The Right Places

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Ewing Marion Kauffman, who says, “I wanted to be Kauffman of Marion Laboratories, not Kauffman of Kauffman Laboratories, there’s an important difference” (though business rivals hint darkly that he simply invented “Marion” as his middle name) is a man so totally lacking in modesty that his huge self-esteem more or less passes for charm. When he entertains, he urges his guests to make after-dinner speeches extolling Ewing Kauffman. After each tribute, he applauds approvingly. He lives in a huge brick fortress on a hill that prominently displays itself to the street below, and from his house he flies two big flags from two big flag poles, the American because he is proud to be an American, and the Canadian, because he is proud of his blondely beautiful and Canadian-born wife. His house is full of delights, including an Olympic-size swimming pool, a sauna and a steam bath, a pipe organ, a ballroom, and a fountain electronically geared to splash to the accompaniment of music and colored lights. “I’m just learning to use my wealth,” he admits. “Now we give two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to charity every year.” One of his most recent big outlays, however, was to purchase the Kansas City Royals, a baseball team, because “my wife wanted them.”

  There are, as they say in Kansas City, not many people around like Ewing Kauffman. At the same time, there are too few people in Kansas City like Mrs. Kenneth Spencer, whose husband died several years ago. In 1966, Mrs. Spencer wrote out a check for $2,125,000 to build a graduate research laboratory at the University of Kansas, her husband’s alma mater. She continues to make sizable gifts to a long list of philanthropies. The Spencers had no children, and so one day Kansas City will doubtless benefit importantly from Mrs. Spencer’s fortune.

  Not long ago a group of young Kansas City businessmen sat at lunch at the Kansas City Club, the downtown eating club for men. The group included Jerry Jurden, vice president of ISC Industries, a securities outfit; George Kroh, a real estate developer, Bob Johnson of the History and Science Museum, Gordon Lenci, headmaster of the Barstow School, one of several private day schools in the city, and Irvine Hockaday, Jr., a young lawyer. No one at the table was over forty, and most were not more than thirty-five. And, as it almost inevitably does, the subject came up of what was wrong with Kansas City’s “image.”

  “Kansas City had a lot of things going for it around the turn of the century,” one man said. “The Armours were here with their meat business, Fred Harvey’s headquarters were here, all the major truck lines came through here, and of course there was the river port. But look what’s happened to Dallas, compared with what’s happened to us! Compared with us, why should a city like Dallas even exist? Yet Dallas is known as the Big D, and everybody laughs at Kansas City.”

  “We’ve got to overcome apathy,” George Kroh said. “We’ve still got a lot here. We’ve got cattle, oil, industry, a broad economic base—clean air, and no ghettoes. Of course there’s not much glamour in being Mr. Clean. We’ve got the Mission Hunt, the Polo Club—and still we’re thought of as a bunch of hicks in a nowhere cow town.”

  “One thing Kansas City is not—it’s not provincial,” Bob Johnson said. “I found that out when I moved here from Chicago. This is a very aware city. The people here know what’s going on in the world.”

  “That,” another man pointed out humorously, “is because of our location. We’ve got no ocean, no lakes, no mountains to go to—we’ve got to get out of Kansas City to find all that.”

  As for culture, the young men agreed that Kansas City has always been more oriented toward sports. “Still, you see a lot of people going to the theater now that you used to see at the ball games”—and there was general agreement that Big Tom Pendergast’s influence on the city’s cultural life had been disastrous. “And now,” George Kroh said, “there’s so damn much infighting going on among the various art groups. The Lyric Opera is fighting the Philharmonic, and the Performing Arts Foundation is fighting the Kempers, and all the different museum groups are fighting each other. We need some sort of unifying force.” At the same time, it was pointed out, an exhibition of art owned by Kansas City collectors, held at the Nelson Gallery, had drawn some three hundred works from a hundred and ten different collections, with tastes ranging from Gainsborough to de Kooning and Warhol. And, someone else added, “I’d say that at least ninety per cent of those collectors were people under forty.”

