California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Adding to their woes is the fact that the farmers have lost control of the California Assembly and state Senate. The large landholders used to have great power in both, but under the one-man-one-vote system their voice is much less effective. Now, though the Valley ranchers remain resolutely Republican, the Valley counties often go Democratic. Needless to say, Valley ranchers have few kind words for Cesar Chavez and his striking table-grape pickers, whose headquarters was in Delano, some seventy-five miles south of Fresno. “We weren’t about to have some labor organizer tell us what to do,” one rancher says. “Why, California pays the number-one farm wage in the country, and the grape pickers are paid the best! Why couldn’t he pick on states that were behind?” Mrs. William Harkey, the wife of a wealthy peach rancher in the little town of Gridley, says, “You bet I bought plenty of grapes during that whole darned thing. I didn’t buy them to eat, of course, because they’re terribly fattening. I fed them to my pet raccoon.” Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s support of the table-grape boycott produced the somewhat sick California joke: “Confucius say, ‘Man who boycott grapes should not play in Martha’s Vineyard.’”

  Valley ranchers, pessimistic by nature, are endlessly gloomy about their labor problems, and some insist that there can be no solutions. “The only people making money here are the developers,” one rancher claims. “They’re buying land at five thousand dollars an acre and selling it for housing at five thousand a lot. Twenty-five years from now this whole Valley will be nothing but houses, and all our fruits and vegetables will be coming from Africa.” Still, despite the cities’ sprawl, California’s harvest acreage continues to increase. Another rancher says, “When they took away the braceros, they forced us to use the winos. Those decent, hardworking Mexicans have been replaced by the dregs of society.” It is true that during the harvest seasons the trucks gathering up winos from the slums, skid rows, and backwaters of Valley towns for work in the fields are not a pretty sight and make the image of “urine-smelling buses” an apt one. At the same time, the labor shortage has forced the farmers to increase the mechanization of their farms. More and more, computers are feeding cattle and machines are shaking peaches out of trees, replacing human hands. This has meant that though the California farmer may not have been able to raise his prices by much, and though his machines are expensive, they have enabled him to increase his yields enormously. California farmland grows increasingly valuable. It seems likely that California farmers will be able to afford their air-conditioned cars, their heated pools, their air-conditioned houses and pool houses, their private planes, and their wives’ regular forays to I. Magnin’s for some time to come.

  Though the Valley farmers continue to curse the federal government and the trade unions, one of the most difficult things, perhaps, for them to understand is why the average laborer is not willing to work as hard as they, the farmers, do themselves. During the harvest season the farmer rolls up his sleeves and goes into his fields, where he will work for fifteen or twenty hours a day, seven days a week. His wife will put in the same hours in a 120-degree shed as a weighing master, and his sons and daughters will stoop and pick in the hot sun side by side with the winos. When floods threaten the levees of the Sacramento Delta, the Delta ranchers will work all night lugging and hoisting sandbags. Why, the ranchers ask, aren’t farm laborers happy to do the same? As one rancher puts it, “There’s enough money in California for every man in the state to earn more than just a decent living. Why isn’t everyone as well off as I am? Too damned lazy, that’s all there is to it.”

  Meanwhile, possibly to counteract the cities’ superior attitudes toward the farm towns, the Valley communities indulge in the sort of local boosterism that would have made Sinclair Lewis’ George F. Babbitt proud. Local chambers of commerce are untiring in their efforts to get even the smallest towns on the map, and each community is characterized by at least one if not several superlatives. Fresno is the “richest” county in the world. Castroville is advertised as the “Artichoke Capital of the World.” Entering Modesto, the visitor is greeted by a huge arch spanning the wide main street, proclaiming * MODESTO WATER WEALTH CONTENTMENT HEALTH *. Up in Chico several “unique attractions” are vaunted. First, there is the twenty-four-hundred-acre natural park where the original wilderness of the northern Valley is carefully preserved. The park was donated by General John Bidwell, who founded the city. “He was mixed up with Sutter and all the rest,” one local resident explains, “and his wife was big on Christianizing the Indians.” Chico residents proudly point out that Bidwell Park was the setting for the original Robin Hood film, with Errol Flynn, because its thickly clustered live oaks, festooned with ancient grapevines, were considered the closest thing to Sherwood Forest. Hidden in Bidwell Park are two natural lakes, along with what Chico used to boast was the “World’s Largest Oak.” In 1963 the World’s Largest Oak was split by a lightning bolt, and so now Chico’s chamber of commerce advertises that it has “Half of the World’s Largest Oak.”

