November 22, 2007
The L.A. Times editorial board has always had a response to the season-snobbery of those West Coast transplants who, around this time of year, yammer on about going home for a glorious autumn:

Our weather's better than yours.

Who wants falling leaves and first snows when you can have sunshine and fruit-filled gardens year round? Since the turn of the last century, and rising to a peak in the 1920s, possibly to attract and welcome the newcomers who doubled Los Angeles County's population, The Times has opined about the weather. The board complained of rain and praised the sun with the purplest of prose, pseudo-scientific health and psychological advice, and lusty descriptions of women dressing for heat.

Even in the dead of winter, The Times is tersely unsatisfied, writing a one-sentence piece on Jan. 14, 1890:

The cold weather still continues.


But only weeks later, on Jan. 29, 1890, The Times gleefully bragged:

These are the days we boast of as being typical of the Southern California winter.... One such day as yesterday does more good to the health-seeker than he obtains harm from a week of rain. The warm sun is life-giving penetrating, and not an hour should be spent in the house.


The next winter, on Feb. 12, 1900, The Times tried not to be too displeased, even with the threat of the Japanese current (a common topic of discussion, which was said to be changing the California climate):

There is no need yet to put on a long face about the weather outlook. Let our interesting and industrious pessimists, who are again beginning to talk about the Japanese current, the rainless climates of Peru and Egypt, and other cognate subjects of a discouraging nature, hold their horses a little while yet.


Spirits were high again in November of that year, during what must have been an Indian summer. The Times needled their "eastern friends" and, shockingly, hoped for rain. November 14, 1900:

The weather that we have been experiencing in Los Angeles during the past ten days is altogether phenomenal. Of course, when our eastern friends who are visiting us for the first time are told this they express incredulity, and remark that they have heard that sort of thing before, but it is a fact, all the same... We ought, however, to have a good old-fashioned downpour — or several of them — between now and the end of the century, or we shall really have to begin to give some weight to the arguments of those who claim that the seasons in Southern California are undergoing a changeĀ….


On November 22, The Times got what it asked for:

The big rain for which everybody in Southern California has been asking for three years, has come.... Before the bills for the ravages of the flood in Southern California are all paid, they may foot up more than a million dollars; but that is a small item in comparison with the worth to the country of the blessed rain.


In the new century, with the city's profile still tiny but starting to rise, The Times made a bid to attract world leaders, on June 14, 1905:

It appears that some objection has arisen to holding the conference of the peace plenipotentiaries in Washington, owing to the extreme heat.... The place to hold this meeting is Los Angeles.... It is the one spot on earth that is absolutely without objectionable features, climatic or otherwise. The plenipotentiaries can remain here a whole year through and never need fires to warm them nor fans to cool them.... They shall be fed on the lot of the land — "the best the market affords," and be supplied with bathing suits, pajamas, white duck uniforms, Panama hats, tan shoes and striped stockings.


The following year, The Times offered a parable for newcomers to the city. February 13, 1906:

There are today in Southern California a great many thousand people who have never passed through a California winter before. To them at least a brief treatise on the subject of the weather may not come amiss. There is a story told of a tourist passing through Pasadena, who asked a man he encountered on the street what he thought of the weather. He replied, "I don't know;" and the tourist then asked: "Are you a stranger here, too?" Then the reply came: "No, I have been here too long to know anything about the weather."


But despite The Times' best efforts, the message about California's fine weather hadn't reached everyone, it seems. The editorial board complained on May 3, 1907:

There is scarcely one in a hundred of [visitors] that has not the conviction that summer in Los Angeles is about as torrid as in Senegal.... Even our own Californians, from the central and the northern parts of the State, who visit us occasionally, find no greater surprise than in our cool, overcast mornings, our middays scarcely ever excessively hot, and the bracing ocean breeze that comes in almost invariably in the afternoon...."


And, on January 24, 1908, during another rash of winter weather in winter, The Times wrote, in overwrought words we hope weren't completely serious: