The Dream Endures California Enters the 1940s

The fifth volume in Starr's classic history of California, The Dream Endures shows how Californians rebounded from the Great Depression to emerge in the 1930s into what is now known as "the good life." Starr illustrates the ways the good life prospered in California--in film, fiction, leisure,and architecture. Starr looks at the newly important places where Californians lived out this sunny lifestyle: areas like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (whereEinstein changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. "In this, more than any other of Starr's monumental California histories, we see the stirrings of uniqueness in the social and cultural evolution of California. Starr's theme is relevant to all of America and the national destiny."--Neil Morgan, San Diego Union-Tribune "Enormously sensitive and moving. Social and cultural history doesn't get any better."--San Francisco Chronicle "In his monumental continuing study of California, Kevin Starr belongs in the company of the best."--Herbert Gold, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Kevin Starr is State Librarian of California and University Professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern California. He is the author of six books in the Americans and the California Dream series.

Chapter One

Good Times on the Coast

Affluence and the Anti-Depression

In a three-part series published in Westways in the fall of 1936, Los Angeles journalist Farnsworth Crowder assessed the California temperament as a matter of sunshine, physicality, and the pleasure principle. Because of the California climate, Crowder claimed, an unapologetic pursuit of pleasure had emerged as a driving force in daily life among Californians. This preference manifested itself through an intensified relationship to the environment and life in the outdoors. "Your Californian," Crowder claimed, "seeks snowbanks, beach sands, channel islands, pine forests, desert inns, in preference to museums, theatres, birthplaces, tombs, and historic landmarks. He feels that there is a distinct appropriateness about a concert under the stars, a graduation-out-of-doors, a supper in a patio, in preference to anything under a roof; he will even suffer chilblains in defense of this preference."

The relative lack of a history, Crowder argued, served this obsession with nature. True, California had a Spanish and Mexican past, and before that a Native American heritage; but few traces of these eras had survived, and their relationship to the cultural consciousness of contemporary California was virtually nil. ("Almost any square block of London is more drenched with flavors of the past than the whole of Los Angeles.") Unburdened by history, Crowder speculated, Californians related directly to the here and now and to the physical. "This cult of the body snubs tradition, formality, and dignity," Crowder maintained. "Sun-bathing, nudity, bare heads, open-necked shirts are not imposed by cranks; they are dictated by the sun. Health consciousness is extreme and is reflected in the medical profession and in the prevalence of quackery, pseudo-science and cultism. The climate is so entirely congenial to the American athletics mania that sports flourish and champions are a major product. Body-awareness is, of course, heightened among women by the presence of the movies, and one sees glamour attempted in the most unexpected corners on the most improbable faces and figures, until as one draws closer and closer to Hollywood and Vine the effect becomes positively bizarre."

Crowder's thesis, like all such synthetic speculations, was at once overstated--and correct. As a matter of social experience and self-perception, Californians did glory in athletics, outdoor living, and the festive pageantry of life in a manner that did not differ in kind, but rather in intensity, from patterns of enjoyment in other regions. Nor did the Depression totally interrupt the fun. Amidst the stories of poverty, labor strife, and urban and rural wretchedness, which are so much a part of the California story in the 1930s, there must also be chronicled the emergence of a pleasure-seeking, leisure-oriented society that contained within itself the formula for post-war America. What affluent Californians and in many cases the middle classes could enjoy in the 1930s--swimming, golf, tennis, country clubs, horseback riding, resort life, backyard barbecues, musical entertainment--decisively shaped America's conception of the good life in the post-war era. If California tested alternatives of Far Left and Far Right in its political culture during this period, it also was testing, triumphantly, a Hedonistic Middle based on the desire of ordinary people to get a little more out of life, to have more fun: a motivation, however commonplace in its formulation, that would bring millions to the Golden State after World War II.

Already, by the 1930s, the California lifestyle had discovered its first premise and most sustaining metaphor in the automobile. From the automobile came tourism: not just in terms of visitors from out of state, but intra-California tourism as well. By the mid-1930s the tourist business in California represented three-quarters of a billion dollars in assets and employed more than a hundred thousand Californians. More than a million tourists arrived each year between early May and late October. In 1935 alone, Southern California, which accounted for three-quarters of the tourist business in the state, reported 459,000 winter and 810,000 summer visitors. Most of them arrived by automobile, at an average rate of some six hundred thousand cars per year. Internal tourism was equally important. At a time when an estimated 75 percent of the American population never traveled more than five hundred miles from home, Californians were showing themselves addicted to the weekend or holiday getaway--almost always by automobile. Organizations such as the Automobile Club of Southern California and the California State Automobile Association trumpeted statistics asserting that the roads and highways of California were traveled, twelve months a year, by a greater number of cars per person than those in any other state.

Motoring implied a psychological relationship to California as a landscape in motion, unfolding as a lavish pageant across the windshield, and to the automobile as a source of well-being and personal identity. One sees this relationship developing in the 1910s as motor tourism, initially an elite activity, became popular enough to warrant its own manual, On Sunset Highways: A Book of Motor Rambles in California, by Thomas D. Murphy, first published in 1915 and reissued in 1921. Meticulously illustrated with photographs and color reproductions of California paintings, On Sunset Highways represents an early and powerful presentation of California to itself and to the rest of the nation as a source of moral, spiritual, and psychological uplift via the automobile. Whereas John Muir and his counterparts in the Sierra Club might consider the hiking trek, or at most the horseback ride, as the only politically correct mode of encountering California as a source of beauty and inspiration, Murphy and the other motor tourist writers of the period (who remained, after all, touched by the high-mindedness of their era) saw in the automobile a comparable source of improving experience. The very linkage of motoring and art in Murphy's guide spoke for itself in an era that viewed landscape painting as an intrinsically uplifting medium. The automobile, to their way of thinking, in California and elsewhere, but in California especially, turned Everyman and Everywoman into secular pilgrims en route to the California equivalents of Canterbury and Compostela.

As in the case of so many other leisure activities, the aesthetic formulations of the 1910s regarding motoring began to move into more middle-class directions in the 1920s as more and more tourists embarked on motor pilgrimage throughout the state in the long, sleek, and shiny black Auburns, Chandlers, Hupmobiles, Nashes, Peerlesses, Pontiacs, Rickenbackers, Roosevelts, Stutzes, Whippets, Willyses, Buicks, Packards, Cadillacs, and Fords of that era. On 12 December 1925 a new American institution, the motel, made its debut with the opening of the Milestone Motel outside San Luis Obispo. Designed by Pasadena architect Arthur Heineman, the Milestone Motel featured the near-mandatory Mission Revival bell tower, in this case a replica of the Santa Barbara Mission, and red-tiled roof. Behind the Spanish romance, however, was a no-nonsense bungalow court, with a garage in back of each cabin. It took another twenty five years for the word motel to be accepted into Webster's dictionary, but by that time this California-invented institution had long since further wedded America to highway culture.

In December 1935 Basil Woon, writing in Westways, noted how motels and motor lodges were competing effectively against hotels in the city for the tourist traffic. The urban hotel, Woon pointed out, tended to be situated near the downtown railway stations. Since most tourists now arrived in California by automobile, motels and motor lodges--clean, efficient, inexpensive, conveniently located near highways for a late arrival or early getaway--were proving competitive. Most air terminals were also located outside of cities, so motels and motor lodges were competing for elite air travelers as well, thanks to even yet another variation of automobile culture, the rent-a-car. To his delight, travel writer Jim Tully discovered in January 1934 that he could be sitting at the bar at the Algonquin in New York and, some seventeen hours of flying time later--via stops and plane changes in Cleveland, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas--could be busy about his business in Los Angeles, having been impressed by the efficiency of Miss Angelina Butkiewicz, a registered nurse serving as stewardess, and her equally adept replacements on the flight west.

The 1930s witnessed the automobilization not only of the hotel via the motel, but of the home via the house trailer and of the restaurant via the drive-in. Between 1935 and 1937, the number of car-drawn house trailers in the United States tripled to three hundred thousand. A new facility, the trailer camp, a development of the earlier auto camp, emerged to meet the needs of the estimated one million Americans who either spent their leisure time or lived permanently in house trailers. In Southern California, with its excellent climate, trailer camps, courts, and parks began in 1939 and 1940 to emerge as a significant form of permanent housing for the first wave of newly arriving defense workers. By 1940 an automobile culture was in place in California that anticipated how Americans would live in the post-war era. Fast food, drive-ins, the motel, the automobile as home and habitat: the road culture of America was not exclusively invented in California, yet California did intensify the paradigms.