  Irvine Hockaday, who is active in city politics, nodded emphatically and said, “Yes, this is a beautiful city, a great place to live. The only thing wrong with Kansas City is what Mayor Davis said. Did you hear what Mayor Davis said? He said, ‘All this town needs is a few more funerals.’”

  Senator Wherry, in a broadside against the Red Chinese, once said, “We will lift Shanghai up, up, up to Kansas City if it takes us a century!” So much for Senator Wherry, and so much for Shanghai. As for Kansas City, funerals are, alas, inevitable, and we shall see how high Kansas City climbs.

  Courtesy of the Fresno County and City Chamber of Commerce

  Luxury and livestock in California’s Central Valley

  3

  California’s Central Valley: “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health”

  Colusa, California, is not provincial either. Nor are Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, Lodi, Sacramento, Chico, or Redding, to name a few other Central Valley places. And yet, like Kansas City, they are disparaged and made the butt of all the jokes. The lyric of a recent hit song runs, “Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again!” Not long ago, Herb Caen, the San Francisco columnist and chronicler, led off a column with “Lodi’s leading playboy (and that’s funny right there) …” And in a review of Fat City, a novel by Leonard Gardner, a news magazine wrote, “The place is Stockton, California, a city filled with a litter of lost people, most of whom pile on urine-smelling buses each morning and head for the onion, peach, or walnut fields for a killing day on skinny wages.” In fiction, Colusa has fared no better.

  Broadway producers say that if a reference to Canarsie gets a laugh in a New York show, the California road company can get an identical laugh by substituting “Modesto,” or “Visalia,” or “Yuba City.” In fact, any Valley town will do.

  The Central Valley of California contains some of the lushest agricultural land in the world, and the Valley’s towns and cities are the homes of some of California’s—and the country’s—wealthiest families, who lead lives of quite splendid luxury. A “litter of lost people”? That would hardly apply to the Weber family of Stockton, founders of the city, who own vast ranches of peaches and tomatoes, or to Mrs. Tillie Lewis of the same city, another tomato tycoon, who made an enormous fortune when her canneries developed a way to take sugar out of canned fruits and juices, or to Mr. Peter Cook of Rio Vista, said to be “so rich that he doesn’t lease out his gas wells—he drills them himself.” Then there are people like the Alex Browns, so rich that they found it more practical to open their own bank than to bother with ordinary commercial accounts, and the McClatchys, owners of the Valley’s largest newspaper and radio-TV chain for four generations.

  In Modesto, there are the Gallos, largest wine producers in the world, and further south there are hugely wealthy families such as the Giffens of Fresno. Russell Giffen, from an office furnished with eighteenth-century antiques, directs a ranching operation with acreage in the hundreds of thousands (so many hundreds of thousands that he is not quite sure just how much land he owns), raising cotton, barley, wheat, safflower, alfalfa seed, melons, tomatoes, and a good deal else. Urine-smelling buses indeed! Central California garages practically overflow with air-conditioned Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces. The men who drive the big harvesters for Martin Wilmarth—who harvests, along with other produce, twelve hundred acres of rice in Colusa—sit in comfort in air-conditioned cabs. Another Valley farmer has a fleet of custom-made Cadillac pickup trucks, also air-conditioned, said to be the only vehicles of their sort in the world. At the same time, California’s Central Valley, though it is the largest single region in the state, where over two hundred products are grown—prod
ucts which become ten per cent of what America eats—the area has remained the one part of the state which hardly anyone outside it knows; which few outsiders see or visit, and which fewer understand.

  Even Mrs. Ronald Reagan speaks without enthusiasm of her current address in Sacramento, the state capital and the Valley’s largest city. “Thank heavens we can escape to Beverly Hills on the weekends!” Nancy Reagan says, adding that she has to go to Beverly Hills at least once a week to get her hair done. “No one in Sacramento can do hair,” she sweepingly asserts. Like most people from Los Angeles and San Francisco, Nancy Reagan had never spent much time in the Valley and had never set foot in Sacramento until her husband was elected governor. When she did, she was horrified by what she found and has been complaining bitterly ever since, to anyone who will listen, about the house where she was expected to live.

