Goodbye to the Millennium, the 1900s--and Mom

SACRAMENTO — If it were my call, I’d have imposed a moratorium long ago on the M-word: millennium. You’ve now read that overused, irrelevant noun for the last time in this column.

Also “Y2K,” which must stand for one of the great commercial hoaxes of this or any other century. How many billions have been spent unnecessarily to protect ourselves from the unseen New Year’s bogeyman?

The end of the 20th century deserves reflection, not just hype over a cutesy acronym. Consider all that has happened solely in California these past 100 years.

When the century began, fewer than 1.5 million people lived in the state. Today, there are 34 million and we’ll probably hit 50 million by 2025. There now are as many people residing in California as lived in the entire United States at the end of the Civil War.

In the last 100 years, there has been a 33-fold increase in land officially classified as “built up.” Coastal Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area have lost 80% of their open space. This torments us in our daily lives--in numbing commutes, dirty air, high housing costs. But thanks to mid-century visionaries, California did react to the growth of that era by developing world-class university, freeway and water systems.

All these facts tend to be treated in people’s psyches as abstract statistics, generating yawns. But I’ve been forced in recent days to focus more directly on the last 100 years because of my own M-word: Mom. My mom died last Sunday at age 99.

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Effie Skelton’s life embraced the 20th century in many ways. She was born in 1900 and lived to within a few days of 2000. She was an Oklahoman--you didn’t dare call her an “Okie”--and migrated to California, one of the many millions from the South and Midwest to seek new opportunity here.

She was a product of the American melting pot. Her father was half Cherokee, half Irish; her grandmother, as a child, had been force-marched out of the Smoky Mountains on the “Trail of Tears.”

Born in “Indian Territory” before statehood, mom checked in at only 1 1/2 pounds. An Indian aunt concocted a lifesaving brew of blackberry brandy and sugar water and fed her through an eyedropper. She was kept warm in a cigar box by a wood-burning stove. Such was the art of medicine in 1900.

She grew up in tiny Okemah, across a back alley from future folk singer Woody Guthrie. One of my favorite letters from mom was written after the Okemah City Council refused to name the town library in Woody’s memory, contending he’d been a Communist. That’s the sort of “backward, bigoted” thinking that had caused her to leave the South and drive to California in 1926, she angrily wrote.

Mom met dad at--where else?--a beach party in Ventura, and they married in 1930. Dad was a Tennessee farm boy who’d left home to work in the California oil boom.

But the Depression hit hard. Dad was unemployed for three years. Go to college so you can get a good job, I repeatedly was lectured. Dad’s schooling had ended after the eighth grade. Mom was yanked out of college by an older brother who didn’t think it a proper place for a young woman. Fortunately for kids like me, California created a system of affordable higher education.

In 1942, we moved to Ojai, where $9,000 bought my parents a small orange ranch. Mom sold real estate for three decades, finding her niche in a man’s world long before most people ever heard of “feminism.”

Her story--and this century’s, to a large degree--is illustrated in photo albums. Faded pictures of people riding to town in a buggy. Posing with a horse. No cars then--nor radios, let alone a TV or PC. Later pictures of my brother and me holding up a 1945 newspaper declaring VICTORY, a reminder of the glorious point in this century when Americans were the most united.

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It’s impossible to predict what sort of life a child born in 2000 will experience.

There’s some speculation that by the end of the 21st century, one-third of Americans will live in California, which is how it was when Columbus landed.

Kevin Starr, historian and state librarian, notes California must come to grips with this exploding growth--just as early in the 20th century, Progressives conquered that era’s most vexing problem: institutional political corruption.

He foresees people living in homes with totally integrated information systems; computer use as common and simple as flicking on a light switch. By contrast, mom’s first info system was a crank telephone, local newspaper and a stroll downtown.

Amid continual change, one thing remained constant: mom’s character. Like California’s: sunny, spirited and independent.

Mom’s old neighbor, Woody Guthrie, might sing about her: “So long, it’s been good to know ya.” The same could be said for the century.