Emergent regions and lifestyles require explanations, instructions, and celebrations, which is the appointed task of the American magazine. California was no exception. The 1930s witnessed the emergence of Sunset, one of the most successful regional lifestyle magazines in the country. Founded in 1898 by the Southern Pacific as a magazine to promote West Coast tourism, Sunset began its existence oriented to an East Coast market. In 1914 a group of employees led by Sunset editor Charles Field purchased the magazine from the Southern Pacific and made every effort to transform it into a California-based Harper's or Atlantic Monthly, while keeping its orientation toward tourism and lifestyle. Writers for Sunset in this era included such California-based literati as Stewart Edward White, William Rose Benet, George Sterling, Peter Kyne, Kathleen Norris, Herbert Hoover, Sinclair Lewis (in his Carmel phase), John Muir, Stanford president David Starr Jordan, Zane Grey, Dashiell Hammett, Joseph Henry Jackson, and other regional writers of reputation. The Sunset magazine of 1914 through 1928, in fact, was the single most distinguished literary magazine on the West Coast. Its bold and chromatic covers were striking, with San Francisco artist Maynard Dixon, who also wrote poetry for the magazine, doing a notable series.

As excellent as it was, however, Sunset was on the verge of bankruptcy by late 1928, yet one more among the numerous literary periodicals that have failed in California. Enter Larry Lane, advertising director of the Des Moines-based Meredith Publications, which owned the highly successful Better Homes and Gardens. With the help of six other Des Moines investors, Lane purchased Sunset in September 1928 for $65,000 and immediately laid down a new editorial policy. Sunset would no longer seek to rival Harper's and the Atlantic as a writer-driven literary review. It would become, rather, a staff-written magazine, no bylines, no well-known writers, focusing on the West Coast lifestyle, meaning homes, gardens, cuisine, travel, and leisure. Liquor and tobacco advertising were forbidden. Lane also pioneered the concept of regional editions, differing in story content and advertising, within a single format, with bureaus being maintained in Tacoma for the Northwest, Palo Alto for California, and Palm Springs for the desert Southwest. Overnight, the intellectually ambitious magazine of the 1920s became exclusively focused on matters of regional lifestyle.

Like all successful magazine editors, Larry Lane used Sunset to define first to himself, and then to his readership, why California and the West had so enchanted him in the years he had traveled there on behalf of Meredith Publications. To review the files of Sunset from 1929 to 1941 is to miss completely any suggestion that a Depression was happening. As a business, Sunset might have been struggling along with everyone else. (Not until 1938 did Sunset experience an operating profit.) But within the pages of the magazine there unfolded a panoramic pageant of gardening, architecture, regional cuisine, patio dining, golf, tennis, horseback riding, and other leisure pursuits, which represented, in its own way, a cunning strategy for economic success. Sunset fought the Depression by ignoring it, by holding before the middle classes an image of the good life as it was surviving even in dire times and would be even more joyously repossessed in times to come. In presenting the West as suburban paradise, Sunset flattered the taste and expectations of middle-class Westerners as it chronicled a lifestyle, increasingly available by the late 1930s, that in the post-war era would provide the blueprint for the way Westerners conceived of, and lived, the good life.

An experience central to that lifestyle, covered extensively by Sunset, which tested each recipe in its own kitchens, was the cuisine of California and the Far West. The beginnings of an indigenous California cuisine can be seen in such frontier items as pinon nut soup and acorn biscuits. In each case, a Native American staple, the food of the land itself, was transmuted into a parallel American dish. Mid- to late nineteenth-century California recipes show a decided proclivity for indigenous (one is tempted to say Native American) foods, rabbit, venison, wild fowl seasoned with local herbs, the use of acorns in muffins, breads, and breakfast porridge. At the same time, Mexican-Californian dishes survived the transition from Mexican to Yankee occupation. There was never a time, in fact, when Mexican cuisine was absent from the Yankee-Californian diet, which in and of itself suggests larger social and cultural realities. Barbecued meats, chili peppers, tortillas and enchiladas, tamale pie (corn meal, meat, olives, peppers, and tomato sauce, roasted in a casserole), and other corn-meal dishes, together with the delicate Mexican custards and aguardiente, a fiery local brandy, held their own through the nineteenth century.

French haute cuisine flourished in San Francisco from the 1850s onward, and the turn of the century witnessed an interest in Italian cooking, again in San Francisco especially, with its large Italian community and many Italian restaurants. In 1904 the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association issued a collection of Italian recipes compiled by Linie Loyall McLaren under the title High Living: Recipes from Southern Climes. The eclectic fin de siecle was framed by two San Francisco books, Daniel O'Connell's The Inner Man: Good Things to Eat and Drink and Where to Get Them (1891) and Clarence Edgar Edwords's Bohemian San Francisco: Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes (1914). Especially strong in the cuisine of San Francisco was seafood, as might be expected, with an elegant local white fish, the sand dab, emerging as a special favorite, along with the redoubtable oyster loaf (a long loaf of heated sourdough French bread stuffed with oysters and appropriate sauces), a favorite late-night meal of the sporting set.

Meanwhile, there were Quaker cookbooks, a spiritualist cookbook, a number of cookbooks from the ladies' auxiliaries of Jewish temples, Japanese cookbooks, a Chinese cookbook, Swedish cookbooks, and a French cookbook, the stunning 307-page Hotel St. Francis Book of Recipes and Modern Menus (1910) by the hotel's executive chef Victor Hiertzler. Emphasizing fresh fruits and vegetables and a limited use of meat, the Japanese cookbook, Entree and Salad Cookery by Aoki Taiseido, published in San Francisco in 1909, might be said to have foreshadowed, if only indirectly, the Japanese-Californian cuisine of the 1980s, but it was printed in Japan in Japanese, with the exception of its English preface, and was used only in the Japanese community, whose cuisine would ultimately exercise such an important influence on the eating habits of Californians. Already, since the turn of the century, Californians were eating more fresh fruits and vegetables than the rest of the nation, and enjoying an abundance of citrus, for obvious reasons; yet the plenitude of such fruit and produce cannot be said to have substantially modified the meat-and-potato-oriented American diet, although visitors to California did note, among other things, the prevalence of fresh seafood, a rarity in so much of the nation, and the luxuriant salads served as a first course.

Ethnic groups--Chinese, Japanese, Armenians, Italians, and others--continued to prefer their national dishes; and ordinary Californians continued to dine through the 1930s on meat loaf and potatoes, tuna-noodle casserole, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Jell-O, tapioca pudding, macaroni and cheese, and other dishes typical of mid-America in this penny-stretching period. The privileged classes, however, revived the barbecue of the rancho era. Early California Hospitality (1933) by Mrs. A. B. de Packman, published in Pasadena, indicated a growing preference in the 1930s for the reconstituted, one might say reimagined, cuisine of early California, which meant the barbecue. A preference for barbecuing was strongest among the upper middle classes and the wealthy, for whom the outdoor barbecue became a rite of celebration of their identity as heirs to the dons of Old California. Elaborate outdoor grills became increasingly characteristic of the patios and backyards of affluent California: great stone constructions, many of them possessed of architectural distinction, equipped with iron spits and other utensils fashioned in a style to suggest Mexico, set beneath oak trees, surrounded by stone or redwood tables. Group excursions among the affluent--organized horseback rides, special celebrations at country clubs, large-scale entertainments at the ranch-estates of the wealthy--frequently ended in pit barbecues for a hundred or more, in which a whole carcass--a heifer, a pig, a lamb stuffed with rice and raisins--was simmered among buried coals for twenty-four hours, beneath a covering of earth. Disinterred, the meat was served piping hot with baked beans, green peppers, sliced onions, cole slaw, sourdough French bread, and red wine.

The use of wine as an ordinary beverage was also a growing characteristic of affluent California in the 1930s. Wealthy Americans had always enjoyed wine as part of formal dining. In post-Volsted Act California, however, locally produced reds and whites appeared frequently on even the luncheon table. It was the abundance of red wine, in fact, that differentiated the California barbecue from its Texas counterpart, at which cold beer was usually served. Like so much else in the 1930s, California dining preferences expressed elite values that would become mainstream after the war. By the 1950s even middle-class Californians had learned to drink the wines of Italian Swiss Colony, Petri, Christian Brothers, Gallo, Sebastiani, and Foppiano, red and white, along with their meals. While a great backyard barbecue, and certainly a pit barbecue feeding a hundred, might be beyond the means of an ordinary Californian, the near-ritual cooking of meat in the outdoors, so strongly associated with the vanished Spanish or Mexican way of life, so promotive of group identity and well-being, so celebratory of family, friends, and community, anticipated the post-war mania for the outdoor barbecue, which became an almost universal symbol of well-being in the Golden State.

