December 2008 Archives

In books. Because of books. Naturally.

Sixty Years in Southern California by Harris Newmark. Newmark’s memoir, published in 1916, is a revelation. Even more remarkable, it is an account of Jewish Los Angeles in the mid-19th century. Newmark’s city in 1853 - a dozen years after the American occupation - is violent and beautiful. The contradictions that still color what Los Angeles means are everywhere in the cowtown the city was. Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881) covers much of the same period much more luridly.

Southern California Country: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams. McWilliams’ interpretive history of Los Angeles, first published in 1946, still shapes how we think of the city. His themes are greed and ignorance in the sunshine (his parallel is novelist Raymond Chandler). Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown is McWilliams rewritten.

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Back at the beginning of this, I remarked a couple of times about falling in love. Falling in love with Los Angeles. Or rather, falling in love with the bigger thing that’s L.A. of which Los Angeles is both a present and absent part. You can be in L.A. but nowhere near Los Angeles. Sometimes, nothing but the light . . . our light . . . unites them. (Was I out of doors more, less inside, when I fell in love? My mother was dying. Outside was somewhere to go. Somewhere else.)

I would go out with Michael Ward, a former student assistant in a history program at Cal State Long Beach in which I had been a very junior administrator. He drew (he paints now). He took photographs (and still does). His roots are in Montana, and I always had the impression that Michael’s part of it, the past out of which he came, was (vaguely) the sort of place that could be in the background of a Dorothea Lange photograph, documenting something for the Farm Security Administration. (I went with him once on a rambling trip through northern California and the upper West to Montana, and his hometown was that place.)

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L.A. photographer John Humble lay on his back and pulled himself through a gap under a chainlink fence. The fence - marked No Entry - lines the bank of the Los Angeles River near its official source (two streams that have been engineered for this purpose).

There are few access points to the river. None of them is meant for public use. The river is a potentially dangerous place. It’s made for the transmission of millions of gallons of water an hour when winter storms pile up against the San Gabriel Mountains. When it rains, the river channel fills quickly. In a few minutes, the water can be higher than your head and flowing faster than you can run.

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My L. A. suburb sold itself into existence as “The City of Tomorrow Today” at the beginning of a new age in Los Angeles. The end of that age was down the street. The buildings where the future had been fabricated - in the form of Douglas jets - stood not far from where I live. Those buildings are gone now. The industry those buildings stood for is gone, too. No one makes jetliners in southern California anymore.

The Douglas plant in Long Beach had employed 50,000 workers during World War II and began the Cold War era as the largest aerospace industry employer in California. But Douglas wasn’t alone. Through the 1960s to the end of the Vietnam War, aerospace manufacturing in Los Angeles County employed more than 250,000 workers. As late as 1990, aerospace employed more than 130,000 countywide, more than half the state’s entire aerospace workforce. Today in all of Los Angeles County, only about 38,000 workers are employed in aerospace manufacturing; perhaps 17,000 more in the rest of southern California.

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