California Dreamin' is becoming a reality.

California will always be a magical land where new things happen.

The saying, "All that glitters is not gold," is apropos when describing California. It was the gold rush of 1848 that made it boom, and in these latter days, it is the lack of gold that is causing many Californians to rush to adjacent states, abandoning their mortgages and California's economic meltdown. I lived in California for many years, when its golden aura had not yet faded, when Californians were mostly happy and the San Andreas fault had yet to strand motorists on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Most of that time was the hiatus of years between Ronald Reagan's stint as governor and his being catapulted into the Oval Office. I have fond recollections of California, and a few that still make the hair on my neck stand up. There was the time in 1982 that I was at a large round table in a lounge in Hollywood, about to be hired to do the animated title sequence of the film, "Jimmy the Kid" (Gary Coleman, Ruth Gordon, Don Adams, Cleavon Little -1982). The executive director said, "What's it gonna cost me to hire you?" I started to reply and he waved his hand and said, "Nah, nah, don't tell me. Write it on a napkin." My buddy, Barry,  who had helped me land the job, smiled at me over his piña colada. It was an inside job. Barry had abandoned his Christianity for a time, and dove into the gay lifestyle. One of his liaisons had led to the job. It was the way things got done in tinsel town. Thirty years later, my hindsight is 20-20 of California. Like many, I have been keelhauled by this economy. But Californians know more about that than me. My California experience made me an avocado and guacamole aficionado. Mangoes would not be my favorite fruit, and my tennis game would not be what it is today, if not for the years I lived there. So I am thankful for my time ensconced in the Hotel California. It was mostly awesome. 


California is known for its stereotypes, and over the top success stories. It's Disneyland, smog, Silicon Valley, the birthplace of traffic jams, a place where hucksters hang out, a place where fruits and nuts aren't just agricultural products, coolness, un-coolness, roller skaters on Venice Boulevard, surfers, surfer chicks, preachers in glass temples, surfer preachers, blond bombshells, movies that bomb, movie stars transformed into governors and presidents, bronze stars and hand prints set into the pavement outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and http://www.chinesetheatres.com/  The Beach Boys, Academy Awards, The Doors, New Wave, the birthplace of the Yo Yo, beat poets, hippies in Golden Gate Park, big time producers, small time nobody's, home to Apple Computers, motorcycle gangs, Sunset Blvd., James Dean, The Grateful Dead, and every sitcom you watched on TV when you were growing up. Everything, man. It is a microcosm of America. And though I have a love of history, many much better, hipper historians have written much better volumes about both modern and the old history of California than I ever could. California's many fine universities and pubic libraries overflow with these histories. I would like to tell the story of the founding of Santa Barbara or San Francisco, two cities I lived in for several years, and my most favorite cities in California, but I am not qualified to do that. I would like to explain how the early settlers came from dark dreary towns in eastern Prussia and tilled the dark untilled ground and planted palms, orange groves, grapevines, and describe in detail the thousands of wind generators, and offshore oil drilling platforms that decorate California. I would like to share how its  early visionaries made tennis and volley ball courts, fish taco stands, and made flip flops the “costume de rigueur” in California coastal towns, and write extensively about the marvelous and colorful film stars who made and still make California their home. I think of Momma Cass singing "California Dreamin.' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-aK6JnyFmk&feature=related 


But a blog is not the Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t have space or time to go into the very deep history and lore of California today. I can't stop to tell you about Momma Cass choking on a sandwich. I will not mention that I think that Adele looks and sings like Momma Cass. Hotel California is a mind bending place. You will never be the same after California. There are volumes of stories to tell of California. I will say that there is no doubt in my mind, despite the bottoming out of the real estate market in California, there are still many wonderful cities and people to be found in the Golden State. But if you only have a day to kill, see the California redwood groves, they are worth the trip. Avoid the other tourist destinations in California, if you disdain long lines and being  stalled in traffic for hours.

I last went to California in 2009 with my son. We camped near the redwood groves in the Lady Bird Johnson reserve of Northern California. It was awesome. We drove from Eugene, Oregon, where I lived for over twenty years. I also drove to California in 2007 to see my cousin, David, who sold real estate there for many years. David could sell anyone just about anything, and would if given half a chance. David has left California now, or so the rumors have it, having run off with a failed actress in her RV, to Florida, where they sell bottled water. They claim the water can do things to you that Mother Nature never thought of, like make you grow younger, for example. Or a better actor.

