Page 18 - 2014 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
MACINTOSH SE, circa 1987, had a
case similar to the original Macintosh
computer, but with slight differences
in color and styling, above; Hollywood
sign, below.
in the Mexican War and accelerated by the
Gold Rush, California became the 31st state
of the United States. New Californians
brought the new Golden State into being,
plowing its fields, founding its great univer-
sities, building its cities.
California’s lustrous reputation was tar-
nished on the morning of April 18, 1906,
when a massive earthquake rocked
Northern California and leveled much of
San Francisco; what the rolling, rumbling
ground didn’t knock down, the ensuing
firestorm burned down. Some 3,000 people
died. Now, it was San Francisco’s turn to
start over. San Francisco dramatized its
recovery, and celebrated the new Panama
Canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific,
with the splendidly showy Panama-Pacific
International Exposition of 1915.
dream-weavers of Hollywood. In the 1940s,
creative people from Europe such as Billy
Wilder and Thomas Mann, fleeing fascism
and war to begin anew, lent the movies an
Old World artistic sensibility.
California’s story since World War II has
featured growth and more growth. Com-
bined with in-country migration, global
immigration made California the most
populous state in the Union in 1962.
The Rise of Hollywood
Just two years after that optimistic display, the
nation plunged into World War I. After the war
ended in 1918, still more migrants rushed to
California. In 1920, Los Angeles (and much
later San Diego and San Jose) surged past San
Francisco in population. The orange groves
and dusty byways of old Los Angeles began
morphing into “LA”—more specifically, and
more mythically, “Hollywood.”
Actors, writers, directors and producers
streamed to Los Angeles, growing a quiet cot-
tage industry of silent motion pictures into
a technologically advanced business. Stars
were born in a place that came to be called
“the dream factory.” Not a few of the Dust
Bowl migrants who left the drought-stricken
Midwest for California in the 1930s got their
first impressions of their new home from the
A Center for Change
From the 1960s on, California has been, in
a positive sense, the most disruptive state
in the nation. Student political activism,
the hip counter-culture and early awaken-
ings of the New Age movement found
fertile ground in California. The in-season,
sustainable, slow-food movement arguably
took root fastest in California. American
environmentalism in large part began in
California, when Scottish immigrant John
Muir founded the Sierra Club in San Fran-
cisco back in 1892 and took President
Theodore Roosevelt camping amid the nat-
ural wonders of Yosemite Valley in 1903.
From the 1980s on, Silicon Valley has
joined Hollywood as a creative lodestar for
the whole planet. The high-technology
world has enshrined risk-taking, innova-
tion, learning from failure and—you
guessed it—starting over. Quoting another
California innovation, the 1960s Whole
Earth Catalog, Apple’s Steve Jobs urged
Stanford University graduates in a com-
mencement speech in 2005 to “stay
hungry, stay foolish.”
Californians, across centuries and cul-
tures, always have.
»
1911: FIRST
TRANSCONTINENTAL
FLIGHT & LONG
BEACH AIRPORT
CALBRAITH PERRY RODGERS landed on the long, sandy shore at Long
Beach to complete the first transcontinental flight in 1911. Until Long
Beach Airport was created in 1923, planes used the beach as a runway. In
1919, on what would become the site of Long Beach Airport, barnstormer
Earl S. Daugherty created the world’s first flight school. In 1922, Amelia
Earhart took flying lessons from Long Beach aviator Monty Montijo.
16 2014 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A
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