For a smashingly successful pit barbecue, it helped to have a ranch. The 1930s witnessed an intensification of resort ranching and dude ranching among the affluent. William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon was obviously the biggest resort ranch of them all; but the lifestyle magazines of the period showcased many lesser, even more authentic, ranch-estates, in Carmel Valley outside Monterey, in the Santa Ynez Valley and the Ojai Valley in Santa Barbara County, and in Rancho Santa Fe in northern San Diego County. Two forces were at work: either the wealthy had acquired working ranches that previous owners had lost to the Depression or, as in the case of the Carmel Valley and Rancho Santa Fe especially, ranch-estates were developed by part-time Californians from the East who preferred the central and south coastal climate and a ranch-oriented lifestyle to the resort amenities of Palm Springs. In any event, such Californians as Mr. and Mrs. Bing Crosby of Rancho Santa Fe were spending a good part of the year as lady and gentleman ranchers, ensconced in architect-designed or architect-renovated ranch houses--adobe walls, red-tiled roofs, flagstone patios, exposed beam ceilings, oversized fireplaces--the whole emanating an idealized mood of a gracious, spacious Spanish/Mexican California.

Once again, the trickle-down theory asserted itself. Discovered by the wealthy, leisure clothes in a cowboy-Western idiom became the rage by late 1939, as no-nonsense working clothes--jeans, flannel shirts, cowboy boots and hats--became increasingly stylized for the leisure market. At the Billy Rose Aquacade Theater at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, Levi Strauss and Company introduced an extensive line of stylized Western resort and leisure wear at a gala showing in early September 1940. (The most popular event on Treasure Island, incidentally, was the Cavalcade of the West, a musical pageant involving cowboys, Indians, covered wagons, and an early railroad train.) The Levi line as well as other California-produced Western leisure wear caught on immediately in California and the national market.

As early as the 1890s, Southern Californians were showing an intense relationship to the stunning shoreline that fronted their mountain-and-desert-guarded enclave. Middle-class families would spend an entire month on the beach (Redondo Beach was a favored site) living in tents. Putting aside late Victorian and Edwardian taboos, young women, wearing bathing suits that would raise eyebrows in the East, plunged into the surf alongside the men. Elsewhere, a pale complexion was prized in a woman through the First World War. In Southern California, a new phenomenon, the deliberate suntan, became a badge of beauty and health. The seaside villages and summer tent cities of the 1910s developed in the 1920s into a string of beach towns running from Laguna Beach in Orange County to Malibu north of Santa Monica, where a sea-and-shore-oriented lifestyle, as yet free of over-population and suburban sprawl, flourished with a special charm. The very roll call of these Southern California beach towns--Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Long Beach, Seal Beach, Sunset Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Balboa, Laguna Beach, Oceanside, Encinitas, Del Mar, Coronado--bespoke long days on the sand, a bracing plunge into the surf, the smell and taste of food and drink in the outdoors, splendid sunsets and party-happy nights.

In the 1930s the rather casual, even haphazard beach cabins of an earlier era showed signs, among the affluent, of stylization. Architects such as Winchton Risley and Roland Coate entered the beach house business, designing vacation homes that avoided the pretensions of the Santa Monica mansions as well as the scruffy rusticity of Laguna Beach in favor of deliberately contrived complexes--informal, picturesque, serviceable--keyed to the long weekend. In one prototype Risley suggested two dormitories, one for women and one for men, as part of a beach house complex, so as to make the house compatible to large gatherings. On Martha's Vineyard, a beach house might contain a formal dining room. The Southern California beach house of the late 1930s, by contrast, tended to substitute a half-covered patio for outdoor dining.

For the younger crowd, the beach itself was habitat enough. No beach house was necessary, only sleeping bags and a station wagon. At San Onofre Beach just south of the Orange County-San Diego County line, near San Clemente, a new sport, surfing, was taking hold. The surfboards of the 1930s were long, ten to fifteen feet, and heavy, weighing up to sixty pounds in that pre-fiberglass era; and surfing was enjoyed more by young men in their twenties and early thirties, the college crowd and young professionals, as opposed to the later dominance of the sport by teenagers. At San Onofre, Hermosa, Palos Verdes, or Malibu, perhaps a hundred surfers and their wives and girlfriends, representing a variety of surfing clubs or informal circles, would converge on a weekend in their wood-paneled station wagons of the era (later revered as woodies, a prime element of the surf cult) and proceed to erect tents or lean-tos of driftwood and palm fronds. While surfers were on shore, they would plant their tall surfboards, twice the length of ordinary human height, upright in the sand in rows and circles, thereby creating a surfers' Stonehenge, each board bearing its name in block letters. (Surfing screen star Jackie Coogan called his board Opuu, the Hawaiian word for stomach, poking fun at his ability to stand upright.) Entering the surf, dozens of surfers would advance on-line into the water, paddling on their stomachs, then break formation as they caught a wave into the shore. At San Onofre, where the waves broke far out, a surfer could catch a quarter-mile ride. By night, there were campfires and beach parties into the late hours, with singing and ukelele music. Surfers had a reverence for things Hawaiian--Hawaiian shirts, Hawaiian names for their surfboards, ukelele music, Hawaiian chants--since the islands were fons et origo of surfing in the Southland.

Among beach towns, each had its orientation. Laguna Beach, for example, was an art colony, the Carmel of Southern California, slightly raffish and affordable. A handful of galleries selling the works of local artists lined the Pacific Coast Highway as it passed through Laguna Beach, and each year beginning in 1932 the town sponsored a Festival of the Arts, which attracted large crowds of amateur artists and collectors. In 1933 Laguna Beach residents organized the first annual Pageant of the Masters as part of the festival, with locals arranging themselves into elaborate tableaux vivants of Old Master paintings.

Sailing-oriented Balboa had once been the preserve of the upper middle classes. The Depression removed some of Balboa's pretensions, transforming it to a more accessible beach resort. Hollywood dominated shorefront development at Malibu, although a more modest lifestyle prevailed in the canyons. Hollywood had a stake in Santa Monica as well. Marion Davies, mistress of William Randolph Hearst, maintained her official residence there. Santa Monica also served as the Riviera of inland Los Angeles. The downtown Jonathan Club operated a beach club there, and in the nearby Santa Monica Mountains the Uplifters sponsored a ranch resort where polo players could enjoy playing fields created for the 1932 Olympics. There was also, in Santa Monica, in the hundreds of cottages just up from the shore, and in the canyons, a flourishing middle-class life. In its Art Deco shoreline--restaurants, hotels, dancing pavilions--Santa Monica epitomized Southern California as suburban seaside; and on Sundays, as had been the case since the 1890s, the beach teemed with the middle classes of the region. Nearby Venice, by contrast, was a Coney Island kind of a place: popular, demotic, its great boardwalk teeming with working families of a Sunday, drawn there as much by the arcades, shooting galleries, roller coasters, mirror mazes, fun houses, hot dog stands, and merry-go-rounds as by the good weather and the seashore.

Further south, Long Beach was, in one glorious jumble, an oil boom city, an industrial center, Des Moines by the Sea (ground zero for the Iowa Society, the Kansas Society, the Missouri Society, and similar organizations), the geriatric capital of the United States (never before in human history had so many people over sixty-five been assembled in one place), a busy port, a naval base--and, amidst it all, a seaside resort. The industry came from the oil derricks, pumping since 1921 when the gushers began to spout on nearby Signal Hill, peaking at sixty-eight million barrels in 1923. The port of Long Beach and the ship repair facilities of the Navy, based there since 1919, added to the industrial character. Soon, Douglas Aircraft would open a plant adjacent to a newly constructed municipal airport, the most modern airport in the Far West, Streamline Moderne in style and graced with WPA murals.

In the early 1900s, Long Beach was the most important beach resort in Southern California, its accessibility enhanced by direct streetcar service to the rest of the Los Angeles Basin. Constructed in 1905 at the base of the Pike Pier, the first Municipal Auditorium hosted Chautauqua meetings, Shriners' conventions, song fests, and church gatherings. In 1908 the upscale Virginia Hotel opened, and Long Beach began to attract a national clientele. Photographs from the period show Long Beach teeming with well-dressed men and women, promenading or sitting beneath striped canvas awnings on the sand. In the 1920s Long Beach became a popular resort for the Folks. The annual Iowa picnic held in Bixby Park attracted more than a hundred thousand former Iowans and their descendants.

