The Wonder Years

Through most of my wonder years, as they were called in the famous commercial for white bread, the governor of California was Pat Brown. I was a toddler when he was first elected and only 11 years old when he was hurled out of office in 1966, replaced by Ronald Reagan. As a result, I shuffle empty-handed to his ongoing journalistic wake, bearing no great inside stories to illuminate the grand man of the California boom.

As a reporter, I had dealings with Brown only twice. Once, in the late 1970s, I happened to catch him crossing a picket line at the Fairmont in San Francisco. The onetime stalwart of labor sheepishly mumbled something about “always staying there,” and made tracks. A decade later, I interviewed him about the death penalty. He was an old man by then and almost baffled by the fact that 36 people went to the gas chamber in the time he held the power of clemency.

Beyond those twigs, I have little else to toss on the anecdotal pile that Brown’s political cronies and the reporters who covered him have assembled so lovingly since his death last Friday. What I can speak to, though, is what it was like to be a child of the era personified by Brown. Politicians always conduct their business in the name of children, building a golden future, and all that. Typically, it’s just gas and smoke. With Pat Brown, it seemed different.

*

In the California where I grew up, there was plenty to worry a child. Nukes, for instance. I remember as a kindergartner in Porterville being drilled on how to dive under a desk when the Bomb was dropped. Why the Russians would want to bomb Porterville was never explained. One thing we did not need to worry about, however, was going to college.

To grow up in California in the early 1960s was to understand that a college education would be there, pretty much for the asking, free. Brown added something like a dozen campuses to the state university and college systems, making sure there would be room. Those who couldn’t pass muster at first could go to the junior colleges and prepare. It was called the Master Plan for Education, and kids knew all about it. It was part of our indoctrination.

Freeways were under construction everywhere, as were suburbs. Brown built something like 1,000 miles of freeways, and it seemed our family drove every single one. In the back of the station wagon we kids would boast to ourselves--inaccurately, I have since learned--that California was special because it constructed “freeways” while the rest of the motoring nation was content with mere highways and toll roads.

The San Joaquin Valley had no football team to put us, as they say, on the map. We had farming. It was thrilling to read in the Fresno Bee about the county ranking No. 1 in the nation in agricultural production. It made us feel bigger than our small town, connected. Much of this farming was conducted on the valley’s west side. This was desert land made to bloom with water delivered by the State Water Project that Pat Brown sold to California as a concrete ribbon to tie north together with south, to make us all great together.

*

A lot of the posthumous analysis has presented Brown as a symbol of Big Government. What he actually represented was Big California. There was a spirit to his time, a sense that California was making itself into something special, and it infected the children as much as any adult, private industry as much as government. California could do anything. It was California.

Whether Brown created this chauvinism, or simply reflected it, I can’t say. Certainly he wasn’t building all those campuses himself. Taxpayers financed his $4-billion budgets--pocket change compared to the $56-billion whoppers of today, but controversial then. And surely my enduring conviction from childhood that California is the only place worth living was instilled as much by my family and my friends and my experience as by any politician.

It also must be noted here, sadly, that the golden promises of my childhood were never quite fulfilled. Brown left office as the smoke of Watts was clearing; so even then, not every California childhood was a freeway drive through the poppies. Public schools have become a cruel joke in many cases, and the birthright of free higher education was forfeited even before I slipped into college. Nature and politics caught up with the west side. The freeways have gone wobbly from lack of repair, and the only thing California can build anymore is prisons. The spirit has waned.

Indeed, much of the golden reminiscing about Brown this past week has suggested a darker, edgy subtext: Look at what we don’t have now. And yet, for a brief moment, we did have it. It was a wonderful time to be a child in California, and Pat Brown helped make it so. I wonder what our children will say about this time we are making for them today.