It’s Our Party and We Can Skip It if We Want To

Look at you, you poor thing. Sit down, have some coffee. Sorry this column isn’t in bigger type to make it easier on your eyes.

It was all that celebrating yesterday, wasn’t it? Well, who can blame you? How often does California celebrate its 150th anniversary of statehood, anyway?

Hmm? You weren’t out celebrating? You mean you always look like that on Sunday mornings?

Wait, wait, now--you didn’t get left off any invitation list. Tell you the truth, there wasn’t much of a party. Not even a birthday card. Maybe in 50 years, when we reach 200. OK, OK, I stand corrected: if we reach 200.

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The little Ohio town where I grew up was so small it didn’t have a hospital, so small it didn’t have a movie theater, yet for its 150th birthday, its sesquicentennial, the little burg went wild with parades and historical pageants; my mother strolled up Main Street, all eight blocks of it, in my great-great-grandmother’s wedding dress.

Yet California, the brawniest state in the union, the richest and busiest, turns 150 and it pretty much sits out its own party--another wallflower moment in a year that saw Los Angeles’ lamentable millennial party turnout and no part at all for ordinary Angelenos when the Democratic National Convention set up camp downtown.

Kevin Starr, the state librarian whose books on California are a small library unto themselves, stuck up for California’s fete-free sesquicentennial with drollery: “How can you have a party when your state is a party 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Other places, gloomier places--they need parties. If you threw a party in California, how could anyone tell?”

In truth, there were two gatherings of tall ships. The post office issued a stamp Saturday--but it also issued a stamp for Daffy Duck. The DMV issued sesquicentennial license plates, but almost nobody knew what “sesquicentennial” meant. No Californian had the wit to mark the big birthday in his birthday suit, probably because there were no cameras around.

On Saturday, on the Capitol grounds in Sacramento, the governor joined some schoolchildren in wandering through a “living history” festival, exhibits of blacksmithing and canoe-making and abacus-tabulating, the business pursuits of early Californians, some of whom were done to death and others treated like slaves.

That may be one clue to the party-pooping 31st state: Not every Californian, then or now, found the place to be the promised land. As Starr says, “We are multiple Californias . . . to come up with one embracing California-wide metaphor that embodies all our social and historical experience--it’s just not possible.”

What has united Californians, and still does, is work. Like Atlanta, the “town too busy to hate,” California is the state too busy to party.

In his 1973 California history, T.H. Watkins describes how the news of statehood was received in the new state being so honored: “While it cannot be doubted that a certain joy was expressed by many Californians over the state’s admission to the union, it is equally true that at least as many greeted it with a thundering indifference--for apathy was the political lifestyle of most of her citizens. . . . So, California was now a state? Fine, a good move. Now let’s get back to the heart of the matter--making money.”

A hundred fifty years of statehood, who cares? But drive around town and the banners and signs boast: “Serving Los Angeles since 1979 . . . since 1983 . . . since 1995.”

California, so different and so indifferent, can still throw a great grand opening.

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Until past the turn of the century, Admission Day was a state holiday. A sentimental postcard of the 1910 statehood festival depicts a poppy-crowned figure of California tenderly handing up a California grizzly cub to the welcoming arms of Columbia, the figure of the nation. (Soon thereafter, the California grizzly was extinct.)

By the time California became a state, the Gold Rush had already made it a legend. The rest of the world heard the statehood news before it reached California by steamship on Oct. 8, 1850. The Times of London asked its readers to consider “the extraordinary character” of the place. “Here was a community of some hundreds of thousands of souls collected from all quarters of the known world--Polynesians and Peruvians, Englishmen and Mexicans, Germans and New Englanders, Spaniards and Chinese . . . the extemporized state . . . with a territory as large as Great Britain, a population difficult to number, and destinies which none can foresee.”

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Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Al Martinez. Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.