When I last saw David, and his pretty, but over the hill actress girlfriend, they were living in Bel Air. Bel Air is just a hop and a skip away from Beverly Hills, and if you drive a few miles further down the coast you’ll run into Santa Monica and Venice Beach, which are perhaps the coolest places to hang out in the L.A. area. In other words, Bel Air is ideally situated on some pretty high-end real estate property. I registered several of my screenplays at the WGAw office when I was in L.A, and that was pretty cool. I also attended an actor's workshop near Hollywood and Vine. It was run by a former Canadian wrestling star, Rock Riddle, (never mind he didn't know anything about acting in films per se). This is a typical scenario in California - where everyone is vying for the American dollar, cashing in on people's hopes and dreams. It started during the Gold Rush and it has never stopped.

Most of the real estate in Bel Air, and Beverly Hills, isn’t worth the millions they ask for it, that is a given. You couldn’t grow grain crops on the land unless your mules could walk upside down on the terrain, and most mules cannot do this, even in the olden days of early California. Californians are an ambitious, rather materialistic folk. In Beverly Hills, even the gardeners make six figure incomes. We should remember that Californians have given us a disproportionately large number of the new and hip trends and products. Want to be trendy? Go live in California. I regret Californians not labeling their trendy inventions with stamps on their undersides that read: “Dude, like, we totally thought of this first gnarly idea in California. Whoa.”

My cousin David and I drove to San Felipe, Baja (Mexico) when I was there. The border guard thought David looked like a gray haired Mexican. David thinks he still looks like a cross between Richard Gere and Tom Sellick. David mumbled a strange assemblage of Spanish to the guard and the guard screwed up his face and asked David and I in clearly articulated English, “Do either of you two dudes speak Spanish?” I said, “Je ne parle pas espagnol. Mon cousin, David, pense qu'il peut vous vendre le pont de Brooklyn.” (I do not speak Spanish. But my cousin, David, thinks he can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.)

San Felipe is a sleepy fishing village on the northern tip of the Sea of Cortes. The climate there is dry but not too dry. Hemingway loved the Sea of Cortes. It inspired him to write the novel, “Old Man and the Sea.” Near the old sleepy village lay a development David was involved with. He has made some decent money in real estate and it enabled him to buy an airplane, which he put together himself and was repairing in a rented space at a small airport. Real estate was on David’s mind, and that was why we had driven nearly  three hundred miles to San Felipe. He owned a piece of ground at an American owned development that I forget the name of now. Let us call it Rancho San Felipe. David owned a property on the 18^th fairway of the golf course of Rancho San Felipe. They have patented a grass on the course that is unique. It is greenish brown in color, and tolerant of seawater. So they water it with water pumped from the Sea of Cortes. David's property was about the size of a living room in a ranch style house in Cucamonga. He wanted $250,000 for it. Nobody was biting and David was running out of cash and credit cards. We had arrived in time for a weekend sale-a-thon at Rancho San Felipe. Potential buyers had driven down from L.A. and San Diego for the event. Many were nervous about shelling out a quarter of a million dollars in Mexico, where you can normally buy villa’s with twenty bedrooms for that price. But in Rancho San Felipe you could buy a reasonable replica of everyman’s idea of what a Spanish villa looked like for the same price but with eighteen fewer bedrooms. 

I accompanied David on one tour of a house, with a young nervous couple from Orange County. The houses were so new that the plaster was still wet. They looked rather nice until you looked closer. For example, I tapped on what looked to be a solid plastered column and heard an echo you would normally hear in the Grand Canyon. They were made of ticky-tacky imported from villages all over Baja and Southern California. The development is set on a slope that according to David, has an aquifer that runs under the ground from a nearby mountain range. David said the mountains were laden with enormous deposits of gold and silver that the Spaniards, not to mention millions of impoverished Mexicans, had failed to find. From one of the faux villa’s you can see a wide expanse of the Sea of Cortes. It is a romantic view as long as you don’t look down at your yard, which is not in yet, and will never be because of an ordinance that only allows Ocatillo, palmetto’s and cactus.

The weekend was nice. I played tennis, and walked on the beach. I found about ten pounds of pretty little shells. David could not sell his 18^th hole property, or the house to the nervous potential buyers he toured through the ticky-tacky house.

