Where were you when California died?
Where were you when California died?
I was born late in the year 1940, in San Jose, California, and no, I cannot tell you what it was like back then.
I can, however, tell you what it was like five years later. I could also offer you glimpses of what it was like to be 4 or 5 years old during World War II, but that’s another story.
This is the part I want to share. My brother and I spent our early years living in my grandfather’s home in Willow Glen. It’s still there – a “heritage home” now – at 1255 Pine Avenue, on the corner of Cottle and Pine.
Mom was busy. She, along with millions of American women, was building things… big, heavy, nasty things. She built LSTs (Landing Ship Tracked) for a company called FMC – Food Machinery Corporation, and when she wasn’t building munitions for FMC, she was building munitions for some other outfit I no longer remember.
Mom was Rosie the Riveter, God bless her memory, and we didn’t see a whole lot of her while the war raged. Like her sisters, she gave up her time for her country, but we were too young to understand what was at stake. Mom was a voice on the radio, or a wispy ghost who tucked us in long after the sun had gone down.
She was an amorphous Goddess we neither knew nor understood.
That’s another story, too.
Across the street from my grandfather’s home, there was a cherry orchard. I think, but cannot attest, that it was spread over at least 320 acres. My brother Bill and I used to sneak across the street with brown paper grocery bags… there were no plastic ones back then, let alone supermarkets that needed them… and steal enough cherries to fill them up.
We were accomplished thieves.
We brought these plump bags of (mostly) Royal Anne and Bing cherries to our grandmother, she would ask us where they came from, although she knew full well the answer.
We would offer up patently ridiculous fairy tales, and she would make pies, jams and jellies which delighted us no end.
My brother says that the orchardist surrendered the first two rows of cherry trees, which stood like sentries on the edge of his domain, to the 4 and 5 year old pirates who plundered his treasures.
I cannot say, because I was simply too young to recall such truths, but I can still recall what it was like to climb into those loving trees, brown bag in hand, and plunder whatever I could.
Bill and I were consummate cherry thieves.
That was a long time ago, and, although I could waste hours of your time blathering about the Santa Clara Valley between 1944 and 1960, I won’t. It is clearly not of any importance to anyone, anywhere, particularly Californians, who seem to have no appreciation whatsoever for what once was.
Most of the people who are capable of remembering California, let alone the Santa Clara Valley back then, no longer have an audience who gives a damn. All we can do is weep into our beer (or, in my case, Chardonnay), bemoan the absence of respect, and thank God we got out when we did.
Endless acres of apricot, cherry, plum, pear and peach trees simply disappeared. Greed replaced common sense, and we destroyed one of the most beautiful places on earth, only to replace it with those ticky-tacky houses my beloved father helped to create.
What on EARTH were we thinking?
Where were YOU when they mowed down the fruit trees and replaced them with 1200 square foot “California Ranchers?”
Where were you when Lick Observatory, on Mount Hamilton, obscured by smog, could no longer be seen?
Where were YOU when they paved the Santa Clara Valley?
Where were WE when they replaced the clean, apricot-scented air with a disgusting brownish yellow cloud of sewer gas and changed the name of the corpse to the “Silicon Valley?”
California’s bankrupt, they say. Welfare programs may not simply be “cut,” they may be eliminated in their entirety. Schools may be closed, competent teachers dismissed, and an entire generation of California children dumped on the dung heap of financial stupidity.
I weep for the children, not only because California can no longer afford to teach them, but because they cannot steal cherries from the orchards which no longer exist, and because the vineyards no longer grow the grapes which made the wine. I weep because the children have not experienced the heady ecstasy created by the scent of fresh apricots drying in the California sun.
To those of you who do not recall the mineral water spring at Alum Rock, or the vineyards of Los Gatos and Cupertino, let alone the scent of clean air, I extend my regrets.
My California died in the Sixties, and will never return.
Where were you back then?
