Situated in the sprawling suburban-urban region known as Southern California, Los Angeles was a palm tree–laden, sparklingly bright, but relentlessly complex city. Americans throughout much of the twentieth century, and particularly after World War II, saw L.A. as an oasis for people seeking a more exciting and satisfying life. After all, most Americans knew—from a string of movies and television programs, popular music, and everyday folklore—all about the region’s reputation for boundless warmth and beauty, open-mindedness and plentiful opportunity, and free love and unencumbered sex on the beach. The peak cultural moment for California occurred in the late 1960s. After the Summer of Love in 1967, young people flooded to California. After all, who wouldn’t want to come the place where, according to Time in 1969, “the citizens of lotusland seem forever to be lolling around swimming pools, sautéing in the sun, packing across the Sierra, frolicking nude on the beaches, getting taller each year, plucking money off the trees, romping around topless, tramping through the redwoods and—when they stop to catch their breath—preening themselves on-camera before the rest of an envious world”? Because of Hollywood’s influence, and because of a confluence of historical and cultural forces, the Los Angeles of the imagination offered all the bounty and possibility of the latter part of the American century. California at the turn of the 1970s, Time continued, was the “hothouse” incubator of the latest, most promising fads, fashions, and ideas: “California clothes, architecture, arts, business ventures, topless/bottomless parks, table wines, liberated leisure styles, cults, think tanks and Disneylands seem to be spreading everywhere.”1 By the later 1970s life in California had become synonymous with ocean breezes, swaying palms, fast cars, warm beaches, an endless (and endlessly lucrative) summer, and beautiful young women and boys.
Tom Wolfe had been a frequent visitor to Southern California all through the golden days of the 1960s and early 1970s. His first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was a 1965 collection of essays that had as its titular centerpiece an essay on the wild and eccentric customized hot-rod car culture of Los Angeles. In the essay Wolfe described the aesthetic and styles that California’s custom-car fetishists adopted in the era—the baroque curves, a.k.a. the “streamline”; the tail fins and other lurid details; the chrome and the sparkly tangerine-flake paint jobs; and so on. Wolfe also described how California’s teenagers would meet and perform esoteric local car rituals on weekends. “Everybody would meet in drive-ins,” he wrote, “the most famous of them being the Piccadilly out near Sepulveda Boulevard. It was a hell of a show, all the weird-looking roadsters and custom cars, with very loud varoom-varoom motors. . . . The real action, though, was the drag racing, which was quite . . . illegal.”2
Wolfe would return again and again to California throughout the 1960s and ’70s, focusing, for instance, on the Bay Area psychedelic drug culture by following Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on a 1968 cross-country road trip for his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; writing about a group of California surfers in an essay that became the title of another book of essays, also released in 1968, The Pump House Gang; and writing a story on California’s visual landscape (of billboards, neon lights, advertising murals, and “electrographic” signs) for the Los Angeles Times Magazine called “I Drove around Los Angeles and It’s Crazy! The Art World Is Upside Down.”
That the nation’s perceptions of Los Angeles in 1977 were mostly faux—created on a flimsy basis, and fostered by no small amount of marketing, public relations, Hollywood fabrication, and wishful thinking—was part of the place’s charm to those who loved it. After all, though the landscape of Southern California had few tangible qualities to recommend it, King Charles III of Spain had founded Los Angeles in 1781 as a dusty outpost pueblo that had few natural resources and even fewer geographic advantages.3 Despite this the Spaniards of the eighteenth century were the first to suggest, in a paroxysm of longing, the near-mythical qualities of California. They concocted the name of the territory from a sixteenth-century Spanish novel that described a fictional island called California that was “very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise.”4
In 1821 Los Angeles became part of Mexico after that country achieved its independence from Spain. In 1848, as part of the peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, Los Angeles and much of the rest of California became part of the United States. The American city of Los Angeles, originally composed of a land grant of just twenty-eight acres, was officially incorporated in 1850, just five months before California, which had rapidly grown since the 1849 Gold Rush, became the country’s first state west of Texas. As a vast unexplored outpost far from much of the rest of the country, California, from its origins, came to represent something very specific in the country’s collective imagination. California was a place of open opportunity and quick riches. Even after the famous California Gold Rush of 1849 proved overhyped, to people stuck on the cold cornfields of the Midwest or in the drab factory cities of the Northeast, California’s reputation as a land of plenty remained. Indeed, California’s promise of a better, happier life became so entrenched that it was written into the state’s constitution in 1879. The California Constitution’s Article 1, Declaration of Rights, reads: “Section 1. All men are by nature free and independent, and have certain inalienable rights, which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness” (emphases added).