By the 1930s the popular character of the Folks' Long Beach was memorialized in three oceanside constructions: an eight-acre Municipal Auditorium, opened in 1932, which also functioned as community center; the Pike, an amusement zone extending for nearly a mile along the beach west of Pine Avenue and Ocean Boulevard; and the Silver Spray Pier, which extended midway from the Pike into the ocean. Its great indoor salt-water plunge was dubbed (with appropriate Iowa corn) the Million Dollar Bathhouse. Each facility served a bustling democratic life, the sort of scene Reginald Marsh loved to paint on Coney Island. In the case of Long Beach, artistic celebration came from a spectacular tile mosaic mural in the Municipal Auditorium entitled Recreation in Long Beach, completed by forty artists and craftsmen of the Los Angeles Federal Art Project: the largest tile mosaic in the world. By night it was illumined by powerful floodlights. Designed in an Italian Renaissance style by the firm of MacDowell and Austin, the Municipal Auditorium was available for a variety of activities: concerts by the municipal band, meetings on Sunday morning of the world's biggest Bible class, symphony concerts, an annual art festival, community sings, plays, square dancing, the annual Navy Ball. Day and night, the Pike teemed with comparable vitality as people enjoyed roller coaster rides, shooting galleries, penny arcades, a merry-go-round, sideshows, and miniature automobile races; ate ice cream cones and cotton candy; or stood as spectators as such annual events as the Baby Parade, the Pet Parade, the Doll Fiesta, or the Bathing Beauty Contest. On Halloween, the Fourth of July, and New Year's Eve, the Pike and the Silver Spray Pier were thronged like Times Square with celebrating sailors and civilians.

From the Long Beach airport or the port, pleasure-seekers might fly or take a steamer to Avalon on the island of Santa Catalina, twenty-six miles offshore, where in the 1920s Chicago chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., owner of the Chicago Cubs, was developing a resort city on the shores of Avalon Bay. Wrigley owned the island in its entirety, having purchased it for $3 million in 1919 from the Banning family. He intended to transform Avalon, so he said, into a resort for Everyman that avoided the excesses of Coney Island. Wrigley devoted the 1920s to the construction of, eventually, twenty-five hundred "bungalettes," which housed two to three people for between $12 and $17.50 a week. To bring them over and back, Wrigley purchased and had sailed through the Panama Canal a sixteen-hundred-passenger Great Lakes steamer, which he renamed the Avalon, augmenting it with the construction of a brand-new ship, the Catalina, which carried two thousand. By the late 1920s more than four hundred thousand people each year were visiting Avalon and the interior island, where boars, wild goats, and buffalo, left over from the filming of The Vanishing American in 1925, roamed, and where Captain Blood, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Sadie Thompson were filmed and such Hollywood personalities as Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Jean Harlow, Dolores Del Rio, Mickey Rooney, Errol Flynn, and David Niven were wont to frolic in the sun.

Founded early in the century by Charles Frederick Holder of Pasadena, the Tuna Club on Santa Catalina was the center of sport fishing in the Southland. The tuna is a gallant antagonist, capable of battling an angler for up to five hours. When the tuna went elsewhere, as they did for four to five years at a time, there were always marlin or swordfish on hand. Hooked, such fish leapt from the sea and appeared to walk across the waves on their tails. To a later generation, the fishing of these great creatures might seem barbaric; but through the 1930s, photographs of victorious anglers, rod and reel in hand, standing alongside a suspended gigantic fish, provided a dramatic emblem of the good life, Santa Catalina style.

As the capstone of his development, Wrigley built the Casino at Sugarloaf Point on the northern tip of Avalon Bay, designed by Sumner Spaulding and variously described as Moorish-Venetian, Spanish Colonial, or Adriatic. Opening on 29 May 1929, the Casino was, and remains, a glorious structure, a fantasy Xanadu on Avalon Point with a 1,250-seat motion picture theater on the first floor (one of the first theaters in the country to be acoustically engineered for the new talkies) and on the second floor a fifteen-thousand-square foot ballroom, circular in form, its maple, white oak, and rosewood surface resting on a supportive sub-floor of pine and cork to cushion the shock of thousands of dancers. Innumerable Southern Californians danced innumerable weekend and summer evenings of the 1930s to the music of Irving Aaronson and His Commanders, the resident orchestra in the first half of the decade. CBS Radio carried these dance sessions live to a national audience, and millions of Americans who had never been to Southern California felt themselves almost there as the announcer intoned: "From the beautiful Casino Ballroom overlooking Avalon Bay at Catalina Island, we bring you the music of Irving Aaronson and His Commanders..." As the Casino gained in popularity, better-known groups--the orchestras of Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Alvino Rey, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey; Kay Kyser and the College of Musical Knowledge; Bob Crosby and the Bobcats; the Freddie Martin Band; the Ted Weems Band, featuring Perry Como--crossed the channel. The daily arrival of the steamer on Avalon Bay was a big event. An announcer greeted celebrities over a loudspeaker system, and musicians led the passengers off the ship in parade to the hotels.

William Wrigley Jr., alas, was not on hand for the fun. He might have been uncomfortable with it all anyway, being of a shy and retiring nature. Wrigley passed away in 1932. At his memorial service in the Avalon Theater, the organist played "Beautiful Isle of Somewhere." Two years later, Wrigley's remains were interred in one of the most ambitious one-person mausoleums in the country: an eighty-foot concrete tower rising from a massive base set on a hilltop in the center of a thirty-eight-acre botanical garden, which soon became yet another tourist amenity.

Californians loved their mountains as much as their seashore; indeed, the mountains of California had inspired such figures as William Brewer, Thomas Starr King, Clarence King, John Muir, J. Smeaton Chase, George Wharton James, and Joseph Le Conte to produce much notable literature. Founded in San Francisco in 1892, the Sierra Club served the species of high-minded mountaineering represented by these writers, with its emphasis upon a purist relationship to the mountain wilderness, a conservation-oriented ethos, and an upper-middle-class aesthetic. Such a Progressive response was edging into a more democratic preference by the 1920s. The city of San Francisco, for example, maintained a public camp on its Hetch Hetchy water preserve, Camp Mather, named in honor of Stephen Mather, the first director of the national parks system. The fact that a city should maintain a public camp in the mountains, where families might vacation on the American plan at most reasonable rates, testified to the love of the mountains characteristic of that city and the rest of Northern California as well. Not surprisingly, both the University of California (the Bear's Lair) and Stanford University (Fallen Leaf Lake Lodge) also maintained mountain camps in the Sierra for alumni. Southern Californians also loved their highlands, the Tehachapis, the Santa Monica Mountains, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino ranges, and other montane spurs. In the late 1910s and early 1920s the Los Angeles Times ran a popular column by Pasadena writer, photographer, and landscape painter Frederick Roland Miner concerned almost exclusively with the pleasures of mountain life--mule packing, hiking, fishing, camping, and cabin craft--which the Times Mirror Press published as a book in 1923. Miner was writing for a statewide audience that included hundreds of thousands of urban and suburban Californians, even those of moderate income, who maintained a mountain retreat, if only a remote cabin.

Next to New England, California had emerged as the skiing capital of the nation by the 1930s, and there were those, such as Berkeley chemistry professor Joel Hildebrand and Wendell Robie, president of the Auburn Ski Club, the oldest ski club in California, who believed that California had surpassed Vermont and New Hampshire as skiing centers. A charter member of the Auburn Ski Club, Hildebrand was invited to manage the United States Winter Olympic team at Garmisch-Partekirchen, Germany, in 1936. His son Alex won the intercollegiate cross-country American championship. Another son, Milton, was a leading downhill skier, as was Hildebrand's daughter Louise. Located near Cisco in the Truckee-Lake Tahoe region, the Auburn Ski Club was not only the oldest and most prestigious of the twenty-three winter sports club in California, it was also the most developed skiing facility in the state, with a lodge and three-hundred-foot ski jump. Ski club president Wendell Robie brought a number of well-known jumpers--Roy and Harvor Mikkelsen, Sig Weterstaad, Rolf Wigaard, and Andrew Blodjer, among others--from Europe to work as instructors. With champions such as these in their midst, the young skiers of California, many of them college students, acquired an expertise that the United States Army would soon be utilizing in its Tenth Mountain Division.

