The Times basks in the light
The L.A. Times editorial board has always had a response to the season-snobbery of those West Coast transplants who, around this time of year, yammer on about going home for a glorious autumn:
Our weather’s better than yours.
Who wants falling leaves and first snows when you can have sunshine and fruit-filled gardens year round? Since the turn of the last century, and rising to a peak in the 1920s, possibly to attract and welcome the newcomers who doubled Los Angeles County’s population, The Times has opined about the weather. The board complained of rain and praised the sun with the purplest of prose, pseudo-scientific health and psychological advice, and lusty descriptions of women dressing for heat.
Even in the dead of winter, The Times is tersely unsatisfied, writing a one-sentence piece on Jan. 14, 1890:
The cold weather still continues.
But only weeks later, on Jan. 29, 1890, The Times gleefully bragged:
These are the days we boast of as being typical of the Southern California winter.... One such day as yesterday does more good to the health-seeker than he obtains harm from a week of rain. The warm sun is life-giving penetrating, and not an hour should be spent in the house.
The next winter, on Feb. 12, 1900, The Times tried not to be too displeased, even with the threat of the Japanese current (a common topic of discussion, which was said to be changing the California climate):
There is no need yet to put on a long face about the weather outlook. Let our interesting and industrious pessimists, who are again beginning to talk about the Japanese current, the rainless climates of Peru and Egypt, and other cognate subjects of a discouraging nature, hold their horses a little while yet.
Spirits were high again in November of that year, during what must have been an Indian summer. The Times needled their “eastern friends” and, shockingly, hoped for rain. November 14, 1900:
The weather that we have been experiencing in Los Angeles during the past ten days is altogether phenomenal. Of course, when our eastern friends who are visiting us for the first time are told this they express incredulity, and remark that they have heard that sort of thing before, but it is a fact, all the same... We ought, however, to have a good old-fashioned downpour or several of them between now and the end of the century, or we shall really have to begin to give some weight to the arguments of those who claim that the seasons in Southern California are undergoing a change .
On November 22, The Times got what it asked for:
The big rain for which everybody in Southern California has been asking for three years, has come.... Before the bills for the ravages of the flood in Southern California are all paid, they may foot up more than a million dollars; but that is a small item in comparison with the worth to the country of the blessed rain.
In the new century, with the city’s profile still tiny but starting to rise, The Times made a bid to attract world leaders, on June 14, 1905:
It appears that some objection has arisen to holding the conference of the peace plenipotentiaries in Washington, owing to the extreme heat.... The place to hold this meeting is Los Angeles.... It is the one spot on earth that is absolutely without objectionable features, climatic or otherwise. The plenipotentiaries can remain here a whole year through and never need fires to warm them nor fans to cool them.... They shall be fed on the lot of the land “the best the market affords,” and be supplied with bathing suits, pajamas, white duck uniforms, Panama hats, tan shoes and striped stockings.
The following year, The Times offered a parable for newcomers to the city. February 13, 1906:
There are today in Southern California a great many thousand people who have never passed through a California winter before. To them at least a brief treatise on the subject of the weather may not come amiss. There is a story told of a tourist passing through Pasadena, who asked a man he encountered on the street what he thought of the weather. He replied, “I don’t know;” and the tourist then asked: “Are you a stranger here, too?” Then the reply came: “No, I have been here too long to know anything about the weather.”
But despite The Times’ best efforts, the message about California’s fine weather hadn’t reached everyone, it seems. The editorial board complained on May 3, 1907:
There is scarcely one in a hundred of [visitors] that has not the conviction that summer in Los Angeles is about as torrid as in Senegal.... Even our own Californians, from the central and the northern parts of the State, who visit us occasionally, find no greater surprise than in our cool, overcast mornings, our middays scarcely ever excessively hot, and the bracing ocean breeze that comes in almost invariably in the afternoon....”
And, on January 24, 1908, during another rash of winter weather in winter, The Times wrote, in overwrought words we hope weren’t completely serious:
Los Angeles has a bone to pick with the weather forecaster. His timidity has cast a damper on the city. Yesterday, as possibly most people noticed, it rained. Did we have any warning? Were we given notice so that we might take our “brolleys” out of “hock” and examine our rubbers for holes? Not a warning.... And so our faith in another of this world’s mighty prophets has been shattered and we are left to mourn another idol broken. Our tears mingle with the clouds which have dissolved in rain.... [W]e willingly give hints on how every man can be his own weather prophet.In the first place kindly gaze at the moon when she is young and innocent and new, and see if lovely Luna is reclining on her back. If she is, beware, she is going to cry. But should she be standing up so that your powder horn will not hang on the tip of her cream-colored shoe, rejoice, for the month will be like unto the golden-globed city of Redlands dry.... And don’t forget to watch the hogs and the chickens. These suppliers of ham and eggs respectively are sure guides.
Fortunately, it was beautiful again by Aug. 2, 1908. (Anyone see a pattern?) The Times offered a way to enjoy the weather, which isn’t available to Angelenos anymore:
It is the heated term in this great America of ours. Torrid temperatures began in Chicago, New York, and other eastern cities as early as June. To almost the last day of July hot weather here was counted by just two days, and while the mercury was high, 90 degrees, the humidity was low, about 20 degrees.... We are all more or less spoiled by the luxury of our climate.... The Huntington and Sherman-Clark electric lines, covering the valley like a gridiron, carry passengers to any one of a dozen beaches in from half an hour to an hour for 25 to 50 cents.