In its early years as an American town, Los Angeles remained a small, dusty, and remote home to five thousand souls, mostly ranchers and farmers. Los Angeles began to grow after the arrival of the railway in 1876 and the discovery of crude oil in 1892. In 1900 its population was 100,000, and by 1910 it had grown to 319,000. In the 1920s Southern California continued to grow, thanks to several new and developing industries—particularly aviation and the Hollywood film industry. By 1930 Los Angeles’s population of 1.2 million made it the fifth-largest American city. In 1932 the city was large enough to attract the Olympic Games, hosted in and around the grand new Los Angeles Coliseum. The sense that the city had arrived on the international stage was boosted by the fact that contemporary newspaper accounts suggested these were the first Olympic Games to turn a profit, even though they were being held in the midst of the Great Depression.5
As early as 1945 Life proclaimed that the California lifestyle was influencing American society, pointing the way to a new form of “modern living.” Before the war, as the reach of the American automobile expanded, freeways were seen as key to connecting the disparate communities spreading across the Southern California basin. In fact, Los Angeles constructed one of the country’s first urban expressways, the Arroyo Seco Parkway in 1940, and continued building them more ambitiously than anywhere else in the country.6 In the 1950s California’s highway budget was the largest of all states, as roads were increasingly needed to reach the ever-expanding sprawl of shopping malls and housing developments. Many of the newcomers to California in the late 1940s and early 1950s, whose cars filled the new freeways and were parked in the attached garages of new tract homes, were servicemen who had tasted the tempting fruit of California during their military training. Los Angeles had been the nation’s most dominant staging location for the war effort in the Pacific, home to numerous war factories and training camps that housed hundreds of thousands of military personnel. Mainly young men away from home for the first time, they marveled at the sunny weather, the openness of the local people, and the openness (and cheapness) of the land. After the war, as the country grew more mobile and more prosperous, countless servicemen returned home, packed up their belongings in a new Edsel or Chevy station wagon, and hopped on the new highways to head west.7
The newly arrived postwar Californians eagerly pursued the American Dream of the time by purchasing the trappings of the middle-class Good Life: clapboard house, backyard patio and barbecue, big American car in the garage, maybe a pool, and, on the weekend, the prolife
rating local popular entertainments. Los Angeles had all of this to offer anyone seeking to live the dream—in fact, it was the dream-making center of the country.8 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gallup polls consistently ranked California number one as a vacation spot, an “ideal place to live,” and the most beautiful state with the most beautiful cities. Americans in the mid-1950s mentioned California most frequently as the state where they would most like to relocate, citing the job opportunities and climate as the main attractions.9 In 1955 Disneyland opened in Anaheim, and people grew ever more curious about the golden magic that increasingly seemed to define Southern California. In 1958 Major League Baseball’s Dodgers and Giants shocked the eastern establishment by leaving New York City and moving to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. And, despite the local dismay and anger at the loss of Brooklyn’s favorite “bums,” in 1960 a Look poll revealed that 11 percent of all Americans, if given the opportunity, would choose to move to California, too.