  North of Sacramento is the pretty river town of Colusa. A few years ago Colusa enthusiastically celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its incorporation, and visitors to this event were invited to tour California’s second-oldest courthouse (1861) and the Will S. Green mansion (1868). Will S. Green founded Colusa and is venerated as this part of the Valley’s “Father of Irrigation,” as it was he who first surveyed the Grand Central Canal in 1860. Colusa also has a mini-mountain range all its own, called the Sutter Buttes. Remnants of some long-ago volcanic activity, the Buttes spring up surprisingly from the otherwise flat Valley floor to jagged peaks more than two thousand feet high. Besides giving Colusans something to look at other than an empty horizon, the Buttes allow Colusa—with typical Valley pride and its fondness for superlatives—to declare that the town contains the “World’s Smallest Mountain Range.”

  Still, for all their self-pride and self-promotion, the moneyed residents of the Valley towns remain acutely aware that they are not, and never will be San Francisco—that in San Francisco’s eyes they will always be outsiders, visitors, part of the routine supply of tourists. San Francisco remains “the city,” and the Valley remains the Valley, committed to a way of life that is agricultural, not citified. Joan Didion’s novel Run River is set in the rich Delta region, at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, where life is always somehow regulated by the rise and fall of water, the floods and ebbs, and where in every mind there was “a file of information, gathered and classified every year there was high water.… At what point had they opened the Colusa Weir. When would the Bypass reach capacity. What was the flood stage at Wilkins Slough. At Rough and Ready Bend. Frémont Weir. Rio Vista.”

  Miss Didion, who comes from the region herself, also portrays how carefully Valley families study the subtle nuances of San Francisco society. At one point in the novel two young Valley women, Martha and Lily, are discussing the social credentials of a third female character, Nancy Dupree, whose engagement has just been announced in the Chronicle. Nancy Dupree is from Piedmont, a wealthy suburb of Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco. Nancy’s father’s money was made in the construction business. After World War II.

  Martha supposed that Nancy Dupree had probably come out at the Fairmont in a white dress ordered from Elizabeth Arden.

  Lily was not sure. Those construction people were a little different, particularly if they lived in the East Bay. It was not as if her name were Crocker or Spreckels or something like that.

  No, Martha agreed, it was not. It certainly was not as if her name were Crocker or Spreckels or something like that. What a revelation, Lily’s sudden grasp on the San Francisco social scene. Was it possible that Lily had at hand a copy of the 1948 San Francisco Social Register?

  Though San Francisco remains the Valley’s role model—laying down the criteria for fashion, interior decoration, entertaining, club life—and though Valley families faithfully subscribe to the Chronicle (which publishes a special Valley edition) in addit
ion to their local papers, to most of the old Valley families, with roots going back into the black Valley soil for three, four, and even five generations, back to the days of the earliest pioneers, whose ancestors crossed the isthmus on muleback to get to where they are, the fact that San Francisco still does not quite accept Valley people as ladies and gentlemen is merely a minor annoyance, a familiar but not painful thorn in the side. Most of these families, who certainly could afford to do so if they wished, would not dream of living anywhere else. They go to San Francisco for the shopping, the restaurants, the theaters, the opera, the museums. Then they go home to the towns they know and love the best.