Other popular winter resorts were located in Truckee, where the Truckee Ski Club rivaled the Auburn Ski Club in facilities; in Grass Valley, where the Grass Valley-Nevada City Ski Club was located on the Tahoe-Ukiah Highway; in Shasta City and the Yosemite; at Shaver Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, fifty-five miles east of Fresno; at the nearby General Grant National Park, the Giant Forest Winter Camp in Sequoia National Park, and a number of sites in the San Bernardino Mountains. As usual in matters Californian, a high level of amenities prevailed in many of these lodges, where fine food and warm drink before a roaring fire ended an exhilarating day on the slopes. At the Ahwahnee Hotel in the Yosemite, skiers and other winter visitors enjoyed each Christmas a festive Bracebridge Hall dinner re-creating the procession of dishes--the fish, the boar's head, the peacock pie, the baron of beef, the flaming pudding, the wassail bowl--described by Washington Irving in the Christmas sketches of Bracebridge Hall (1822).

Polo, golf, and tennis were other avid California pursuits and were also showing the same progress from elite to middle-class usage as motoring and skiing. In the mid-1930s the City and County of San Francisco used PWA and WPA funds to clear a polo field in Golden Gate Park, adjacent to the St. Francis Riding Stables. One scans in vain the newspapers of the period in an effort to detect signs of community opposition or complaining letters to the editor regarding the use of public monies to facilitate this most elite of elite sports. Polo came early to California, with the formation of a California Polo Club in 1876. In the 1890s polo was especially popular in the Anglo-Canadian community centered in Riverside in Southern California and, a little later, in the Burlingame Country Club south of San Francisco. The California Polo Annual for the 1913-14 season lists a busy schedule with matches held at the Hotel Del Coronado, at the Hotel Del Monte on the Monterey Peninsula, at Riverside, Pasadena, the Midwick Country Club in Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Burlingame. The San Francisco Peninsula sustained a polo culture mature enough to support its own publication, the Peninsula Polo Annual, which chronicled the well-attended matches of the region.

Central to the success of polo in California was a father-and-son team: William Pedley of Riverside and the Midwick Country Club, who had taken up polo in India while working there as an irrigation engineer, and his son Eric, a Stanford undergraduate just before World War I, who learned the game from his father and the great English player Hugh Drury, when Drury was living in Riverside. In 1921 Drury and Eric Pedley played for the Del Monte Polo Club and set new standards for the sport on the West Coast. By 1924 Pedley, then playing for Midwick, was leading a strong California team in the National Open of the United States Polo Association in Long Island. For the first time California polo made an impression in the polo-savvy East. In September 1930 Pedley played for the United States against England, perhaps the high point of his career. Throughout the Depression, polo continued to thrive in California, with such celebrities as Will Rogers, who played at the Uplifters Ranch near Santa Monica, becoming prominent advocates of the sport. In San Francisco the Army polo team from the Presidio--for whose benefit the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park was largely created--continued to set high standards of sportsmanship throughout the decade. Once again, there was the elite-popular connection so typical of the 1930s, as crowds gathered on Sundays in Golden Gate Park to watch cavalry officers from West Point ride against their equally privileged competitors.

Golf in California ran true to form, moving from elite to more popular circumstances. Established in March 1894, the Riverside Polo and Golf Club pioneered both golf and polo in the United States; indeed, the Riverside Golf Course was one of the first in the country. In the next few years, golf courses were laid out in Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, Pasadena, and Los Angeles. In the 1920s California witnessed the rise of a number of elite golf and tennis clubs as golf became the sport of preference for the upper middle classes. The courses of the San Francisco Golf Club and the Olympic Club of San Francisco, fronting the Pacific on the southwest corner of the city, were among the most beautiful golf courses in the world, as was the Army-sponsored Presidio Golf Course on an equally dramatic site approaching the Golden Gate.

Perhaps the most beautiful course in the state belonged to the Monterey Peninsula Club at Pebble Beach, a privileged residential community on the famed Seventeen Mile Drive fronting Monterey Bay, which the Del Monte Hotel had been serving as a center of elite social life since the 1890s. Throughout the late teens and 1920s, a Riviera row of ambitious mansions had been abuilding amidst the Monterey cypress trees lining the Seventeen Mile Drive, winding along the dramatic palisade fronting the Pacific. Samuel F. B. Morse, a direct descendant of the painter-inventor and an artist in his own right, was active in the development of Pebble Beach as a principal in the Pacific Improvement Company and, later, Del Monte Properties. In February 1919 Del Monte Properties purchased a strategically situated watershed tract on the Seventeen Mile Drive for development as a golf and country club. Morse brought golf course architects Charles MacDonald and Seth Raynor out from the East to design the fairways and retained architect Clarence Tantau of San Francisco to design an elegant Spanish Colonial-style building set amidst a grove of pine and cypress. When the new club was granted a charter by the State of California in January 1919, Samuel F. B. Morse, president and general manager of Del Monte Properties and the social leader in the affluent circles that had roosted on Pebble Beach, was elected president. Photographs from the period show golfers, resplendent in knickers and cardigans, golfing their way amiably through the 1930s. Very soon, the club developed a national champion, Lawson Little Jr., who won both the United States and British Amateur Championships in 1934 and 1935.

Like polo, golf was edging into greater availability, and not just as a spectator sport. Once again, San Francisco took the lead as the city continued to develop its municipally owned Lincoln Park course on Land's End overlooking the Golden Gate. If the Monterey Peninsula Country Club had any competition as far as scenic grandeur was concerned, it came from the Lincoln Park course, which ordinary San Franciscans might use for a modest fee. PWA and WPA funds were used both to improve the Lincoln Park course and to develop a second and third municipal golf course, the Harding Park course in the center of the city and a nine-hole course on the rolling dunes fronting Ocean Beach. Somehow, despite the Depression (or was it because of the Depression?), San Francisco was finding it appropriate to use federal funds on behalf of an elite game that demanded expensive park-like facilities but could now be enjoyed by the general public for whom the cost of a country club membership was out of the question. In the post-war era, both municipal and county golf courses would proliferate throughout California, together with innumerable private country clubs, as golf approached the condition of a social obsession.

As in the case of other sports, tennis as well went popular in the 1930s. True to pattern, tennis first emerged as an elite pursuit among the various clubs belonging to the Southern California Lawn Tennis Association organized in 1887. Good weather, together with the ease with which tennis courts could be laid out, soon made Southern California, along with Long Island, one of the two tennis capitals of the United States. In 1904 a seventeen-year-old from Los Angeles, May Sutton, astonished the tennis world by winning the Wimbledon women's singles, the first American to achieve championship status in this international contest. Although most tennis in Southern California was played in private clubs through the 1920s, many Southern California cities, Los Angeles included, were initiating an ambitious construction of public courts. By the late 1930s thousands of free courts were available to the urban middle classes.

A tennis champion from Berkeley, Helen Wills, led the parade. Wills began her career while still a high school student. By 1940 she had won eight Wimbledon singles championships and two Olympic gold medals. She remained undefeated in national and international matches between 1927 and 1933. At once muscular and feminine, the epitome of the California Girl, Helen Wills melded the genres of athlete and Hollywood star. The toast of London, Paris, and the Long Island tennis circuit, she made the cover of Time twice, on 26 July 1926 and 1 August 1929. When she played in England, she drew crowds of ten thousand and more. A crowd of four thousand gathered to see her play at Stanford. When she agreed to write a book for Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins was assigned as her editor. When Mexican muralist Diego Rivera arrived in San Francisco in 1929 to paint a mural in the San Francisco Stock Exchange Club, he persuaded Wills, whom he met at a reception, to pose as California. Rivera made daily trips to the California Club on Bush Street, where Wills was practicing, to observe his subject prior to painting her as the essence, in Rivera's words, of "all that was beautiful in California womanhood." In December 1929 she married Frederick Moody, a San Francisco stockbroker, in an Episcopalian ceremony at St. Clement's Chapel in Berkeley in which Helen Wills, now Helen Wills Moody, explicitly did not promise to obey her husband. Socialite banker-lawyer Cyril Tobin lent the couple his yacht Galeta for a honeymoon cruise to Mexico.