One of the families who had been bedazzled by the idea of California was Tom Fallon’s. Since Fallon’s marriage to the former Catherine Kolber in the late 1930s, he had raised his family in New York amid a tangle of Irish and German relatives. A few blocks away from their too small two-story clapboard house in Menands (across the river from the state capital, Albany) was Catherine’s sister, Helen, who lived with her husband and two children. Tom’s two brothers had each made their way—after they each escaped their own stays in separate Pennsylvania orphanages—to live and work for a time in the Albany area before each decided, in turn, to move elsewhere in the state. John Fallon, the second-oldest brother after Tom, moved to Binghamton, about 140 miles southwest of Menands, and Jim, the youngest of four surviving siblings (a younger sister had died in an orphanage), moved to Brooklyn. Their ostensible reason for leaving Albany was to escape being close to their father, a raging Irish alcoholic, and out-of-work coal miner, who had indirectly caused the death of their mother.10
Tom Fallon had not been drafted to serve in the armed forces during World War II. Instead, he had been steadily rising through the local police force, gaining the rank of sergeant in the early 1950s. But he was frustrated by the job. Not only did it pay barely enough to keep his family fed, but it did nothing to feed his imagination and sense of doing something big. In the 1940s, when Tom Fallon was a young man, they called it “know-how.” American know-how—it was what built the great cities of the country, transforming a new country into a burgeoning nation. To make extra money after hours in those days, Tom Fallon painted houses and did various handyman jobs for families around Albany.11 He was known for his meticulousness, for covering every square inch of space with tarps so that there was no chance anything could get spoiled by paint drips. Tom wanted to be in a place where his skill, his attention to detail, his imagination would matter.
By the early 1950s, as people increasingly talked of the opportunity and sunshine in California, Fallon began to wonder if life out west wouldn’t be more rewarding than life in the East. They had freeways in Southern California. Cars. A vast network of radio stations beaming entertainment across the wide urban basin. They had show business. Jobs and cheap land. When asked many years later why he would leave behind a good civil-servant job with plenty of future opportunity, as well as all of his siblings and extended aunts and uncles and other family in the area, Tom Fallon said without any sentimentality, “I wasn’t going to get rich on a policeman’s salary.”
In the middle of February 1953, the Fallons decided—on the uncertain promise of a well-paying painting job—to pack their six young children and what belongings they could carry into a station wagon and an Airstream trailer that Fallon had assembled by hand. Leaving Menands forever behind, the Fallons joined a long procession of other young families doing the same—traveling part of the time on the first vestiges of President Eisenhower’s grand interstate highway system and part of the time on the storied highway of song and lore, Route 66. Tom’s youngest child, a boy named Barry, was just a baby. Catherine kept Barry occupied during the entire trip by repeatedly giving him a Kleenex box from which he pulled tissues, one by one by one. The rest of the children spent their time in the novel confines of the trailer, watching the country slowly pass by outside the trailer windows.
Coming to California was not an easy adjustment for the Fallons. During their first year in the state the family lived in modest conditions in a trailer park in Fontana, a city located about nine miles from San Bernardino and noted for its steel mills. Life in Fontana—choked as it was by dust and smog, overrun with tumbleweeds and coyotes and strange varmints—certainly was different from that back home. Tom’s middle son, James, or Jimmy as he was known, was nine years old when the family made its move, and for a time he felt like a fish out of water. A fan of cowboy movies, Jimmy noted the dusty heat of the California sun and imagined this was how John Wayne must have felt as he rode the range in movies like Hondo. He also was immediately schooled by his schoolmates about how one dealt with local weather conditions. In a rare California rainstorm that first year, Jimmy put on his galoshes and trudged to school just as he had countless times before in Menands. But in the land where the sun always shone and image mattered more than anything, the other kids were put off by his odd fashion choice. “You wear those?” someone asked dismissively. Jimmy never wore galoshes again.
Over time the Fallons slowly adapted to their new life. At thirty-four years of age in 1954, Tom Fallon painted houses, yes, but he held other jobs—security guard, bakery truck driver, night stocker at a supermarket, whatever it took to get by. He was hardly ever home, but eventually he managed to save enough money to buy some property. That spring Fallon bought a house in San Bernardino proper, the eponymous county seat of the largest county in California.12 Here Tom and Catherine became prolific year-round producers of tomatoes, cucumbers, and all manner of fresh vegetables in their small, but fecund, backyard garden. The entire yard around Tom and Catherine’s house would always be well maintained and exceedingly lush. And just beyond the yard, the murky green leaves of several groves of lemons and oranges provided a playground for the Fallon kids to dart and hide and play cowboys and Indians until the sun set beyond the valleys to the west.