  The California governor’s mansion, a turreted affair of Victorian gingerbread built in 1878 and painted a glittering wedding-cake white, was immediately unacceptable. “There are seven fireplaces, none of which can be lit,” Mrs. Reagan has said. “The house is on a corner facing two gas stations and a motel, and it backs up on the American Legion Hall where I swear there are vile orgies every night. The house was condemned fifteen years ago. I said to Ronnie, I can’t let my children live there!” Upon seeing it, Mrs. Reagan immediately refused to occupy the mansion, and the Governor indulged “Mommy”—as he calls her—and rented a house in the suburbs of the city. Since then, Nancy Reagan says that she has been “too busy” to get to know any of her Valley neighbors. She made one trip to the Sacramento branch of I. Magnin & Company, California’s favorite fashion store, and found its contents inferior to those in the stores in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, where she still prefers to shop. “Here, everything is scaled down for these Valley farm women,” she says.

  These, needless to say, would be nothing short of fighting words to the women of the Central Valley who, among other things, are among Mrs. Reagan’s husband’s staunchest supporters. A great many Valley families are older-established than families in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and these consider themselves among the oldest of California’s Old Guard. The first families of the Valley were here long before gold was discovered in the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill, near Sacramento, and these families descend from men and women who crossed the Sierras on foot, before the days of the covered-wagon trains. And yet, as they are most acutely aware, young women from the Central Valley are not invited to join the debutante parties in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Valley men languish far longer on the waiting lists of San Francisco’s select clubs such as the Bohemian and the Pacific Union. “It’s because of our cow-town image,” they say with resignation, and they suffer from an inferiority complex even more severe than their counterparts in Kansas City.

  Geographically, San Francisco and Los Angeles people have always treated the Valley as something to be endured, a place to be got through. You have to get through Bakersfield and Visalia in order to get from Los Angeles to Yosemite Park. From San Francisco, it was necessary to get through Sacramento in order to get to Lake Tahoe or Squaw Valley—until the new freeway managed to speed the motorist over the rooftops of Sacramento without its really being visible. The old Route 99 that used to take you up and down the length of the Valley had, to be sure, a perverse way of leading the motorist through the most woebegone sections of each Valley town it encountered, and there was, as a result, no encouragement to turn off the main highway and explore. After a trip through or across the big Valley it was easy to leave it with the impression that it was little more than a flat—very flat—expanse of fields and orchards, punctuated by glum skid rows and trailer camps. Now, in a sense, the freeway system has made it worse. You can traverse the Valley without even knowing it’s there.

  And yet it is. Over the round, dry, coastal mountains that shelter San Francisco, through such a pass as the Altamont, and then down into the Valley, you know, when you encounter it, that you are in a somehow special place. There is a special smell, which changes with the seasons, from the smell of loamy earth to the perfume of blossoms and unfolding leaves to the drying of eucalyptus bark at the end of summer. Each harvest has its smell—sweet and winy grapes, dusty tomatoes. There is also a special hazy paleness to Valley sunlight and, in winter, special ghostly fogs and mists that rise from marshes and canals and river beds. There is also a special language here. Ask for directions, for example, and you might be told: “Head up about a mile past Harris’s piece till you pass a prune orchard on your right and some apricots on your left. Then take your next right, which will put you up onto the levee, then go along the slough till you hit a grove of wild wormwood trees.…”

  The Central Valley of California is actually a pair of valleys placed end to end, created by two rivers—the Sacramento, which flows south out of the Sierras, and the San Joaquin, which flows north. The two rivers merge in a fan-shaped delta east of San Francisco, and then empty to form San Francisco Bay. Like Kansas City’s famous bluff, the much-advertised beauty of San Francisco Bay would not exist if it had not been created by the convergence of the Valley rivers which, of course, spill out at the end of their journey through the Golden Gate. The topography of the double valley, which is, on a relief map, as though a great scoop had been drawn down through the center of the state, is responsible for the Valley’s special climate. Moist air from the Pacific is turned back by the coastal range of mountains and, on the eastern side, the towering Sierras collect westward-moving weather in the form of rain or snow. Thus the Valley remains hot and dry throughout most of the year, and it “never” rains from April to October. At least it’s not supposed to rain during these months.