Tennis, in other words, as represented by Helen Wills, had sex appeal and a distinctive California-oriented cachet, although women tennis players were required to wear calf-length tennis skirts until Helen Hull Jacobs broke the barrier by appearing on court in shorts at the Sea Bright Lawn Tennis Club Invitational Tennis Tournament in New Jersey in 1933. In the late 1930s, tennis became more and more a celebrity-oriented event, with large crowds of non-tennis players following the action or reading about it in the newspapers, just as they would read movie magazines about the stars who were also wont to make guest appearances on the court. Active on the Southern California tennis circuit in the 1930s as players and presenters of trophies were Gilbert Roland, Joan and Constance Bennett, Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Johnny Weissmuller, and an Errol Flynn, ever so splendid in white flannels, not yet debilitated by an off-court pursuit of wine, women, and song.

What to wear while pursuing the California lifestyle, how to furnish one's home, indeed, the design of the house itself also emerged as pressing questions. Throughout the 1930s regional designers increasingly stylized the consumer environment to reflect the casual, leisure-oriented values of California, which emerged as an increasingly important design premise for leisure clothes, tableware, and household furnishings. By the late 1930s, California leisure and sports wear--slacks for women, open-neck polo shirts for men, women's sunsuits, swimming suits for men and women, golf and tennis attire, even evening wear with a casual accent--was gaining a national reputation. Whether casual shoes from Joyce, sportswear and accessories from Louella Ballerino, Margery Montgomery, or Irene Bury, an afternoon frock from Violet Tatum, an evening dress from Patricia Perkins, a swimsuit from Gantner and Mattern, or sportswear from Koret, the one characteristic California fashions had in common was color: bright color, new colors, citrus colors--orange, lemon, lime, tangerine--newly introduced into American apparel. In the post-war era, such colors would be commonplace in American sportswear, but in the mid- to late 1930s, their introduction represented an innovation that bespoke the lifestyle of the Golden State.

The same was true of pottery and tableware. Pacific Clay Products of Los Angeles issued glazed settings in Apache red, canary yellow, silver green, royal blue, and mocha white. Like California cuisine, California-designed tableware frequently invoked the Spanish-Mexican past, blending Latin motifs with Moderne and Art Deco. The Gladding McBean Company of San Francisco issued Franciscan Ware, which managed to Art Deco-ize the Mission era. Another line, Fiesta Ware, fused Old California and Streamline Moderne with a bright-hot California palette and the heavy solidity of hand-thrown pottery. Fifty-five and more years later, Fiesta Ware remains a collector's item as it continues to emanate the self-confident mood of California 1940.

By November that year, House and Garden was reporting on the emergence of Asian and Hawaiian motifs in California interior decoration and household design. The Gump's look, of course--a juxtaposition of Asian screens, vases, and other objets d'art and traditional European furniture--had long characterized the San Francisco style; but Hawaiian motifs, stylized rattan and bamboo furniture especially, at once reflected the long-standing relationship between California and Hawaii and, one suspects, the growing involvement of the United States in the South Pacific and Far East. California-Hawaiian was an informal look. Those with developed taste used it sparingly, mostly in beach homes. It was also a favorite in bars and darkly lit restaurants such as Trader Vic's in Emeryville and San Francisco, having, one supposes, suggestions of the mystery and adventure, and possible escapes from restraint, in exotic atmospheres. The Gump's look, by contrast, was decidedly upper-end, yet possessed as well of that Asia Pacific connection ever on the subliminal frontier of the California consciousness.

And now the most basic design challenge of them all--housing. In what domestic circumstances should the California Dream be pursued, even if a Depression were raging? How should the Californian build the ideal home, for private purposes most obviously, but also as a means of influencing national taste? In the mid- to late 1930s, California architects and developers and their middle-class clientele began to assemble the affordable dream house of the post-war era.

As far back as the 1870s the Southern Pacific Railroad, anxious to promote immigration to the Golden State, ballyhooed California as Land of Homes. Here, it was suggested, ordinary Americans in large numbers might experience the joys and consolations (and social stabilization) of home ownership. While this dream of owning one's own home came true for many, the concept of mass home ownership gained renewed intensity in the second half of the 1930s with the entry of the federal government into the home-loan business. The challenge now became to bring the amenities of the California dream house to the widest possible audience. Already, from the 1910s onward, a formula was in place: the patio; a reversed floor plan, with the living area opening onto a rear garden or patio enclosure; the facilitation of an indoor/outdoor lifestyle through wall-length glass-pane doors opening onto the interior patio or back garden; a designated sun room, which was in effect an indoor solarium; a breakfast nook adjacent to the kitchen, distinct from the dining room; an attached first-floor garage, directly accessible to the house.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the quest for the perfect California home regained strength as a regional preoccupation. Where one chose to live, place and house alike, together with the style one chose to live in, asserted itself as a substantive element in the discussion of what it meant to be a Californian. Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink, for example, and novelist Kathleen Norris consciously saw themselves as paradigms of an achieved home-style, Southern and Northern California versions respectively. For Madame Schumann-Heink home was a rose-covered villa on Coronado, Late Prairie in style, to which she moved in the early 1920s after donating her former home at Grossmont in San Diego to the Disabled Veterans of the United States. "Above all, what I love is the spirit of the place--like no other in the world," she told a reporter from Sunset in October 1928. "Such a spirit, this of California! Once you have come under the spell, you never care to throw it off, nor do you care to be long away from it." As the highest-paid writer in the United States, making more than $300,000 a year through the Depression, Kathleen Norris could afford the perfect California home, which in her case meant La Casa Abierta, the Open House, in Palo Alto, where she and her husband novelist Charles Norris (Frank Norris's younger brother) lived from October to May, when they repaired to their summer home at Saratoga in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Designed and built in 1929, La Casa Abierta demonstrated the hold of Spanish Revival on upper-middle-class California through the 1930s, although fewer and fewer such homes were built as the 1930s progressed.

Spanish Revival did not translate automatically into mass housing, as Arts and Crafts and Prairie had so effectively lent themselves to downsizing in the early 1900s. The Sunstream Corporation, on the other hand, made a valiant (and generally successful) attempt to reproduce Spanish Revival on a mass basis in its creation of the Sunset district in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940 avenue upon avenue of mini-villas, Spanish in inspiration, stood side by side on the once shifting sand dunes of westside San Francisco. In Southern California, the most successful suburbs of the 1920s--Bel Air, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Flintridge-La Canada, Palos Verdes Estates, San Clemente, Rancho Santa Fe, and La Jolla--were predominantly Spanish. Architect Lillian Jennette Rice, one of the first women to graduate (in 1910) from the School of Architecture at Berkeley, designed and supervised the development of Rancho Santa Fe on behalf of the well-known San Diego firm of Richard Requa and Herbert Jackson and the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company. Rice both designed the homes and civic center structures and did the landscaping for this elegant and tasteful planned development, which was set amidst groves of eucalyptus trees planted by the Santa Fe in the 1910s as a source of railroad ties. "Every environment there," noted Rice of the site, "calls for simplicity and beauty--the gorgeous natural landscapes, the gently broken topography, the nearby mountains. No one with a sense of fitness, it seems to me, could violate these natural factors by creating anything that lacked simplicity in line and form and color." Under development at the same time by La Jolla Properties was the La Jolla Hermosa Tract designed by architects Edgar Ullrich, Thomas Shepherd, Herbert Palmer, and Cliff May. Rancho Santa Fe was inland, and La Jolla was coastal; yet each development emanated an ambience of dignity and tasteful restraint within the Spanish Revival idiom so congenial to San Diego County.

A native San Diegan, Cliff May, the youngest of the La Jolla architects, took Spanish Revival into the 1930s (the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, for that matter) after detaching it from archeological fussiness, streamlining it, and running it parallel to more contemporary styles. May refocused the Spanish Revival movement away from Andalusia and baroque Mexico and returned it to the more simple prototypes of frontier California in the 1820s and 1830s. Best described as California Spanish, a Cliff May house--heavy walls suggesting adobe, visible timbers in construction, sweeping horizontal lines, slate (not tile) roofs, oversized stone pavements--remained a style of choice thirty years after Spanish Revival peaked as a regional preference. May paid special attention to such interior details as built-in drawers, electric outlets, and ultra-modern kitchens. (The kitchen, noted real estate and architecture writer Jack Courtney in the February 1937 Westways, had become the most technically and aesthetically dynamic component of the California home, with the possible exception of the bathroom.) In the penultimate phase of his career, May was given the commission to design the holy of holies of the California lifestyle, the headquarters of Sunset magazine in Menlo Park. He finished his career with another cultural icon, the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa.