It was in the new house in San Bernardino that the California Dream would start to seem finally within reach for Tom Fallon’s family. Two particular Californian institutions in those days would provide rich fodder to fatten the yearnings—the great desire to become the kind of “self-made” man that had made California what it was since its earliest history—that had brought Tom Fallon west. First, just down the street from the new house, a small food joint was known for selling a bag of hamburgers for a buck. Run by brothers named Richard and Maurice McDonald since 1940, the place was a modest success. In 1954 the brothers took as a partner a traveling salesman, Ray Kroc. Kroc eventually had a simple idea—Tom Fallon noted—that would transform the McDonald’s concept and, eventually, the American food business.
Additionally, in the fall of 1955 during a record-setting heat wave, the family drove nearly fifty miles southwest of their home to Anaheim. Disneyland, the new amusement park that had opened in July of that year, was still so new that many of the drinking fountains were not yet working. In the one-hundred-plus-degree heat that day, park employees passed out free glasses of ice water to keep half-sunstroked park visitors from collapsing. Despite the inconveniences, the family had a memorable enough time that they spoke of it for many years afterward.
To Tom Fallon there were no better examples of the 1970s spirit of California know-how than fellow transplants Ray Kroc and Walt Disney. Kroc, after serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War, had tried his hand at a succession of temporary trades—salesman, pianist, jazz musician, and radio technician—in his home state of Illinois. His life changed after he came to California and, by chance, met the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino. With them Kroc developed the idea of expanding the McDonald’s business through fra
nchises, and he began to do so by establishing the McDonald’s Corporation in Illinois in April 1955 and opening a number of restaurants there that year.
Meanwhile, Walt Disney’s various midcentury enterprises epitomized the California penchant for turning a pipe dream into reality. Disney, like Kroc, had served in the ambulance corps during the First World War, then returned to his home in the Midwest—in Kansas City—and struggled to establish himself. After failing as a newspaper cartoonist Disney worked on the animation team at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, then formed his own animation company, called Laugh-O-Gram. This company soon went bankrupt, but Disney was undeterred. In 1926 he moved to Hollywood, where he started the Walt Disney Studio. Again Disney nearly failed, as Universal Pictures grabbed the rights to his first popular cartoon character, Oswald Rabbit, and then hired away his team of animators. Rather than give up, however, Disney again risked all on a new staff, a new character named Mickey Mouse, and a bold new animated short, called Steamboat Willie, that was the first commercial film to be synchronized with sound.
After producing a number of popular animated features starting in the late 1930s, Disney was at last legitimately successful, but he remained restless for more. In the early 1950s Disney became fixated on another risky idea: a Disney amusement park. Amusement parks were not popular in the early 1950s. People were drawn to the new air-conditioned movie palaces, as these seemed safer from juvenile delinquents and other perceived dangers. Over and over people—especially owners and managers of other amusement parks—advised Disney against pursuing his idea. Even worse, banks and investors shied away from Disney’s sales pitch, suggesting the idea was a “fantasy” that offered “too little collateral” for the price. Even Disney’s own brother Roy, who was the financial officer for the thriving Disney company, refused to allow company money to be spent on this windmill tilt. But Walt Disney continued pushing, raising eleven million dollars on his own for the park’s construction by mortgaging his house, cashing in his life insurance, calling in debts, and establishing a partnership with the local entertainment industry.13 He built his pipe dream, Disneyland, and the results, of course, were stunning. By the end of the park’s first year of operation, three million people had visited, and Disney collected profits of thirty million dollars. Disneyland, which almost no one believed would work, revolutionized an entire industry and changed the local and national cultural landscape forever.
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