Somehow It Feels Like the Fifties

Memorable decades rarely end neatly at their chronological borders. And so it was with the Eighties. In California, at least, the Eighties finally seemed to self-destruct sometime in the last half of 1990. Maybe it was the day a California homeowner sold his house for less than what he had paid.

Or maybe it was the day when George Deukmejian woke up and discovered that a comfortable surplus in the state budget had turned into a huge, blood-sucking deficit. In any case, the Eighties finally went, and the evidence of their passing could be seen all over Sacramento on Monday.

On the steps of the Jesse M. Unruh Office Building, for example, you could stand in the rain and watch Kathleen Brown get sworn in as state treasurer. She talked about bonds and Wall Street and reassured the small crowd that she would work hard to protect the state’s credit rating.

Her father, Pat Brown, stood beside her at the podium and smiled--sadly, it seemed--at these words. Perhaps he was thinking of the old days in the Sixties, when he was governor, when the state could build the California Water Project, the largest civilian construction project in the country’s history, and never worry about a credit rating.

Somewhere behind Kathleen Brown, where he could not be easily seen, stood her brother, Jerry. His own departure from the governor’s office in 1982 signaled, as much as anything else, the real beginning of the Eighties. For his part, Jerry looked fidgety and nervous, and disappeared quickly when the ceremony was finished. Perhaps the new decade simply does not suit his tastes.

Across the city, swearing-in ceremonies were scheduled like bowl games on New Year’s Day, one after the other, to keep conflicts to a minimum. Immediately after the Brown affair, you could walk a few yards to the south lawn of the Capitol where the day’s major event, the governor-elect’s inauguration, was to culminate three days of celebration.

Outside of Sacramento, these pre-inaugural events are regarded as dutiful exercises, and more or less ignored. Inside Sacramento, it’s a different matter. The style and tone of the partying is believed to reveal much about the new governor himself, and each event is scrutinized for its hidden evidence.

On Monday morning, the Sacramento Bee published a governor-by-governor breakdown of past inaugural celebrations to show the validity of this approach. In 1975, for example, Jerry Brown offered his supporters a clam chowder lunch at a Berkeley restaurant. That was it, and everyone got a bill for the chowder at the end of the meal.

Eight years before, Ronald Reagan and buddies carried on like pashas. The cost of the inaugural ball alone was calculated by the Bee at $1,065 per couple in 1991 dollars. On inauguration day, as he strode toward the podium, Reagan was given a 19-gun salute by a brace of cannon.

So what are we to learn of Pete Wilson from his three days of frolic? It’s very hard to say. If Wilson was ushering in his version of the Nineties, we may have something to fear. Because the last three days looked spookily like the Fifties.

As evidence, I offer the “gala” of Sunday night. Initially this event was billed as the glitzy party where “Hollywood” would come to salute the new era.

You may have heard about this party. The headliner was Wayne Newton. The warm-ups were Charlton Heston reading from Abraham Lincoln, and the Kingston Trio. The Kingston Trio sang “Tom Dooley.”

And on Monday night there was not one inaugural ball but two, one for the adults and one for “Young Californians.” The two groups did not mix, and Vice President Dan Quayle acted as chaperon for the youngsters.

For a while Monday, it seemed that the gods had decided to send their own salute to the inauguration. In the middle of a four-year drought, light rain began to fall.

Pat Brown called attention to this blessing at his daughter’s outdoor ceremony and recalled that rain fell on his own inauguration 30 years ago. Getting wet at your swearing-in is a good omen, Brown said.

But over at the Capitol, these views weren’t shared. As the drizzle continued, crews began folding up the chairs on the south lawn and carting off the microphones. Someone had decided this was an omen that could be ignored. Pete Wilson was moving inside.