The Natives are Restless

By Cynthia Hobart Lindsay

The native of southern California—whom the author calls a “Procal”—inhabits the area of Los Angeles and its environs. He came to California because he was tired of something—usually cold weather—and he has become the most hobby- and leisure-conscious citizen in the U.S., devoted as he is to his barbecue, his swimming pool, his beaches, his deserts and his television set. Cynthia Hobart Lindsay describes a long list of Procal habits and habitats: his outrageous driving—which seems to be the most marked manifestation of his “restlessness”; the Sunset Strip which is frequented by the closest thing to a southern California beatnik; Hollywood parties; the penchant for the occult; Forest Lawn Cemetery—which also serves the community as an artistic and cultural center; the out-of-bounds areas—notably Pasadena; and the most recent complexity—the Dodgers.

Presented with laughter, lifted eyebrows and affection, here is a wide-screen report on the Never-Never Land of Southern California, packed with bizarre but authentic historical, sociological and psychological facts and anecdotes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valmy Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789124828

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Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.

© Valmy Publishing 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS

BY

CYNTHIA HOBART LINDSAY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

1—Euphoria Unlimited 5

2—Movement Desire 10

3—Subdivide and Conquer 15

4—The climate of Lunacy 22

5—Water—Water 27

6—Gullible’s Travels 32

7—Every Little Movement Has a Message of Its Own 41

8—The Littlest Minority 47

9—Casbah Customs 52

10—But He Knows what He Likes 65

11—Natural and Unnatural Wonders 75

12—Hedonists’ Heaven 83

13—He’s a Builder-Upper, a Tearer-Downer 95

14—Deviling the Dodgers 100

15—The Future Lies All Over the place 107

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 112

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Due to the extraordinary speed with which everything in the Procal’s orbit changes, absolutely anything may no longer be true. At the time this was written, everything was absolutely true—really.

—C.L.

DEDICATION

For Tay and Alan who started the whole thing

Now here, you see, said the Queen to Alice, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!—Alice in Wonderland

1—Euphoria Unlimited

AT the height of the first Summit Conference, four members of the Russian Air Ministry arrived from Moscow at the International Airport in Los Angeles, California.

They were met by a space man from Disneyland.

The picture of the momentous occasion that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times showed the space man smiling happily under his space helmet, and the Russians looking bemused under their felt hats. If you find something odd in the occurrence, you are alone. No one, including the Russians, seemed to feel there was anything untoward in this form of official greeting. That is because the event occurred in Southern California. In Southern California no one is ever surprised.

Sorry—there is an exception: every winter the territory is inundated by torrential rains which sweep houses and mountains before them, and make rivers of the streets, and every winter everyone is surprised. It is considered to be unusual, an adjective applied to all forms of weather except bluebird. Along with lack of surprise, the Southern Californian, regardless of social, cultural, intellectual, or economic status, demonstrates another dominant trait: he is Satisfied. As far as he is concerned, there is no place in the world like Southern California. Nowhere. Not any place. It is the end. It is the most. Even if he used to live in Texas.

In attempting to understand the native of the southern portion of the state of California, it will be necessary to observe briefly his geographical, ethnological, and historical background. Having observed and absorbed this background, you will find him to be incomprehensible. Actually, it will be easier if you don’t try to understand—just accept. All I can do is tell you how it is. You figure out why. I’m tired. I’ve been doing all the research.

I love you, California, you’re the greatest state of all—and I know when I die, I shall breathe my last sigh for sunny California. This semi-official state song is the anthem of both Californias—northern and southern. It is one of the few things the sections share, divided as they are by differences of opinion, background, and culture so acute that there have been numerous attempts to divide the state: seven, officially, between 1882 and 1909.

Natives of Los Angeles, in the south, refer to San Francisco, in the north, as Frisco. San Franciscans do not refer to Los Angeles at all.

The native whom we shall study is peculiar (very, in fact) to the southern part of the state. As a convenient way of placing him, it might be well to refer to him as the Procal—because he is so for California that rarely can he see past it. The Procal lives in the southern, or best, part of the greatest state of all. His state is all things to all men, and boasts the most of everything: Both the highest and the lowest points in the land, Mt. Whitney and Death Valley, only sixty miles apart. The greenest valleys, the most barren desert wastes; sloping foothills, giant mountains lavender in the sunset. Miles of golden orange groves. The tallest and almost the oldest trees in the world, the sequoias. The only trees of their kind in the world, the Monterey cypress. The deepest lake in the United States, Lake Tahoe. The greatest—the biggest—the most. But regardless of the scenic wonders of the northern part of the state, the Procal just can’t see it. He’s happy right where he is.