  One such person is Mr. C. K. McClatchy, the fourth generation of his family to operate the Bee chain of Valley newspapers (a fifth generation is waiting in the wings). The chain includes the Sacramento Bee, the Modesto Bee, and the Fresno Bee, and for years the Bees were run by Mr. McClatchy’s doughty maiden aunt, Miss Eleanor McClatchy, who expanded McClatchy Enterprises to include a string of radio and television stations throughout the length of the Valley.* Miss Eleanor was a Valley woman through and through, a pillar of Sacramento society, active in local political, civic, cultural, and charitable affairs, as much in command at the helm of her communications empire as at a cocktail party down in the Delta. Despite her activities, however, her biographical paragraph in Who’s Who in America was one of the shortest in the book. She supplied no data on her date of birth, her parents’ names, her club or church affiliations, her honorary degrees. She merely noted that her newspapers had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1935 for exposing corruption in Nevada. Miss Eleanor had little use for people who tarted up their lives with trimmings. She liked square dancing.

  Her nephew is also very much a Valley person. Sitting in downtown Sacramento’s elegantly paneled, leather-chaired Sutter Club—Sacramento’s answer to San Francisco’s Bohemian and Pacific Union clubs—C. K. McClatchy is a pleasantly handsome, well-tailored, urbane and witty man who, nonetheless, like all true Valley men, has a special feeling about the place and what it means: the struggle for land, for water, for success against a landscape that was in the beginning inhospitable to humans. He smiles at a mention of San Francisco’s toplofty attitude toward the Valley and its people. “San Franciscans look down their noses at everybody,” he says. “They look down at the East, the South, the Midwest, and the Southwest. They look down their noses at Berkeley, Oakland, San Rafael, and all of Marin County—everything that isn’t part of their precious Peninsula. They don’t want to understand the Valley, and so they probably never will. San Francisco has turned its back on its own history, but the Valley hasn’t. There is a sense, here in the Valley, of the continuation of history—of the gold rush, of the opening up of the West by the railroads, of the growth of California from the earliest pioneer days to where it is now, the most populous state in the Union. And you get a sense here of how history has moved—swept, been carried into the present in less than a hundred and fifty years, and of how the present has maintained the integrity of the past.”

  McClatchy points to the little Delta town of Locke, not far west of Sacramento—small sturdy houses lined up along the levee, with truck gardens on the reclaimed river bottom below—which is actually a rural Chinatown, whose population consists largely of the descendants of the Chinese laborers whom men like Charles Crocker imported to help him build his railroad fast and on the cheap. Today Locke’s Chinese American families operate small restaurants, bars, groceries, a laundry or two. “The Valley has kept up with its history like no other place I know of,” McClatchy says. “Just go and stand on the rim of the Shasta Dam”—called “the Keystone of the Central Valley Project”—“and see the thing that is the source of so much that has happened in the Valley, and beyond it, and you’ll see what I mean, why I find this Valley—plain and flat and conservative as it is—one of the most thrilling places to be alive in that I know.”

  * In 1979 the McClatchys expanded outside California and purchased the Anchorage, Alaska, Daily News. Within six months, circulation doubled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  O Little Town

  If anything, Santa Barbarans are even prouder than Valley people of constituting a world of their own, independent of San Francisco and Los Angeles. They are even prouder of their special earthquake.

  Earthquakes are peculiar and, of course, unpredictable. They are measured on the Richter scale of 1 to 10, as ground motion is recorded on seismographs (presumably a quake registering 10 on the scale is the most violent ever recorded). And yet the reading on the Richter scale often bears little relation to the amount of damage done. The “great” San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which brought on the great fire, measured 8.3 on the scale, and that, admittedly, was a mighty temblor. Five years later, in 1911, San Francisco experienced another quake, measuring 6.6 on the scale, which did little damage, and in the summer of 1979 a quake registering 5.9 caused tall buildings to sway but inflicted no significant harm on people or property. And yet, on June 29, 1925—a date that is engraved on the memory of every true Santa Barbaran—an earthquake registering 6.3 on the scale, or just slightly higher than the 1979 quake, virtually changed the face of Santa Barbara.

