Blue Sky Dream (8 page)

Next arrived a dump truck full of redwood chips, backing through the same downed section of fence and stopping at the far end of the yard where a knot of us kids stared up in wonder. “Close your eyes!” shouted my father, laughing as the truck bed rose and a sudden wave of sawdust broke over us, leaving us to rub our eyes as we stumbled out of the pile, all of us now laughing, too. The sawdust was mulch to be blended, according to plan, with the now clumped clay. And so my father next spent several hot afternoons hauling wheelbarrow loads of chips about the yard. The next week he showed up with a new machine that
churned the ground with lots of blades, its roar drawing people young and old to watch my father, his face fierce, his T-shirt soaked with sweat, tame the rototiller. After the rototilling was done, my father slipped over his shoulders a harness of rope and began dragging, back and forth over every inch of ground, a heavy, nailed together collection of boards, a tool, he explained, to level the land. When that was finished, on the next weekend, my father invited all the spectating children to rejoin his rite of spring; we were given a nickel for every coffee can full of stones we collected, my father inspecting the haul can by can before dumping each one out in a plastic trash barrel.

Now it was time for my father to draw elaborate diagrams on engineer’s graph paper, arcs and intersecting lines, the design of a sprinkler system for our lawn-to-be. When he had calculated the optimum configuration, the one requiring the least amount of pipe and providing the most efficient water coverage, he drove to the supply house that had been established by the old families, the store called Orchard Supply, which now boasted an always crowded do-it-yourself lawn department. The next few weekends of spring were taken up with digging trenches and mastering the art of making joints with PVC pipe. On the evening when he got everything to work, there was a short celebration by the family, all of us watching as my father turned knobs and made water spout from the dusty, flayed ground. In days following, now and then, neighbors would drop by to see the performance repeated.

Finally, my father decided, the time had come to open the plastic sacks that had been sitting since the beginning of spring in a dark corner of the garage. He spread, with a machine for spreading, the grass seed and granular fertilizer. He spread on top of that a half-inch more sawdust, as his studying up in
Sunset Magazine
had told him to do. He rolled, with a machine made for rolling, the entire surface of the planted lawn until our backyard looked as flat and uniform as a paved landing strip. He turned on the sprinklers, and we waited for the grass to come up.

Aspects of the plan, as it turned out, had been slightly off. All that sawdust was not what a lawn in clay wanted, apparently.
My father’s sprinkler system was too stingy in its water distribution. And bad grasses called “crab” and “Bermuda” were more interested in living in our backyard than was the Kentucky Blue my father had planted. The lawn did not grow in as smoothly and homogeneously green as my father had expected, but the goal was nevertheless well enough in sight to be pursued. The rite my father initiated that year was therefore to be conducted on a smaller scale every spring to follow for many years to come. There would be new fertilizers and better mulches, new diagrams of ever more optimal sprinkler system configurations. My father would be seen fierce and sweating behind some machine made to punish nature into submission; if not tractor or rototiller, a high horsepowered lawn mower with a fearsome blade. Every spring we children were welcome to gather and watch the original struggle re-enacted until we became old enough to take it up ourselves.

T
he manner in which we went about conquering the Valley of Heart’s Delight—my tribe’s methods of infiltration and patterns of occupation—provides a picture of how it often went in many other places.

