Steinbeck Name Pops Up All Over : Salinas Growing to Like Author It Once Spurned

There is a John Steinbeck library here and a Steinbeck post office. There is a Steinbeck condominium project, a Steinbeck mortgage company and a Steinbeck travel agency. There is a John Steinbeck Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center.

And now the city is hoping that Steinbeck’s allure will ensure success for its proposed $30-million downtown redevelopment project--John Steinbeck Plaza. A key tourist attraction for the project is a proposed center--named, of course, the John Steinbeck Center--where manuscripts and artifacts will celebrate the author’s career. A fund-raising campaign for the center will begin in January.

While Steinbeck’s friends are gratified that his hometown is paying homage to his memory, many say that the tributes are leavened with hypocrisy and self-interest. They find it ironic that a town that reviled and rejected the author during much of his life is capitalizing on his name.

“He was hated by the Salinas Establishment,” said Bruce Ariss, 76, a painter who was a friend of Steinbeck during the 1930s when the author lived near Monterey. “The antagonism was so thick he was very leery of going home.

“Now, he’s the local hero, and they’re naming everything that moves after him.”

Steinbeck created enmity among the wealthy growers and shippers in Salinas because of his sympathetic portrayal of migrant workers in “The Grapes of Wrath” and “In Dubious Battle.” Twice, his books were burned in Salinas, and a library commissioner tried to block the renaming of the city library for Steinbeck shortly after the author died.

Steinbeck once wrote in a letter to a friend that the people of Salinas “want no part of me except in a pine box.”

Considered a Traitor

The agricultural community considered Steinbeck a “traitor to his class,” said John Gross, the Salinas city librarian. Steinbeck’s parents were part of the Salinas Establishment; his father was Monterey County treasurer and his mother a leader of the local women’s club. Many of their friends were wealthy growers who were outraged when Steinbeck described how they exploited farm workers.

“He wrote about some ugly things, and it created a national indignation,” Gross said. “Some local people recognized themselves and were very angry.”

John Steinbeck continues to be a controversial subject in Salinas, and some prominent members of the community still bristle when his name is mentioned, said Jackson Benson, who wrote an acclaimed Steinbeck biography, “The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer.”

Animosity Among Old-Timers

“It’s an ultraconservative community, and some of the political animosity is still there,” said Benson, an English professor at San Diego State University. “There are enough old-timers in the area who’d much rather their town be known for garlic, like Gilroy. They’re not happy about having Steinbeck as the main attraction.”

Harry Noland, who has practiced law in Salinas for 60 years, said he has “no respect” for Steinbeck and “won’t give a penny” when the fund-raising drive for the center begins. Noland, 83, still works as a lawyer, and his firm represents many growers.

‘Exaggerated or Inaccurate’

“I’ve never cared for his writing,” Noland said. “I think a lot of what he wrote was exaggerated or inaccurate. I don’t agree with it. . . .

“I knew Steinbeck, and I knew his parents. But most of these people who are all for Steinbeck now are newcomers. They didn’t know him. But those who did and who are familiar with his inaccuracies don’t have much use for him now.”

As a result of such sentiment, there has been some difficulty raising funds for the John Steinbeck Center, according to Gordon Joblon, a founding member of the John Steinbeck Center Foundation. The center was proposed four years ago as an adjunct to the library, but a lack of interest delayed the project, Joblon said.

Joblon, a former Wall Street executive who moved to Salinas seven years ago, discovered the city’s ambivalent attitude toward Steinbeck when he was named president of Friends of the Library. He attempted to raise funds for the center and was surprised at the lack of interest.

‘Quiet Detestation’

“Where there wasn’t apathy toward Steinbeck, there was quiet detestation. I was a newcomer, and I had assumed people would be proud of Steinbeck. I couldn’t believe the attitudes I encountered. I had thought it would be easy to raise the money.” Joblon shrugged and slumped in his chair. “But we just couldn’t get it done.”

Business leaders showed little interest, he said, and the former head of the Chamber of Commerce at the time refused to write about the center in the chamber’s monthly newsletter.

During the last year, however, city officials have shown renewed enthusiasm for the project. The City Council has donated two downtown structures scheduled to be renovated for the center and has committed $97,000 for fund-raising consultants. About $3 million is needed. And, said Mayor Russell Jeffries, the Steinbeck Plaza and Center was his “No. 1 priority” when he took office in July.

Great Gains Anticipated

“This project is going to put Salinas on the map,” Jeffries said, somewhat breathlessly. “The cultural enrichment will do a lot for this area.”

When Jeffries was growing up in Salinas, he said, the Steinbeck name “was not the best to be associated with.” But the city, he said, is no longer a sleepy agricultural community. The population, about 100,000, has doubled in the last 20 years, and attitudes have slowly changed.