  Trees thrashed about, the towers of All Saints’ Church swayed, and the ground heaved in great waves. At least one Santa Barbara dowager, old Mrs. Cunningham—a Forbes of Boston—was killed. (One of the wealthy Santa Barbara residents had a psychic butler who foresaw the quake and warned her in time to save her collection of costly antique vases.) The aftershocks of the great Santa Barbara quake continued for the rest of the summer, and before it was over, most of what had been old Santa Barbara had been destroyed.

  Nowadays, in retrospect, the 1925 quake is usually referred to as “a blessing.” Until that time the city had developed somewhat haphazardly, without zoning. After the quake Santa Barbara found itself faced with the challenge of rebuilding from scratch, and it was a challenge it embraced with enthusiasm. When the earth finally quieted, an architectural board of review was formed by a group of local citizens. Its purpose was to supervise the reconstruction of the town and to see to it that this was done in such a way that it would be pleasing to the eye and would also have a certain architectural uniformity. The architectural theme chosen was a vaguely Mediterranean mixture of Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival, considered appropriate to southern California’s history. Walls were of beige or yellow stucco, and roofs were of red or yellow tile or terra-cotta. Bell towers and balconies and grillwork abounded. Santa Barbara’s acres were strictly zoned. For obvious reasons, high-rise buildings were prohibited. These architectural, building, and zoning codes have been observed until this day and have become a matter of great city pride. Not long ago Santa Barbara found itself in the middle of an intense dispute over the design of a new wing for the art museum, which proposed to depart, ever so slightly, from the traditional Spanish Mission style. Though structural architects have found Santa Barbara’s elaborate building regulations somewhat inhibiting, landscape architects have flocked to the area and have prospered creating the town’s many pretty parks, malls, and private gardens.

  Partly because Santa Barbara was able to rebuild itself so artfully out of the dust of the earthquake, Santa Barbarans consider themselves very special people. They do not identify at all with San Francisco, to the north. Nor do they feel much kinship with Los Angeles, to the south. As for the Valley towns, they might exist in some other part of the globe. In fact, Santa Barbarans often seem to feel no real relationship with the state of California. “Santa Barbara is an international city,” says Mrs. Michael Wheelwright, the wife of a prominent landscape architect, and many Santa Barbarans would agree with her. Santa Barbara is not merely a city with a permanent population, it is also a resort with a transient one, and many Santa Barbarans maintain other homes elsewhere—beach houses in Hawaii, farms in Vermont—and are always jetting from one part of the world to another. As a result, many Santa Barbara families do not feel Calif
ornia-based, as the older families in other parts of the state do. The peripatetic nature of wealthy Santa Barbarans helped account for the fact that when Santa Barbara attempted to publish its own edition of the Social Register, the enterprise collapsed after four editions; much of social Santa Barbara was already listed in Social Registers of other cities.

  Santa Barbara first came into existence in 1850, when it was incorporated by an act of the California legislature, a few months before there actually was a state of California. But it was not until the late 1860s, in the post-Civil War days, that it had its real genesis. It began, much as San Diego did, as a winter resort for families who, rich from the war, were casting about for new ways to spend their suddenly acquired leisure time and money, and were encapsulating themselves in luxurious redoubts where they would encounter only their “own kind.” In Santa Barbara, furthermore, most of this overnight gentry came from the East and the Middle West—members of the Armour family (meat), the Mortons (salt), the Fleischmanns (yeast), and the Hammonds (organs), to name a few—attracted by the subtropical winter weather, the beaches, the sailing, and other water sports. The early migrants built imposing winter homes in the hills above the little mission town, and many of these rich easterners were (or so Santa Barbarans like to boast) the black sheep of their respective families and were encouraged to go to California by relatives who were eager to have them transplanted several thousand miles from home. This accounts, Santa Barbarans say, for the special relaxed and laissez-faire air of the place—less grand and pretentious than Newport, less formal and competitive than Palm Beach. “Here we have always just gone our happy ways,” says one resident.