In the years just after World War II, there was in the Valley, amidst all the green and blossoms, a rich, private university that called itself “The Farm.” The Farm wanted for itself a big piece of the command economy, wanted to be a center for federally sponsored science and technology work. And so, in 1951, The Farm created within its borders the Stanford Industrial Park, an enterprise that became a model for fifty similar university-affiliated research parks built across America during the next two decades. Stanford Industrial Park was altogether unthreatening to behold, a campus of Purist boxes nestled amidst lawn and nature, a new form for the technological plant, the “ultimate,” as one awed reporter saw it, “in landscaping of an industrial area.” Lovely Stanford Industrial Park became a magnet for scholars
with something to offer the Cold War project, cutting edge work in the fields of electronics, aerospace, computers. The Pentagon and NASA contractors came with them, some, like Lockheed, locating directly within the Park, others—including IBM, Philco-Ford, Sylvania, and, again, Lockheed—establishing major plants nearby in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Indigenous contractors like Hewlett-Packard and the radar maker Varian Associates boomed with the newcomers, prospering from the high technology synergy (rather than any real competition) created by federal spending in the region. When, in 1955, William Shockley’s team came West to be near the Park and to refine his transistor, the Pentagon poured all the more money into the region, snapping up the miniaturized electronics for its missiles, planes, and computers. When other brilliant minds at the Park replaced the transistor with the even lighter and tinier integrated circuit, the Pentagon redoubled its largesse. In 1967, for example, the military bought seven out of every ten such circuits made, microchips that happened to go into the beautiful missiles and satellites of Lockheed, which happened to be the largest single employer in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. By 1967, in other words, the Valley of Heart’s Delight had become a company town, and the company, in the final analysis, was the U.S. Department of Defense.

We, the hundreds of thousands of blue sky tribe members who came to do the work, wanted our freshly made emptinesses and our brand-new subdivisions, and so the orchards would have to be bulldozed, a fact we disguised by laying our groundwork quietly and ingeniously. As early as 1956 in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, we had cast the die. In that year, throughout all the Valley’s two hundred-square-mile area, green and blossomy to the casual eye, a scant twenty-six square miles was in “urban use”—yet nowhere in the Valley was there a single square mile without some little subdivision, some small outpost of ours awaiting the full invasion.

“The result was that all 200 square miles were in effect held hostage for eventual development.” That is what a pair of our enemies, Samuel E. Wood and Alfred Heller saw all too clearly.
They sounded this and many other passionate, impeccably documented alarms for a group called California Tomorrow, as formidable a voice against us as existed at the time. “Slurb” was the mocking term coined by California Tomorrow to describe what my people tended to create in place of orchards. Slurbs, warned Wood and Heller, were the “sloppy, sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities” where nine out of ten Californians would soon be living if my people could not be contained, if precious farmlands weren’t zoned safe from us, if planning for the good of all could not replace greed at the local level. All this our enemies saw in 1961, their prophecies bound into impressive white papers that went to politicians and newspeople all over the state. All this they saw too late, for by 1961 my tribe had on our side collaborators too powerful and quislings too willing.

We had the mighty backing, for example, of the Federal Housing Administration in distant Washington, D.C., an institution created by Franklin Roosevelt in a spirit worthy of Corbusier. The FHA, like my tribe, was not much interested in a used house, particularly one in any inner city. The FHA, as documented by Kenneth T. Jackson in his noted history of suburbanization,
Crabgrass Frontier
, was most interested in seeing fresh emptinesses filled up with brand-new tract homes. The FHA encouraged this by dangling an enormous carrot before the noses of the nation’s private lenders and builders. The business of the FHA was the insuring, with U.S. Treasury funds, of bank loans for housing. But if you were someone who refurbished row houses in urban cores, you could expect a frown at the bank, because the FHA was not willing to insure such mortgages. As Jackson showed, the FHA reserved its sweetest carrot, its highest levels of insurance, for the construction of detached single-family residences for entire neighborhoods of white, middle-income people of non-Jewish descent. For those so favored, FHA insurance trimmed interest rates and drastically reduced down payments, making a blue sky home a near risk-free investment for owner and builder alike.

My tribe found a similar collaborator in the Veterans Administration,
the crafter of the GI Bill for the sixteen million veterans of World War II and millions more after them. What a VA-insured loan meant to my father was a mortgage even cheaper than the FHA could make it, a deal two points below the bank’s rate, and, instead of ten percent down, not a penny. Without that loan, my father remembers, he who was “cash poor” and who made a mere $143 per week would have been able to afford nothing in Clarendon Manor, nothing around Lockheed but “some cracker box.”

My tribe enjoyed the favors of Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Government National Mortgage Association). Thanks to the two Maes, any bank could ignore less lucrative local needs and invest in mortgages wherever in America tract homes happened to be sprouting. Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, writes Jackson, “made possible the easy transfer of savings funds out of the cities of the Northeast and Middle West and toward the new developments of the South and West.”