At the same time, in Southern California, architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler were evolving a regional version of the International Style, which detached California from its largely imaginary Spanish and Mexican past in favor of designs that were clean and functional, aerodynamic even, and built in the materials of the machine age. In 1937 Neutra won the House Beautiful competition for the Palm Springs home he designed for Grace Lewis Miller, a physical fitness instructor, which featured solid concrete floors, large panels of glass as wall replacements, sliding doors, and an exterior of sheet steel. Simple, functional, possessed of compelling compositional logic, the 1930s homes of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler established prototypes that remained influential for fifty years. The house Schindler designed in 1934 for Elizabeth Van Patten in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, or the 1936 Los Angeles house of Ralph Walker, together with the parallel work of Neutra and other masters of the International Style, Southern California version--Gregory Ain, Harwell Harris, Raphael Soriano, and Kem Weber (also an innovative designer of furniture)--foreshadowed the Case Study movement of the post-war era, which sought to devise an architecture that was aerodynamic, industrial in materials, and thoroughly functional, bringing taste and convenience to a middle-class market.

Not that the work of Schindler, Neutra, Ain, Harris, Soriano, Weber, and others working in this mode was then, in the 1930s, the preference of mass taste. Clients who chose the International Style tended to come from an affluent liberal intellectual elite. Yet these homes, so inexpensively a matter of skin over structure, with structure determining design, could be mass-produced--and were, with variations, in the post-war era. Neutra's Palm Springs house for Grace Miller, for example, cost $7,000, which put it $500 less than the $7,500 figure Jack Courtney of Westways believed to be the acceptable price for an architect-designed house in the Southland. Los Angeles architect Theodore Pettit, meanwhile, was designing five-room homes in the Spanish style to sell for $4,000. Remarkably, Pettit kept all elements of the Spanish style, including a twenty-by-thirty-foot interior patio or court. As furnishing for Pettit's low-cost Spanish bungalow, consulting decorator Edgar Harrison Wileman suggested the Fiesta Monterey line carried by Barker Brothers in Los Angeles, a style inspired by Monterey in the 1830s and 1840s. Barker Brothers had an entire department on the eighth floor of its store dedicated to Monterey Fiesta and other furniture lines in the Spanish-Mexican style. By 1940 small concrete homes ("Thermo-Crete" the concrete was called, poured to resemble adobe and given sculptural effects) were selling in Glendale for $2,650. Thus the decade ended with the mass production, even the democratization, of the Spanish style, a process true to the general drift of the 1930s. What could be enjoyed in Montecito and Santa Barbara in the 1920s could be enjoyed in Glendale by 1940.

In November 1940 House and Garden praised this Southern California trend of incorporating a full range of amenities into smaller homes. "It is not unusual," noted the magazine, "to find even a small suburban lot planned with marvelous skill to include not only the house but a tennis court, badminton court and the ubiquitous barbecue besides." House and Garden noted another California trend: the development of the home as an outdoor recreation center. By 1937 sporting goods retailer A. G. Spalding and Brothers was doing a land-office business in ping-pong tables, badminton racquets and nets, croquet sets, and a strictly local game called Lawn Hi-Li, a backyard adaptation of the Basque game jai-alai. While the swimming pool remained an expensive amenity, a number of $4,000 to $5,000 homes covered by magazines in the 1937-40 period proudly showcased a backyard swimming pool. The war delayed this trend, but like so much else in the 1930s it was already there--the private swimming pool as a middle-class amenity--and by the end of the 1950s Southern California had become, as Oscar Levant would put it, a pool's paradise.

Nor was Southern California ungraced by those two most urban of living arrangements, the apartment building and the penthouse. Los Angeles and Long Beach featured a number of large New York City-style apartment complexes. The El Royale apartments on North Rossmore featured a duplex penthouse, as did the Chateau Elysee in Hollywood and the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. For such a democratic city, Long Beach sustained a large number of elite apartment buildings on Ocean Boulevard, most notably the Villa Riviera, the Cooper Arms, and the apartment-hotel Breakers, each of them impressive structures. In Los Angeles the George Pepperdine Foundation owned and operated twelve apartment buildings, with monthly rentals ranging from $35 to $135. Located at 570 North Rossmore (a street promoted as the Park Avenue of the West), the Ravenswood, the flagship Pepperdine property, offered valet parking, housekeeping, laundry, dry cleaning, and room service from a restaurant on the property. Monthly rates ranged from $60 to $350. Income from the Ravenswood was channeled to George Pepperdine College, as well as to a boys' home and a home for underprivileged girls.

For the less affluent urbanite, there was always the bungalow court. Few urban housing forms have proven so successful in serving, simultaneously, density, privacy, and community as the bungalow court. Sylvanus Marston designed the first bungalow court in Pasadena in 1909, eleven freestanding full-sized bungalows arranged around a common courtyard. In the 1920s the bungalow court became more completely adapted to urban land use patterns, with units becoming smaller in size and larger in number. Bungalow courts proved ideally suited to single young women flocking into the city as office help, younger couples, and older couples without children, although there is plenty of evidence that families with children did equally well in this housing environment. The interior court provided a safe play space, and the other residents functioned as an extended family. Almost by definition, bungalow courts were situated on major streetcar lines. Bungalow court residents were not the type to own their own automobile. Yet many units came provided with a rear garage or outdoor parking area. Private yet communal, convenient, landscaped, highly affordable, the bungalow court constituted an important contribution by Southern California to urbanism, and the 1930s was its high point. Very few were built in the suburbanizing post-war era, yet surviving bungalow courts remained the housing of choice for a post-war and post-post-war generation of singles, the elderly, the bohemian, and the odd private eye.

Leisure, the outdoors, a distinctive architecture, the good life: it was the California formula, and Palm Springs had it all. The story of the emergence of Palm Springs recapitulates the entire development of California as pleasure principle, as resort. Like so much else in California during this period, Palm Springs was entering its first golden age of maturity. The population of the Village of Palm Springs (it became an incorporated city of the sixth class in the spring of 1938) doubled between 1929 and 1934, then doubled again between 1934 and 1939. "I have heard Palm Springs discussed in China, Manchuria, in Australia and all over Europe," observed Los Angeles Times columnist Harry Carr. A cluster of Mediterranean-style hotels and winter cottages, Palm Springs stood centered on a Spanish-style plaza, planted with orange, eucalyptus, cottonwood palm, and pepper trees. Just beyond the town was the desert, its rolling dunes sculpted by the winds into stilled sea waves. Everything--structures, plaza, desert, and mountains--was suffused in a persistent golden haze, with runs of lavender created by the ever-present verbena blanketing the desert floor and hillsides, and streaks of cinnamon, umber, salmon pink, scarlet, and royal purple in the mountain ridges guarding the plain on which Palm Springs was centered. Nearby, protecting Palm Springs from the desert winds, Mount San Jacinto rose straight from the desert floor. San Jacinto had no time for foothills. This twelve-thousand-foot mountain peak was, in geological terms, an adolescent that had reached its height overnight. Its canyons were still grinding and settling, and making a sound like growling, which the Cahuilla Indians attributed to an evil spirit named Tahquitz.

In the early 1900s, a generation of writers and poets--Charles Fletcher Lummis, George Wharton James, Mary Austin, Theodore Van Dyke, J. Smeaton Chase, and others--discovered the desert; but their perspective was literary and aesthetic. This first Progressive generation of writers did not come to the desert to play, which would have been impossible in that time of non-development. They traveled into the desert, rather, either alone or in small groups, to experience its grandeur and solitude and to create upon their return a distinguished body of descriptive literature. From its beginnings as an American settlement, however, Palm Springs showed signs of becoming a resort. The first Anglo resident of Palm Springs, John Guthrie McCallum, a San Francisco attorney, took up residence alongside the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indians in March 1885 in an effort to help his son John, stricken in the typhoid epidemic of 1879, regain his health. McCallum built a home on 320 acres, planted orchards, constructed a stone-lined ditch from Whitewater River nineteen miles away--and began to interest others in settling in the desert, a novel idea in the mid-1880s. The very next resident, Welwood Murray, a Scotsman who moved to Palm Springs from Banning at the suggestion of McCallum, went immediately into the resort business. With the help of local Native Americans, Murray built a charming hotel of wood and adobe and began to promote business. Rather soon, Murray decided he needed an image, an angle, a way of marketing an environment still considered hostile by most Americans. Deciding upon an Arab metaphor, Murray bought a camel. (Camels had been intermittently in use in the deserts of California since the 1850s and could still be locally purchased.) Next, he hired a local Native American, Willie Marcus, to stand with said camel at the train station at Seven Palms, dressed in Arab robes and headgear, and hand out brochures promoting Palm Valley, as it was then called, and Murray's Palm Springs Hotel.

