Page 18 - 2022-2023 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 June 11-12 at the
Monterey County Fairgrounds.
In 1948, Castroville crowned
visiting starlet Norma Jean
Baker as California’s 1st
Artichoke Queen. Norma Jean
later won fame under her new
name, Marilyn Monroe.
A DIFFERENT VIEW of the famous Hollywood
sign, top; Marilyn Monroe, above.
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. Thomas Edison’s
Motion Picture Patents Company, based in
New Jersey, held tight control over motion
picture cameras and who could make films.
These tight restrictions stifled innovation
and crippled the film industry so indepen-
dent filmmakers fled to California where
distance made it easier to evade litigation.
The reliable sunshine and temperature also
made it a more suitable place for filming
year-round. 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 specif-
ically, 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 Hollywood. In
16 2022-23 TRAVEL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA
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,
Silicon Valley reached northward, dramatic-
ally transforming the economy and even
the culture of San Francisco. The high-
technology world has enshrined risk-
taking, innovation, learning from failure
and—you guessed it—starting over. Quot-
ing 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.
SEAN PAVONE/SHUTTERSTOCK; LUCIAN MILASAN/SHUTTERSTOCK