Our Place in the California Sun: From the Past, Reflections for Today

This article appeared in The Times on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, when Art Seidenbaum was a cultural columnist for the newspaper. Opinion offers his commentary as a timely memorial to the man who directed this section for the past five years.

A couple of skin-peeling Sundays ago I was adrift on somebody else’s small boat off Malibu not fishing (because nobody brought a spare rod and I wanted to play spoiled child anyway). The world seemed transparent. You could look down past the writhing kelp and see bottom. You could look up at a sky so clear that infinity made sense. And the great corrugated landfall that holds us all to the East was only a thin, brown line of substance sandwiched between both blues.

Instead of compounding doing nothing by thinking nothing, I was trying, however horizontally, to put the climate in perspective with the place. How important back there on shore is the water and the weather? And does the combination of gentle ocean and moderate temperature really tend to limit what this culture can create and accomplish?

It is an old argument, really. I could remember a college course about how colder climates have stimulated men to greater efforts; if the environment is harsh, then people have something to conquer. In a more tropical situation, man tends to build himself a torpid society, lush with natural vegetation and noonday-napping human vegetables.

We’ve been accused of it, all right. Los Angeles and lotus-eaters have been linked for a long time by the people of chillier places. All the unseparated garbage about our full bodies and empty heads, our mortal chase after beauty and our monumental concern about death, our indolent bouncing between boat and barbecue are byproducts of an old and semiundeserved reputation for surface worship.

The movies, and the artificial images they projected, started it. And, truth, the motion picture came to Southern California because the weather was right--more dry, bright, outdoor shooting days than anywhere else in the country. Even today, when most film people dress like three-button bankers who lend hard money to a make-believe industry, an impression persists that we are a people in short pants.

When the airframe industry settled here, it was for similar sunny reasons: more days in every fiscal year for building, testing, flying. Weather was our early claim to fame. The men to make the movies and to man the wild blue yonder were imported. Although they enriched the place, nobody took them very seriously. Balmy was the atmosphere and balmy was the adjective.

The weather reports also made us, in numbers of new residents, a high-pressure area.

Poor people came because where you don’t have to have storm windows or snowsuits for the children, it is easier to be poor. Would-be artists and musicians and writers came for almost the same reason; a back yard could be called a studio. Couples came here to retire because consistent weather seemed good for what ailed them. Speculators arrived because there always seemed to be a new fad under the sun: pools to swim in, drive-ins for meals or for making love, a sports car in every garage. Until the ‘50s, you could make a case that the climate generated more heat than light.

But within a decade, the prevailing winds from the East shifted. What had been the aircraft industry was soaring into other areas: space and the computer sciences. A new definition of Aristotle’s good life--including leisure activities and time to chase culture--was becoming respectable, even applauded. And Americans, after centuries of looking to Europe for examples, gradually began to face the Pacific for the first time. The war and the new technologies were responsible.

The result has been to accelerate our steep growth while improving the cast of climbers. Thousands of fine educators were lured here, no longer afraid that owning a boat would turn a young scholar into a Yahoo. The very same sun that browned a beach bum promised to make life fuller and freer for a professor and his family. Suddenly, it became fashionable to argue that it is the kids that really matter and that Southern California is the ideal place to raise them. A weather code.

Scientists of all sorts brought their searches here. The headiest ones who started a series of think factories chose Southern California. Instead of numbing the mind, they figured, the weather made the mundane chores less difficult, releasing the brain for fancier test flights of its own.

Commentators on American life in the last half of the 20th Century flew in for a new look at what was going on here. Many years after the fact, they came to the conclusion that the old sun stigma was no longer attached. They wrote dozens of articles that nearly unanimously granted us a new set of adjectives to grow on: optimistic, pioneering, energetic, ever-changing, diffused, mobile, rootless.

Pretty much forgotten were the old cults. Almost ignored was the weather that still caused all the changes. Instead, the smog which so often slices between the clear sky and the driving, non-napping natives, became the climate of comment.

Nothing torpid about the tangling twine of freeways. The push up from the horizontal to highrise. The increasing density of people with greater breadth of knowledge. Our observers sniffed the air a couple of times, wiped their eyes and now began to blast us for behaving like big-city people in bad-weather places. The hustle. The random scramble. The urban problems crowned by the gray, gloomy mantle of man’s own smog.

In one way, they are right. All you have to do is get in a small boat off shore to see the way we’ve fouled up the natural, beautiful reason why we came here in the first place.

The secret is that we’ve been hellbent to imitate other cities. People moved in from Chicago and New York with all their old habits. Everybody was afraid to love the weather too loudly. Safer to act like all that sunshine isn’t really here--and now that we’ve hidden it in the filth of our own exhausts, much of the time it isn’t.

Pity the poor locals who have been here all along, who never hid their excitements under the palm fronds but who went about their business of building when the over-land sky was transparent every day and when the girders didn’t block the view of the ocean.

We have moved through several phases as a city. The first was laughter, general laughter from the outside; even then, all the forces for future bigness were at work. The second was an awkward age, as we began to grow fast and were watched with a sort of nervous contempt. Then came the war and all the postwar explosions people talk about: population, education, culture. Here, the echoes of each explosion were the loudest. Now we are usually taken seriously, partly because we have some serious problems that other Americans realize they, too, will have to face.

But floating out there, half-baked and brainwashed with beauty, it seemed to me that in our next phase we ought to become the great preservationists of all time. Hoard the hills from senseless slicing. Open the sky again by refusing to let us split up so many hydrocarbons. Let aesthetics rule because it was a run for natural beauty that started the stampede. Bury the utilities and the bad taste in everything from homes to public advertisements. The good weather is still waiting out there to sustain greatness, not just a cheap, dirty imitation of somewhere else.