As a kid coming of age in the 1960’s my vision of America was formed by music and television. As a young child, say at the age of six, or eight, we didn’t venture too far afield of little Parkville, Maryland. Oh sure we would go to the beach three hours away every Summer for a week. But America, the idea of a wide expansive country spread out beyond Baltimore, Maryland, the idea of America was beamed into our home through television, or in the songs coming through the AM radio. My own ideas of what America looked like, sounded like, was indeed really like, came from media, not from personal experience.
California was a land where all the girls were so blonde and beautiful The Beach Boys had to sing about them. A land of beautiful beaches, riches far beyond my own imagination. Tanned, elegant people, who lunched. Ate expensive meals in a place called the Brown Derby. We had no Brown Derby in Parkville.
In California Hillbillies occupied mansions full of marble floors, and they had a “cement pond”. Car commercials showed convertibles going down the Pacific Coast Highway and from my little view in a tiny suburb in Baltimore, Maryland everything California appeared to be young, impossibly beautiful, with talent that flowed from every inhabitant of the most beautiful place on earth.
We had no winding road by the sea with cliffs, and small beach front towns attached to a major American city where I grew up. We had a decaying “Main Street” with shuttered storefronts on a street called Harford Road that ran for miles, all the way into the decrepit city, ending at a tired, beat up old Sears Roebuck store before giving way to crumbling row homes, filth, degradation and poverty. My own parents had lived down there below that Sears before moving to the suburbs, on streets now just decaying, dying.
In tiny Parkville, Maryland we had boredom that went on for hours with little to do. We had a small Catholic schools where the nuns would beat you for free. We had a church where the priests would give you stern looks and threaten to tell your mother, the president of the ladies sodality, for every little transgression they saw in which you participated on the playground at lunch.
On the plus side we did get a brand new E. J. Korvettes and open air shopping center built nearby, so uh, we had that going for us. That didn’t necessarily measure up to blondes, beach, sunshine and surf mind you. And even as a kid we knew that.
George Hamilton had an ever-present tan from living out there in California, in Malibu you could live right in the sea, the magic of movies beamed forth from Hollywood, and out in somewhere called Laurel Canyon a handful of musicians were making the most beautiful music imaginable.
Even then, though I was young, I still marveled that somehow Crosby, Stills, and Nash, were hanging out with Judy Collins, Carol King, Gordon Lightfoot, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt. How could so many people find each other in the same place and time with such a wealth of talent? What was this magical Canyon that made all the music we were hearing? How could everything beamed through our television be made in one place called Hollywood?
How could so many impossibly talented people migrate to one place? Did they hear a siren’s call through the television to come, visit, see, stay. There were no musicians in Parkville, though one fourth grader did belt out a mean version of “Leaving’ on a Jet Plane” at the Harvest Fair.
If someone had the intent of selling us all California as an idea of youth, sunshine, warmth, beauty, and opportunity, they were doing a great job on me.
Making matters worse for me, my father had been born in California, in a small border town. I’d see all that wonder and excitement on television, or hear The Beach Boys sing about a place called Pasadena, and wonder how my dad ever left such a magical place to end up in Baltimore, Maryland. He called where we now lived “The Land of Pleasant Living”, adopting a local brewing company slogan to describe life in Maryland. I didn’t quite see life in Parkville, Maryland that same way. To me, compared to this California, Parkville, Maryland was an absolute dump.
Of course my dad was dark olive skinned and hispanic, and later in life he spoke of racism he had faced there in California, being called “Spic”, beaten once or twice for wandering through the wrong neighborhood out in this land of enchantment.
But when The Beach Boys were singing California songs I had yet to hear those horror stories.
Apparently for my dad it was no fun to be living in California with a single mom, and having a dad that had run off leaving the family dirt poor. Compound that with an olive brown skin color in a land that worshipped the blonde Goddess, and I guess that is how you get to the East Coast, far away from the beaches of California. I guess the beach is all fun and games when you are the bather lounging, but being the cabana boy isn’t as rich a lifestyle. I guess dear old dad has good reasons for moving East.
Things took an ugly turn for this idea of “California” at the end of the 1960’s when Manson had his minions go out and kill, and I remember reading Vincent Bugliosi’s book “Helter Skelter” as soon as it came out, which made the paradise of California appear to be a nightmare. The entire episode ended the view of California as some land of wealth and enchantment.
Looking at California today, having visited frequently of late since a daughter took up temporary residency there for a time, and one other daughter decided to marry there, I still see the same beauty, but not necessarily the same opportunity. The place is over taxed to a degree it would handicap anyone trying to start up a brand new business. And government there has created more rules and regulations than other states, where you can take a good idea and a few dollars, and chase the American Dream.
“Hollywood” isn’t doing California any favors. These days you are more apt to see film noire depicting a down-and-out California. A California of corruption, a California where the denizens are living lives of filth and degradation every bit as foul as the neighborhoods just below that Sears Roebuck in my own 1960’s Baltimore home town
You don’t get the chance to choose where you grow up, that is a decision left to your parents or guardian. And as you come of age you are able through media to see the vast world beyond.
To look out a window and not see the tired old willow tree blotting out the clapboard house in the adjacent backyard, but to look through the television or computer and see different worlds beckoning.
There was a time and place in America where California appeared from afar to be the epicenter of happiness and life itself. A place that every human aware of its existence wished they could manifest themselves, if even for a moment.
After viewing a variety show, or watching the tanned Johnny Carson on television, beamed into our small three bedroom home in tiny Parkville, I’d trudge upstairs to the bedroom I shared with two brothers. Wondering how fate gave those out there in far away California the chance to live in Paradise as I was surrounded by shag carpeting, cheap furniture, too many family members, and a whole lot of want.
And I wondered, did those people living in Santa Monica, living in “the valley”, living in those fantastic beach towns of Venice, Manhattan Beach, Redondo, the towns you’d hear named when contestants ran on stage of “The Price is Right”, towns such as Glendale, Burbank, Anaheim, did they feel privileged? Did they understand how fortunate they were to live in this land of enchantment?
There was a time and place.
Just hearing a Beach Boys tune, it can take you back there.
When California was an idea, maybe the brightest idea ever in the US of A.
Sadly I saw through the Hollywood crap. No sir, no dirt roads on the way to Atlanta that the Duke boys drove the General Lee on. I had been to Atlanta. Spent way too much time reading every newspaper I could find. Different papers had different stories and opinions. My 60s world view came from the reality of newspapers. My wife says that what is wrong with me. She could be right.