Page 22 - 2017 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
» ARTICHOKE
QUEEN
Castroville, an agricultural
town of 6,500 in Monterey
County that calls itself the
artichoke center of the world, is
home to expansive fields
planted with this tasty member
of the thistle family. The
annual Castroville Artichoke
Food and Wine Festival,
featuring the likes of fried,
sautéed and grilled artichokes,
along with music and three-
dimensional “vegetable art,’’
takes place on the first
weekend in June at the
Monterey County Fairgrounds.
In 1948, Castroville crowned
visiting starlet Norma Jean
Baker as California’s Artichoke
Queen. Norma Jean later won
fame under her new name,
Marilyn Monroe.
HOLLYWOODLAND, a housing
development established in 1923 marked
by this sign on Beachwood Drive, top, was
the inspiration for the famous Hollywood
sign; Marilyn Monroe, above.
20 2017 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A
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.
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
cottage 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 dream-weavers of Holly-
wood. 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 pop-
ulous state in the Union in 1962.
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 awakenings 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 Francisco back in 1892 and took Presi-
dent Theodore Roosevelt camping amid the
natural wonders of Yosemite Valley in 1903.
From the 1980s on, Silicon Valley has
joined Hollywood as a creative lodestar for
the whole planet. In the present decade, Sil-
icon Valley reached northward, dramatically
transforming the economy and even the cul-
ture of San Francisco. The high-technology
world has enshrined risk-taking, innovation,
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 commencement speech in
2005 to “stay hungry, stay foolish.”
Californians, across centuries and cul-
tures, always have.
JOHNNY HABELL/SHUTTERSTOCK; LUCIAN MILASAN/SHUTTERSTOCK