  From the earliest days of California settlement, men struggled with the problems, and the promises, which this particular climate offered. During the long summers the rivers shrank to a trickle or dried up altogether, and the Valley became a desert. In spring, when the snows in the mountains melted, the rivers overflowed and the Valley became an inland swamp. You can tell which are the oldest of the Valley houses because they are built on high foundations, well above the ground, and are approached by long flights of steps, a reminder of the threat of high water that existed only a few years ago. Obviously, what the Central Valley needed was a way to store the spring floods and to distribute this water during the dry summer growing season, and from the first sandbagged levees along the Sacramento River and the digging of the first canals, ditches, and sloughs, this battle with water has been the Central Valley’s major effort. In fact, the story of the Valley, and its economic success, has been written in water.

  One of the first to recognize the Valley’s potential in a large way was a man called Henry Miller (no kin to the novelist of the same name who also lives in California). Henry Miller remains, in some ways, a figure of mystery. His real name was Heinrich Alfred Kreiser. He was the son of a German (or perhaps Austrian) butcher. He came to the United States in 1847 at the age of nineteen, and when he heard of Sutter’s gold he decided to head for California. When he went to pick up his steamer ticket to Panama he noticed that, for some reason, his ticket had been made out in the name of Henry Miller. This, at least, is what he claimed. Did he come upon the ticket dishonestly? In any case, the ticket was stamped “Non-Transferable,” and so the young man, who spoke little English, decided that it was wisest to pretend to be Henry Miller rather than risk losing the ticket. He kept the name until he died.

  In California, he worked for a while as a dishwasher and then as a sausage peddler, and it was as a sausage man that he first entered the Central Valley and was struck with its possibilities. He was a quiet, reclusive young man, and as far as is known had no formal engineering training. Yet he began, in his spare time, to design levees and intricate irrigation systems. He also began to buy land which was considered worthless and which he could therefore buy dirt-cheap. Henry Miller—who, in his later years, developed grandiose ideas about his capacities and took to comparin
g himself with King Solomon—may have been a genius. He was certainly a clever salesman, and perhaps he was a scoundrel. In the days of feverish railroad-building and the speculation in land that was central to the allure of railroads, Miller was able to persuade various fledgling railroad companies to lay their tracks along certain routes. Then, when tracks were ready to be laid, Miller would discover a “better” route. The first route would then be abandoned, and its roadbed would become—by default—a ready-made levee for Miller’s expanding irrigation system. Once, buying a parcel of land from a Spanish owner, Miller agreed to accept “as much land as a boat can circle in a day” in return for the price he offered. He then strapped a canoe to his wagon, set off at a fast clip across the countryside, and, by nightfall, had claimed a considerably larger portion than if his journey had been by water.

  At the height of his career, Henry Miller and his partner, Charles Lux, another ex-butcher, owned over half a million acres of Valley land, on which a million head of cattle grazed. Miller and Lux were America’s first cattle kings, and it was once claimed that whatever California real estate Henry Miller didn’t own the Southern Pacific Railroad did. Miller liked to boast that he could ride from Mexico to the Oregon Border, on horseback, and never be required to sleep on land that was not his own. He was also responsible for the law of riparian rights, which provided that anyone owning land along a river can use the river’s water. This gave Miller complete control of all the water in the San Joaquin Valley, a considerable resource. Today, Henry Miller’s heirs and others who have inherited shares of the Miller-Lux holdings, are immensely rich. Henry Miller died in 1916, and the beneficiaries, direct and indirect, of his enterprises include such far-flung people as Mrs. William Wallace Mein, Jr., of San Francisco, who is Henry Miller’s great-granddaughter, and Mr. Wilmarth S. Lewis of Farmington, Connecticut, the celebrated Walpole scholar, biographer, and collector of Walpoleiana.