My tribe found our collaborators in government bureaucracies wherever we needed them. We found one, for example, in A. P. Hamann, city manager of San Jose, the largest town in the Valley. He proudly declared, “They say San Jose is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I’m going to do everything in my power to make that come true.” We found one in California’s Democratic Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who ordered a flag-waving, statewide celebration on the day, not long after my family arrived, that California’s population eclipsed New York’s to become the largest of all the states. When we saw those flags, my people knew they waved in thanks for our coming.

We found the quislings we needed wherever there were orchard people and farmers who might have blocked our plans. We found them because enough money can make a quisling of anyone. Within a decade after the coming of aerospace to the Valley of Heart’s Delight, our developers were shelling out nearly
$100,000 per acre for any land left that might still be covered with blossoms. The math is simple enough. One of those acres might have yielded $450 worth of cherries or apricots or plums per year at the time, which meant the acre would have had to blossom year after year for two centuries in order to
begin
to match the amount our developer was offering for it immediately. This should give an idea of the quiet force my people exerted whenever we entered a place, power enough to undo a century-old economy and strip the blossoms from a valley once and for all.

M
y people did sigh at the extinction of those blossoms. We missed them the way you miss any pretty decoration taken down for good. But honestly, we did not mourn their disappearance in any deeply felt way. Certainly we did not feel guilt. The reason we did not is that those blossoms never spoke to us as they did to the orchard families. We had not, after all, come to the Valley of Heart’s Delight to join the circular rhythm of nature. The rhythm we sought to join, the rhythm of Corbusier and Eichler and Stanford Industrial Park and Lockheed, was nothing circular as we understood it. Our imagination was linear, proceeding forward and upward, and our lines did not curve back on themselves as did the seasons. We saw promise in the clean possibilities that arose once every blossom had been erased, never to return.

Those orchard people who held their ground longest, either on principle or for a better price, were phantoms to families like mine. Sometimes from the rear window of the family station wagon, as the pink and white forests whizzed by, I’d catch a glimpse, back in the shadows, of weathered wood buildings, the drooping shape of a barn next to the faded bric-a-brac of some old Victorian. These were the hunkered-in homesteads of the people who used to have the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Here and there, too, were stretches of old cannery buildings where fruit
was packed by other people we never saw. The city’s downtown was a zone of musty hotels and dirty-windowed shops, which is why we rarely went there. The restaurants where the old families ate were shy little turn-ins with something sighingly nostalgic out front like a wagon wheel. It’s hard to conjure the images now because at the time none of these places showed much interest in attracting the attention of us newcomers.

Instead, the new roadside buildings on the edges of the Valley of Heart’s Delight, our edges, were those clearly eager to please my tribe. So eager, in fact, as to be obsequious. Planets twirled above gas stations, rows of sky-aimed girders turned car washes into rocket gantries, the Futurama bowling alley near Clarendon Manor covered its huge sign with neon stars and amoeba letters. We visited the new eateries and were charmed by the orange vinyl booths and crazily slanted glass walls and stamped-steel boomerangs supporting zigzag roofs. We were charmed enough to invite the shapes to come in off the roadside and into our homes; an example was the clock that seemed to hang over everyone’s fireplace, the one with the face surrounded by a sunburst of thin rods with balls on the end. Inspired by
Popular Science
drawings of the atom, the motif came to be known as the “atomic swizzle stick.”

Modernist minimalists, the most rigid adherents to Corbusier’s vision, scoffingly called such forms “Googie” architecture after the garish chain of Googie’s restaurants that began to appear in Southern California in the 1950s. They saw in all the color and flash an affront to their Purism. But the point of Googie, invented by advertising, was to catch the eye from a fast moving car. Googie did so with space age iconography, and so like garlands thrown before invaders, Googie made us feel welcome in Cocoa Beach as well as in Long Beach, wherever in America we established our blue sky outposts. What we saw in a Googie was what we saw in an Eichler, a visual language that not only spoke to us, but
about
us.