Right from the start, then, there was in the Palm Springs experience an element of promotional glitz, even hokum. Murray's well-run hotel (his wife was an accomplished cook) flourished. In 1909 Dr. Harry Coffman, his wife Nellie, and their two sons, previous visitors to Palm Springs, moved there permanently and built a second hostelry, the Desert Inn, which Nellie Coffman managed. It flourished as well and had to be augmented with tent cabins. Then, in 1912, came another physician, Franilla White of New York, and her two sisters, Cornelia and Isabel, who purchased the Palm Springs Hotel from Welwood Murray. The presence of two physician-hoteliers, Drs. Coffman and White, indicated that Palm Springs was entering the twentieth century as a health spa in the nineteenth-century style, organized around the dry desert climate and the hot springs in the center of the village that had provided Palm Springs with its first name, Agua Caliente. This image of Palm Springs as a dignified health resort, a place for physical and spiritual refreshment, pervades J. Smeaton Chase's Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun (1920), the final literary response from a desert writer of the old school.

The 1920s witnessed the transition of Palm Springs from health resort to a winter resort for the affluent. In 1924 a young couple, Pearl and Austin McManus, commissioned Los Angeles architect Lloyd Wright, the talented son of a very famous father, to design a hotel, the Oasis. In and of itself, the intense stylization of Wright's scheme for the Oasis--white concrete walls, a Secessionist exterior playing off against gigantic cottonwood trees and an orange grove, an irregularly shaped swimming pool, a patio court, lush lawns and a great fountain, a ninety-foot dining room heated by exposed charcoal braziers, an exquisite use of copper and leather for lamps, wall decorations, and other finishes--bespoke a dramatic transition from an earlier era of rustic inns and tent cabins. Here was a hotel clearly keyed to the stylization of the environment, in this case the desert: a stylization that must be at the core of every successful resort. During the twenties as well, a new kind of resident, the celebrity, began to make connection with Palm Springs: artist and cartoonist Jimmy Swinnerton, for example, and Rudolph Valentino, who had become acquainted with Palm Springs during the filming of The Sheik.

In the 1930s Hollywood discovered Palm Springs and made it its own special place, centered in an even more stylized hotel, El Mirador, which catered to a movie clientele. Actor Charles Farrell, meanwhile, a top-ranked amateur tennis player, and his wife Virginia, desiring a change of residence and career, moved to Palm Springs permanently, where they developed the Racquet Club, which Soon became the tennis epicenter of Southern California, with champions such as Gene Mako and Alice Marble seen frequently on the courts. By 1938 visitors to Palm Springs had the choice of five resorts--the Desert Inn, the Oasis, El Mirador, and two dude ranches, Smoke Tree and Deep Well--and a fully developed program of golf, tennis, swimming, horseback riding, buckboard treks into the desert, polo, skeet shooting, bicycling, lazing by the side of a proliferating number of swimming pools, and a luxuriant night life. Around the pool at El Mirador of an afternoon, or on the courts at the Racquet Club, or on the links of the O'Donnell Desert Golf Course, or at the firing line of the Palm Springs Skeet Club, or watching the polo matches at the Field Club, or favorably seated at one or another of the nightclubs that flourished in the hotels, one might catch sight of Marlene Dietrich, Leslie Howard, Melba Bennett, Gilbert Roland, Don Ameche, George Arliss, the ever-present Farrells, Bob and Dolores Hope, together with assorted producers, directors, and writers such as Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint detective series, who had a distinctively British love of the Palm Springs sun, together with such captains of industry as Major Reuben Fleet, president of Consolidated Aircraft, who liked the Hollywood glamour as much as the clear air and winter sunshine. E. F. Hutton maintained an office on the plaza, with a direct connection to the New York Stock Exchange. "In a way of speaking," noted Frank Condon in December 1936, "Palm Springs might be regarded as the dude in the family of desert towns. For where else can you purchase perfume among the dunes at eighty dollars a bottle? Where else would you find the latest New York and Parisian models, white flannels, snake skin belts with silver buckles, and a broker's office with a direct wire into New York?"

By day, Palm Springs was a casual place. Women appeared on the streets in the brightly patterned one-piece sunsuits of the era, or in flimsy ensembles known as day pajamas, or in bell-bottomed slacks. Palm Springs later claimed to have, if not invented shorts, then at least to have made them acceptable public attire. Jeans, cowboy hats, shirts, boots, bandannas, and Western fringed jackets were also the fashion, especially at riding events such as the Circus Day Rodeo at the Field Club. In the evenings, Palm Springs got dressy, with black tie de rigueur at nightclubs, especially on weekends and in the busy social season from Christmas through New Year's. "Nothing is sadder," laments an issue of Palm Springs Life from 1938, "than the week-end visitor who didn't bring a thing to wear after dark, because the desert is supposed to be so simple." Those caught short could rush to Bullock's of Los Angeles, which maintained a full-service clothing boutique at the Desert Inn.

The social year got off to its start in late October with the annual five-day ride of the Vaqueros del Desierto, a group of some hundred horsemen who trekked through the desert by day and by night enjoyed sumptuous meals and campfire entertainment. In early November, Palm Springs hosted a number of statewide swimming and diving meets. By Thanksgiving, winter residents from the East began to arrive. The Palm Springs Kennel Club gave its annual dog show in early December. By Christmas time, the season was at its height, with the full influx of winter visitors from Hollywood and the East, arriving by Santa Fe Super Chief or on special Sun Land flights from New York via Chicago on TWA, together with an array of Hollywood celebrities seeking to avoid the enforced religiosity of the Christmas season. Hotels and nightclubs made much of New Year's Eve, with most hotels and the Racquet Club featuring large orchestras bused in from Hollywood. In January there was the two-day Midwinter Rodeo, followed by a second rodeo in Circus Week, which occurred in March and was the best-publicized event in the Palm Springs social cycle. In March as well, the thoughts of Palm Springs turned to Polo Week, with matches held at the Field Club, and to golf, with invitational tournaments held for men in March and for women in April.

Among other things, the Palm Springs of the late 1930s anticipated the post-war emergence of California as affluent resort. The paradoxes of the capitalist system stood fully revealed in the contrast between this playground for the rich and famous and the living conditions of farm workers during this period in the Imperial Valley, just a short drive away. As a stylized urban environment, Palm Springs anticipated the post-war planned suburb, followed by the gated community: enclaves into which the affluent might retreat, not just for a winter vacation, but for the entire year. Palm Springs bespoke the privileged privacy of the California Rich, Hollywood branch, a style that would one day enter the White House itself when President Ronald Reagan spent each New Year's Eve in Palm Springs in what had by then become a half-century-old Hollywood ritual.

Like Hollywood films in the 1930s, Palm Springs offered ordinary Americans, so many of them still beset by Depression difficulties, opportunities for gawking and vicarious satisfaction. "Los Angeles simply goes desert daffy on Sundays," noted Frank Condon in December 1936, "and the gasoline parade crawls along eastward through San Bernardino, Colton, Redlands, Beaumont, and Banning, and slowly slides down the long hill into the valley....The city slickers bring along their own lunches in cardboard boxes, some bottled beer in a tin pail, and do not spend a dime with the town merchants, so, as Palm Springs enquires, what good are they? Upon arriving in the general vicinity of the desert resort, the Los Angeles hordes pull up on side roads, or out on the desert, or in a ravine, or anywhere, look admiringly at the purple mountains, ask eagerly where the movie stars may be seen, dig out the pickles, jam and sandwiches, and loaf around happily until five in the afternoon. The parade then starts for home, fourteen miles an hour, bumpers touching and everyone contented. The next Sunday they do it all over again." Every weekend, by 1939, the plaza and streets of Palm Springs teemed with thousands of daytime visitors, hoping to see a movie star. "The town," noted Max Miller of Palm Springs on a crowded weekend, "with its boiled egg sandwiches, its paper plates, its babies, its fat women in slacks, its portable radios, its cameras, has become of a weekend nothing more than a beach town slightly transplanted." Like motoring, barbecuing, wine drinking, surfing, golf, tennis, lazing by the swimming pool, and so many other California pursuits--and places--of the 1930s, Palm Springs had made the transition from elite to democratic. Everyone could now wear polo shirts and slacks.