For many years after its discovery in 1542 by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator on exploration for the King of Spain, California was thought to be an island.

As far as the Procal is concerned, Southern California might as well be.

Technically, Southern California’s boundaries are the Mexican border at Tijuana below San Diego in the south, the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Tehachapi mountain range on the north, and the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains on the east.

Not so, however, for the Procal. He lives in the Los Angeles basin, surrounded by its suburbs and the beach, desert, and mountain areas a few miles away. (Everything is a few miles away; those working in the motion-picture industry live twenty minutes from the studio—it is always twenty minutes regardless of where they, or the studio, are.) He may go to Vegas. He seldom, or never, goes to Santa Barbara—unless, that is, he lives in Pasadena. Procals who live in Pasadena can think in terms of Santa Barbara. The average Los Angeles citizen thinks of Santa Barbara as inhabited by northerners and Pasadena as inhabited by little old ladies.

Ethnologically, there are so many contributing folk-ways in the background of the Southern California native that defining the most influential is difficult. As a matter of fact, it’s impossible. It is probably safe to say, however, that his important cultural heritages derive from Spain and Iowa.

Today, whether he is a native with the blood of the Dons flowing through his veins and a name he shares with a Los Angeles boulevard, or whether he is a misplaced Iowan, he is first and foremost a Procal. He stands firmly on his sandaled feet, his Hawaiian shirt blowing in the breeze, his streaming eyes looking proudly upward toward the flag with the California bear. But he can’t see it because the top of the flagpole is lost in the smog.

The Procal is crazy about his history, but doesn’t know much about it. Having done months of research, I know a great deal about his history but am not crazy about it. So we shall skim over its early phases and come at once to the portion with which we are concerned.

Historically, even the name of California has been a subject of conjecture for years. There are those who believe it derives from the Latin calida fornax, meaning hot oven, in reference to the hot dry climate of Baja California; those who hold to cala fornix, or vault, after an arch under a rock where Cortez landed; those who insist that the name comes from the passage in The Song of Roland where the Emperor Charlemagne laments his nephew Roland’s death: Dead is my nephew who conquered many lands! And now the Saxons will rebel against me, and the Hungarians, Bulgarians, and many others, the Romans, the Apulians, and those of Palermo, those of Africa, and those of Califerne.

But the consensus is that the name was derived from a lusty chivalric novel, Las Sergas de Esplandián, written in Madrid in 1510 by Ordoñez de Montalvo. The book was said by Cervantes to be a favorite of Don Quixote’s, whose enthusiasm was shared by many others, including a sailor serving under Cortez, who is credited with first applying the name to the Golden State. The novel’s descriptive passages tantalized the Spanish explorers, who were looking for a passage to the Spice Islands and found California by mistake. Señor Ordoñez may have been a forerunner of the Procal of today, as witness his description of the island:

Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island named California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise which was inhabited by black women, without a single man among them, and they lived in the manner of Amazons....The island everywhere abounds with gold and precious stones....In this island, named California, there are many griffins. In no other part of the world can they be found. And there ruled over that island a queen of majestic proportions, more beautiful than all others.

Señor Ordoñez displayed enormous foresight; today, the Procal crowns the queen, not only of California, but of the Universe, in the annual Long Beach Miss Universe contest. Gold and stones—semi-, if not precious—abound; the female population, if not black, is certainly tan; and the griffin is the only creature unrepresented at Disneyland, an oversight which doubtless will be rectified.

If you find yourself in any way confused by California’s name, try a little early history: it won’t be easy. It seems it was this way. Sir Francis Drake arrived in San Francisco in 1579. He was a Protestant. The Spanish already in California were not Protestant; they were Catholic. So, alarmed at the encroaching English, as well as the Russians, they built a chain of missions. But they weren’t missions, they were forts, and the Spanish didn’t build them, the Indians did. The Indians—who were neither Catholic nor Protestant—didn’t want to build them. But they were forced to. Then the Mexican government—neither Spanish nor English—freed the formerly enslaved Indians, by the reform decrees of 1833. The Indians—by this time Catholic, tribeless, and homeless—went to work on the vast ranchos formed out of Spanish land grants. In this romantic period, television research material piled up and, to the strumming of guitars, the Indian population dropped from 133,000 to 50,000, from the effects of the raw brandy which was the pay for their labor on the ranchos.

