The old tractors just keep coming around the corner of Mulberry and Main in downtown Wilmington, Ohio, a sputtering battalion of Oliver Super 55s, McCormick Farmalls and Minneapolis Molines--the stars of the Clinton County Corn Festival's 1997 parade. Families line the sidewalks, children wave to the farmers as they pass, but after 20 minutes Kathy Wiley has seen enough. A sylphlike executive secretary at Warner Bros. in Burbank, Calif., Wiley, 31, switches off her videocamera and wrinkles her nose at her husband Jim, who is busy snapping photos.
"More tractors," Kathy says.
"Yeah!" says Jim, 38, a barrel-chested film-distribution manager with a chubby, boyish face. He lowers his camera. "I never knew there were so many different kinds." His eyes are glittering.
"I know," says Kathy, whose eyes are not. "I'm like, Will it ever end?" Then she sees her husband's enthusiasm. "It's fun," she adds, but she can't help glancing up at the autumn clouds, which are sprinkling cool, fat raindrops onto the parade.
"I love this weather," Jim says.
"You've loved everything since we got here," Kathy teases.
Jim makes a face. "In L.A. I endured 15 solid years of sunshine," he says. "All those rays every day--they aggravated me."
The Wileys may look like tourists, but they are not. Emigres from urban America, they have come to rural southwestern Ohio to escape L.A.'s noise, traffic, crime, smog and cost of living--not to mention its cutthroat film industry--and reach for the kind of safe, close-knit way of life Jim recalls from his childhood in tiny Sharpsville, Pa. "Living in L.A., my vision became blurred and twisted," he says. "I was spoiled. I had secretaries doing everything for me. All I did was talk on the phone and sit in traffic."
In June, Jim quit his job as a manager at Warner Bros. and took a position in Wilmington (pop. 13,000) with Technicolor's fast-growing film-distribution unit, one of many cutting-edge firms relocating to small-town America. He is elated at the move, but Kathy, born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, isn't so sure. Still working at Warner Bros. and settling affairs in Burbank, she came to Wilmington for the first time a week before the parade, wearing a fixed smile and a dazed, where-am-I? stare. The couple spent the week house hunting on the back roads of Ohio, videotaping faded barns, visiting newly sprouted subdivisions, stopping by an auction where a farmhouse and its contents were put on the block. There they met Gary Kersey, a garrulous auctioneer who took one look at Kathy's tight black jeans and Jim's designer eyewear and asked, "You folks have any idea what you're getting yourselves into?"