James Petrillo: James Caesar Petrillo (1892-1984) was a labor leader who became the influential president of the American Federation of Musicians from 1940 to 1958. He rigorously policed the practice of hiring nonunion musicians, such as the members of Joseph and Mary Rivas's band.
Hopkins Marine Station: The Hopkins Seaside Laboratory of Stanford University opened in 1892 on Lovers Point, north of its current site at 120 Oceanview Boulevard, Pacific Grove. It has been located on Oceanview since 1917, when it was officially renamed Hopkins Marine Station. It is the oldest marine research facility on the West Coast. Steinbeck attended summer classes at Hopkins in 1923.
"Memphis Blues": A song written in 1909 (published in 1912) by songwriter and bandleader William Christopher Handy, self-proclaimed "Father of the Blues." "Memphis Blues" played a significant role in bringing African American music into the mainstream.
Henny Penny: English fairy tale of undetermined origin and variable plot, sometimes called "The Sky Is Falling," "Chicken Little," "Chicken Licken," or "Henny Penny." In one version Henny Penny is hit on the head by a falling acorn and believes that "the sky is falling" and that she must tell the king. The moral of the tale varies from version to version but certainly can be interpreted to mean that danger is imminent.
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Il n'y a pas de mouches sur la grandmere: The English translation of the French is: "There are no flies on Grandmother."
"no room of my own": Suzy's lament ironically and meta phorically echoes Virginia Woolf's pioneering feminist essay, A Room of One's Own (1929), delivered as lectures at Cambridge University in 1928. In the essay, Woolf claims that in order for a woman writer to be successful, she needs space to work in and money enough to support herself.
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Lama Sabachthani?: From Matthew 27:46: "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
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Monarch butterflies: Steinbeck has taken some license here by timing the arrival of the butterflies (Danaus plexippus) in spring. In reality, they appear annually by the thousands in October to begin their crucial overwintering period in the pine and eucalyptus groves in Pacific Grove, which has established a permanent Monarch Grove Sanctuary.
Kinsey Report: Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956), a biologist at Indiana University and the founder of its Institute for Sex Research, published the studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
petition for release of Eugene Debs: Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), four-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, was convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for inciting disloyalty in the armed forces by making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was freed on December 25, 1919, after President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence.
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March Hare: The March Hare appears in chapter seven, "A Mad Tea-Party," in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by British writer and mathematician Charles L. Dodgson (1832-98).
Salinas High School: Steinbeck's alma mater; he graduated in 1918.
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I'm Sure We Should All Be as Happy as Kings: Poem 25 ("Happy Thought") by popular Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in his A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods (1913): "The world is so full of a number of things, / I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
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