, Sudz in the city ...shall I continue?

And I met friends all along the way.

Now - it's hard for me to decide WHAT do do with so many options to choose from. So to all those boomerangs who come home and complain "there's nothing to do" - of course there is silly. Use the brain you have, look for it, find it and own it. Because whether you like it or not this is your home - and it really is what you make of it.

Donald Munro has a weak grasp of statistics and a bizarre idea about what celebrating achievement means if he really thinks that it is not newsworthy or noteworthy that a Fresnan is Editor-in-Chief of the number one law school in the United States. There is one editor per year, Don, which means there have been 118 of them (counting this year's) since Yale Law School was founded. There are about 200 ABA accredited law schools in the United States; each one has an EIC. Divide that by the approximately 301 million people who live in the U.S. Suuure, a Fresnan is going to make that frequently. Not worth shouting about. We wouldn't want to "fawn" over someone from Fresno accomplishing high academic achievement, because this might encourage other students in this area to think that they could also aim high.

At least there's no shortage of sarcasm in Fresno.

To FresnanAgainstIdiocy: The Central Valley has more than 1 million residents, which means that, according to your own figures, one out of every 300 or so people in the country live here. That's a pretty big place. I'm sure we have students in the best medical, law, architecture, fine-arts, engineering and hard-sciences schools in the country, just as there are lots of great dancers, actors, musicians, artists and others running around out there with Fresno connections. I'm not saying that academic success isn't notable, but neither would you expect to find prominent stories in a publication the size of The Bee about every single student from the Central Valley who goes off to a good university and does good things there. We simply wouldn't have the space, and frankly, I'm not sure how many people who would be interested beyond family and friends. There's a little thing called Real Life that comes after school, and that's when a hometown really starts assessing how much attention to pay to sons/daughters who have moved away.