Today the remaining California Indians are given every advantage, including cement tepees on their reservations, by the descendants of their conquerors. Now, in order to get on to the more recent society with which we are concerned, we shall whisk through some dates: In 1810, Mexico declared herself free from Spain, and California was formally declared a province of the empire of Mexico. In 1822, California declared herself free from Spain and Mexico. In 1824, the Mexican emperor abdicated and Mexico was declared a republic. In 1825, California became a territory of the Mexican republic. In 1835, the United States government offered to buy California. In 1836, California declared herself independent of everybody again, and remained a free state for eight months. Then the republic of Mexico made concessions bringing California back into the union, and until 1846 the "californios" fought a series of abortive battles among themselves as well as against the Mexicans.

In 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico. In 1846 also, the American flag was raised at Monterey, and California was declared a possession of the United States. In 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s mill, and started the Gold Rush. In 1848 the war with Mexico ended and the United States acquired California as well as New Mexico, Nevada, most of Arizona, and part of Colorado. In 1851, California was admitted as a state in the Union.

So much for basic history. I said it wouldn’t be easy.

The pull of California, the land of perpetual spring, drew thousands of pioneers of all races, religions, and intents—adventurers and ministers, pirates and school-teachers—and they sent out word of the wonders of the land, and thousands more came. Gold bonanzas flared and fizzled, oil booms blew up and sometimes out, real-estate sales soared and sank, and soared again. But one feature remained constant: the people’s adoration for California. They boasted about it, they raved about it, they told everybody to come to it, and when everybody did, they wished they hadn’t. Using up all our sunshine, grumbled a native. He had been a native of Iowa a year before, but anyone is a native of California after a year, and any native is a Procal: it follows as the night the day.

The Procal may live in any number of places in any number of ways. He may be an oil riveter, television producer, hairdresser. He may be rich, poor, intelligent or ignorant, radical or reactionary, but he and his homeland are interesting to observe because they are both undergoing changes so vast so rapidly that they cannot adjust even to each other. Let us approach him, though he may be hard to catch, because he is constantly on the move. The face of his homeland, the Sunshine Empire, recognizable yesterday, is not so today; and today’s face will not be recognizable tomorrow because her sons are raking it with bulldozers, changing its contours with earth fill, and hacking its character lines of mountains into a series of flats like paddy fields. The mountains’ silent magnitude is scarred by unhealed surgery and covered by hundreds of little housing tracts plastered like ineffectual Band-aids over their wounds.

The Procal didn’t mean to do it. He just told everyone for so long there was no place like Southern California that now he is right; not even Southern California.

His climate, touted the world over, has vanished under a blanket of suffocating smog through which he is, as yet, unable to cut his way. His famous sun burns red through the gloom, and he coughs, cries, and curses through his days. Then, suddenly, a high wind breaks into the Los Angeles basin, and the clear brilliant California sky is swept clean. People run out of their houses, sniff, and cry, Isn’t it wonderful? to each other. There is an electric quality in the air, a speeding of pace, and the Procals run wildly about snorting and stomping like a herd of overgrained horses, drinking in the wind. The sheer ecstasy of breathing overcomes them, and California has established a new kind of unusual weather.

The smog is an influence in the Procal’s life, and a main contributing feature to the smog, the freeway, is another. In a general study of the area and inhabitants let us discuss some of the influences and the reactions of individual Procals to them. For instance, as we are going to take up freeways per se in the next chapter, we might take up an individual reaction to them here.

Like time and tide, death and taxes, freeways are invincible and inevitable. They have to go through, and they have to go through anything standing in their way. So far, only churches and golf clubs have successfully stood up against them—until last year, that is. Then, a late-middle-aged lady, whose house stood in the way of a new freeway, was offered a sum for its sale by the state of California. She flatly refused, didn’t give a hang about progress, liked her home, and was going to stay there. After weeks of legal entanglement and process-serving, she was threatened with eviction. For more weeks she held off the law at the point of a shotgun, standing on her front porch drawing a bead on law enforcers while smiling for the benefit of photographers.

Regretfully, the authorities finally gave up courteous persuasion, and mentioned tear gas. She remained adamant, but happily they were relieved