by Stefan Stanford, All News Pipeline:
“I go with the word ‘serious.’ A serious budget problem. I would stop short of calling it a crisis.” – Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek, on California’s $68 billion deficit
What Was It Like?
California, without question, is a great state to be from. We lived there for nearly 45 years. We made our California exodus in July 2022. No regrets.
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In fact, not living in California becomes a greater blessing with each passing day. Moreover, depending on the time lived there, and the decades encompassed, plenty of insight can be found in the answers to three simple questions.
What was it like? What happened? What is it like now?
The answer to the first question comes with warm reminiscence. A fond nostalgia for a California that long ago faded from existence.
In the early 20th century, before the mania to splatter every square foot of the LA Basin’s surface with concrete took hold of the local spirits, the place was a magnet for eccentrics and madmen. On any average day, Howard Hughes, a total lunatic, would crash test his latest flying machine into Beverly Hills.
Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, however, was the real archetypical California oddball. For reasons unknown, and between swigs of malt liquor, he worked nearly every day from 1921 to 1955 chicken wiring steel pipes and rods together, erecting numerous towering eyesores in his backyard in the Watts district of Los Angeles.
Then, after 34 years of this madness, Rodia, on a whim, deeded the property to his neighbor and hopped a bus to the East Bay. No one in Watts ever heard from him again. But his monstrosities, known as the Watts Towers, are now a National Historic Landmark. Go figure?
There was also Griffith J. Griffith, who amassed a fortune in the mining industry. That was before he shot his wife in the eye while staying in the presidential suite of Santa Monica’s Arcadia Hotel.
To make good for his transgressions – and to commute his time in San Quentin to just two years – Griffith donated the land for Griffith Park to Los Angeles and funded the City’s observatory. Without Griffith’s private act of preservation, the city wouldn’t have any remaining land that’s not covered with concrete.
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