“As the town has grown, it has attracted many newcomers who don’t have the animosity toward Steinbeck,” said Benson, Steinbeck’s biographer. “And the economy of the community has changed. A handful of growers don’t have all the power anymore. There’s still anti-Steinbeck feeling around, but it’s lessening.”

Monterey Tourists Sought

Civic leaders said the success of the project will silence the Steinbeck critics in Salinas. They hope that the plaza, which is to include a hotel, restaurants and office space, as well as the center, will lure to Salinas some of the tourists who visit the Monterey area each year.

The Steinbeck memorabilia that will make up the bulk of the center’s exhibits is stored in a crowded, dusty archive room at the city library. The archives include manuscripts, first editions, photographs, letters and hundreds of taped interviews with area residents who knew the author. The center, city officials said, will be both a tourist draw and a resource for Steinbeck scholars.

Birthplace Open

Steinbeck was born in 1902 and reared in a large Victorian house on Central Avenue that has been renovated and is open to the public. His best-known books were set in Central California’s agricultural valleys, its seedy waterfronts, its small rural towns. And he sympathetically wrote about the underclass who lived there. Steinbeck celebrated the hookers and the homeless in “Cannery Row,” the poor paisanos in “Tortilla Flats,” the itinerant farmhands in “Of Mice and Men.”

In 1962 he became the first California author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Steinbeck died six years later in New York, where he lived during the latter part of his life.

‘Valley of Whole World’

In his first short stories, Steinbeck wrote about what he called “the long valley,” the strip of rich farmland south of Salinas between the Gabilan Mountains and the Santa Lucia Range. He once wrote in a letter to a friend, “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches . . . so that it would be the valley of the whole world.”

But when his books began to antagonize residents, Steinbeck no longer felt welcome in Salinas, and for several years he lived in the Monterey area. After the publication in 1932 of one of Steinbeck’s first books, “The Pastures of Heaven,” his mother brought a copy to her woman’s club meeting, said Pauline Pearson, historical consultant for the Salinas Library. She wanted the book read at the meeting, but the other women refused.

Skeletons Out of Closet

“He wrote about people and things that really happened, and that upset the women,” Pearson said. “They were offended that he would bring the skeletons out of the closet for everyone to see.”

The growers, who represented the power structure in Salinas, were first offended by “In Dubious Battle,” published in 1936. Steinbeck wrote about labor organizers--whom the growers claimed he sided with--and their efforts to establish a strike among migrant workers.

Three years later “The Grapes of Wrath” was published, and that book, Pearson said, “caused him the most trouble.”

Residents Burn His Book

National attention was focused on the problems of California’s migrant workers--most of whom had moved from the Dust Bowl of the Midwest in the 1930s--and the growers had to “admit for the first time that they did take advantage of people.” A group of residents burned the book near the library shortly after publication, Pearson said, and it was burned again that year during a violent lettuce strike.

The final fillip for Salinas residents was “East of Eden,” published in 1952. Like “Pastures of Heaven,” Steinbeck wrote thinly veiled accounts of members of the community, but “East of Eden” had a harder edge and people in Salinas were scandalized that the novel depicted things such as the clientele of a local brothel.

Hypocrisy Exposed

“This was personal, rather than political, and many people were very angry,” Pearson said. “Steinbeck was exposing the hypocrisy in small-town America, but people here didn’t see the eternal themes in the book. They were just angry that Steinbeck let out the town secrets.”

The animosity toward Steinbeck was so great that he often was afraid to return to Salinas. Benson recounts in his biography how Steinbeck and Lewis Milestone, a producer, drove around the Salinas Valley scouting possible locations for the film version of “Of Mice and Men.”

“After they had visited several possible locations, Milestone noticed that each time Steinbeck drove onto a ranch, he’d never stop,” Benson wrote. “He’d just drive around the circle in front of the ranch buildings and back out again. The producer couldn’t see anything that way so he asked him why he didn’t stop and let him get out and look around. . . . “

‘They Hate Me’

“ ‘Because I’d get my ass full of rock salt,’ ” Steinbeck said. “ ‘They hate me around here.’ ”

While Steinbeck never reconciled with Salinas during his lifetime, Pearson believes he had a premonition that after his death the city would appreciate him.

In “Travels with Charlie,” a chronicle of Steinbeck’s peregrinations across the country with his French poodle, he recounted a visit to Sauk Centre, Minn., the birthplace of Sinclair Lewis. Pearson is convinced that Steinbeck was speculating on his own uneasy relationship with Salinas when he wrote about the hatred Lewis evoked in his hometown after the publication of “Main Street.”

“Did he go back?” Steinbeck wrote of Lewis. “Just went through now and again. . . . And he died there. . . . And now he’s good for the town. Brings in some tourists. He’s a good writer now.”