Page 16 - 2018 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
» WE LOVE
SPORTS
Californians are sporty types
who love the outdoors and
participating in sports. They
also really like watching sports.
The Golden State hosts 16
professional sports franchises
in four major team sports,
football, basketball, baseball
and hockey, by far the most of
any American state. Runner-up
Florida has nine major pro
teams and third-place Texas
has eight.
A DIFFERENT VIEW of the famous
Hollywood sign, top; goalie Jonathan
Quick’s LA Kings jersey, above.
14 2018 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A
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 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. In the present decade, Sil-
icon Valley reached northward, dramatically
transforming the economy and even the
culture of San Francisco. The high-tech-
nology 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 com-
mencement speech in 2005 to “stay hungry,
stay foolish.”
Californians, across centuries and cul-
tures, always have.
SEAN PAVONE/SHUTTERSTOCK; NHL