Unsurprisingly, the next summer was fine too, and the Times had the story. On August 31, 1909, The Times mingles old-fashioned bigotry and strange science with its weather report:
If any one is disposed to make an outcry about the only really hot weather of summer, take him aside and advise him to “keep cool.” Really we ought to rejoice.... It is better than cold cream and enamel for my lady’s complexion. It will bleach her out so that her cheeks will look like peaches and cream, the peaches unpeeled and glorious in their blushes.... Go to the nearest Chinese laundry and see wise John in his two white garments doing the “washee” as careless about the heat as you please.... If we eat here as we did in the cold lands where we were born, and do not exercise, the equable weather fails to open the pores of the skin, and the other organs are overtaxed..... Any wise and conscientious physician will confirm all this....”
On November 17, 1909, The Times talks back to thankless tourists:
The unthinking tourist, in his inability to grasp the significance of facts, often sneers at California as a place whose only asset is climate. We, unreflecting, sometimes try to reply by showing that we have this, that and the other as the basis of our prosperity in addition to the climate...how much richer the country would be if all over it the Octobers were like this last one of the South and the West.
The following year, on October 30, 1910, thanks to a good lemon crop, The Times extended its weather love to the Inland Empire:
We generally associate the use of lemons with warm weather of the kind which Los Angeles is now rejoicing in...along with the news from Washington that killing frosts have struck the East...comes the information from New York that a carload of California lemons has sold at what is believed to be the highest price for this fruit on record. The favored section from which these high-priced lemons came is, of course, within a short journey of Los Angeles. To be exact, it is Corona, a charming part of Riverside county, where many an easterner now knows the pleasure of wintering amid the green of the citrus groves, within sight of snow but beyond any unpleasant influence from it.
Five years later, on May 29, 1915, The Times links weather with Californian temperament:
Only a land where the sun shines for over 300 days in the year could produce the bright warm brand of optimism so distinctive of life in California. Some have come to the Land of Sunshine suffering...but as Dr. Marvin says, weather alters people.
By August 19, 1916, The Times seems broader in reach, forgetting about East Coast tourists and instead mocking the Prussians:
Provincial authorities in Prussia have just received notification that summer time is to be permanently established as occurring between April 1 and September 30. California climate by governmental edict! Another example of Prussian efficiency.
On June 3, 1919, The Times forgets easterners and Prussians and focuses on the fifth column:
Recently a few once-respected native sons exhibited criminal tendencies of a startling character. They were heard to openly berate the May-time weather we were having!.... [W]e insist that any native son who spoke with deprecation and contumeliousness of our May-time weather should be boiled in oil as a traitor to the State.Everybody else knows that it was the finest May ever enjoyed by a civilized people in the memory of man.
But by next summer, on August 6, 1920, The Times forgot all about traitors in its mist and focused on the girls, the clams, and the drunks:
Although the days, the months and the seasons in this Southland are apt to be as like as the peas in a pod, hardly a year passes that does not shatter some of the weather records that have made California a land of pure delight and swelled the bosoms of the grand army of native sons....But we are breaking records [with this] stretch of feverish days and torrid nights . It has been a godsend to the poor working girls.... They have been able to venture into Broadway at mid-day without the saving protection of their furs. They have been in bare skin but not in seal, mole or mink. It is a florid and fervent summer indeed when a lovely woman can dispense with her furs and still feel dressed up.... The clams in the bed of the Los Angeles River complain bitterly of the dust in their throats and many of them are dying of prickly heat. It is so dry in Venice that the passing of a bootlegger is sometimes mistaken for a temblor. Not an iceberg has been sighted from Catalina in a dog’s age and there is hardly a vase of cold feet left in the town.... When you tell the profiteer to go to Hades he only grins and says: “What’s the use?”
And on Aug. 1, 1921, The Times manages a lawyer joke (we think it’s a joke):
In hot weather man refuses to think of any serious purpose.... That is the reason the courts take such long summer vacations.... Witnesses who are perfectly reliable in the winter are very likely to be untruthful in the summer. Attorneys are irritable and querulous, and in excessively high temperatures even become obstructive tendencies they never show at other times.
And in a middle of spring on May 4, 1922, The Times’ prose was more purple than the mountains:
....that little extra modicum of rain has made of our hills and valleys veritable fairylands of wild flowers, of rich succulent grass or joyous shrubs, luscious ferns and roses, roses everywhere that man has the gumption to plant them. Even where the little homes are crowded and weather-worn, huddled in among business premises, valiant trees of peach and apricot, of golden broom, of oranges and lemons are in radiant flower.... The brown soil is heaving with life, bristling with the joie de vivre.... No one can go out and commune with nature in this lovely wakening springtime without feeling nearer to his God, nearer to his own soul. And that is ecstasy.
Exactly one week later, the board returned to defiant tones to address weather naysayers, ending with one its more amusing analogies:
More critics of our matchless climate. Well, let them come. Let them come singly or let them come collectively. We care not. We defy them all. We not only defy, but we absorb and assimilate them.... They will talk about the weather and their neighbors when they are dumb before the beauty of holiness. They will make remarks about the sunlight and the moonshine when they are silent to the enlarging impulses of humanity. It is something to have a climate that is really worth talking about.... Maybe we do have a tang of February and a taste of March. Why not? It wouldn’t do to be all warmth and sunshine.... The faithful and virtuous wife is all very well, but she isn’t always interesting. At least she isn’t talked about. She isn’t even paraded.
Later decades had fewer weather editorials; most were related to more serious subjects like weather conditions for troops during World War II and for passenger planes, or dangerous extreme weather, or crop conditions. But on Feb. 25, 1981, The Times returned briefly to form:
A friend of ours, a transplant from the East, has lost all patience with the benign weather that brought him to California...but he should not lose hope. Our seasons are nothing if they are not unpredictable. We could have a freeze next winter that would play havoc with the now-flourishing citrus and avocados, while he harvests a bumper crop of his seaside apples, pears, cherries, peaches, apricots and walnuts.But he shouldn’t count on it.