But let me shift gears here and share the info I found today about Whittier, an average town in California. Some of the information was too boring to entertain you, so I have embellished the details as I thought necessary. I have never been to to the town of Whittier, and that is perfect for this illustration, because I have not been to many towns in California that have been swallowed up by the urban sprawl of L.A. The town of Whittier, CA has Mexican roots, as do most Californian cities. Some of the roots go all the way to Mexico City. Mexicans believe the roots go under the city into the Aztec ruins. But that is another story. California was owned by Spain for two hundred years. Before that it was owned by God. God liked it well enough, but he had other fish to fry, and he had noticed it had a large rift in the Earth's crust anyway, so he said, "You can have it."

In 1784 Manuel Nieto, a retired captain who served in the Portola Expedition, was granted 300,000 plus acres of land by the King of Spain. The land grant, in what is now California, stretched from the hills north of Whittier to the sea, and from the Santa Ana River to the San Gabriel River. Eventually Mexico severed ties to Spain, and later they were beaten by the United States and relinquished California.

For a while, the town only had one taco stand, a few idle chickens, and an old woman named Chimichanga, or Lola for short. She was toothless, but she could make tortillas like nobody's business. Imagine her shock when a bunch of Quakers showed up who had 100 pounds of Quaker Instant Oatmeal in their Conestoga wagons. The few Mexicans came out of their adobe houses and squinted their eyes at the white folks. "Ay," they were heard to remark, "More gringo's!" The Quakers came out from the east coast - they had bought the land sight unseen. Many of them were also blind. They used white canes to survey the land. There was a bunch of tapping going on, which naturally was the foundation for the distinct sound of The Beach Boys, but this would be years later. Soon, the former Mexicans, whose eyesight was like 15-15, were having the blind white  Quakers plant corn, chili peppers, medicinal marijuana, peyote, and jicama. The Mexicans were crazy about jicama. And peyote. The Quakers knew nothing about peyote and jicama, but they were peaceful folk and though they only spoke German and pigeon English, the two groups got along swimmingly. Sometimes they went for swims; the former Mexicans wearing next to nothing and the Quakers wearing all their clothes.

The biggest Quaker landowner, Jacob Gerkins, who had bought the land in 1868 for $238, from the U.S. Government, could not grow a normal beard. His grew perfectly fine on the sides of his face and along the bottom of his chin, but he couldn't grow a mustache to save his life. The other Quakers, and some of the women too, admired him so much they too took up his unusual beard style. The former Mexicans, who were now Californians, (Mexifornians), became barbers to help the Quakers look more homogenous. Later these Mexifornians started gangs of barbers who carried razors. Thus, the gangs of east L.A. were born. First they were clean cut, and then they only liked to cut. Later they set up respectable businesses with low awnings because people were shorter back then. They also later made their cars lower to the ground because, well, time had passed but they were still short of stature. 

The town's name comes from a Quaker named John Greenleaf Whittier, who was a real person, but he never saw the land. He was blinded by love back east – smitten as it were. He was a famous poet, writer, and newspaper editor. He wrote many fun and curious writings. His most famous was, "One Flew Over the Cucamonga Tree." It is now lost to history, as is whatever fame he had. He only wrote one poem in his life anyone can remember, which was written to dedicate the town he never saw, which we can assume was read at a ceremony in downtown. 

The poem goes as follows:

"My Name I Give To Thee"

Dear Town, for whom the flowers are born,

Stars shine, and happy songbirds sing,

What can my evening give to thy morn,

My Winter to Thy Spring? 

A life not void of pure intent

With small desert of praise or blame;

The Love I felt, the Good I meant,

I leave Thee with My Name.

I think that is a Jim Dandy poem, don't you? When I think of California, I think of happy times at the University of California at Santa Barbara, dipping white corn chips in a homemade guacamole or salsa. In Santa Barbara, every day is a good day. People there complain about the weather that is so perfect you feel as if you are living in Heaven. People seem better looking and more happy and tanned than human beings living in other places in the world. One day I will return to Santa Barbara just to walk on the beach (and avoid the oil on the sand that washes in from the oil rigs), and hang out on State Street in downtown. I will eat a fish taco there and my wardrobe will be a Hawaiian style shirt, shorts,  and flip-flops. I may never return to the Northwest. But this is far in the future, when I am old and rich.