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Patt Morrison: Where have all the orange groves gone?

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Detroit has cars. Chicago has slaughterhouses. New Orleans has jazz. We have orange groves.

Had.

For a hundred years, the Bothwell family’s orange grove in Tarzana stood at about a hundred acres. Now only 14 acres remain, the last surviving commercial citrus grove in the San Fernando Valley, and two-thirds of those — let’s call it 10 acres — could soon be plowed under to build 21 high-end houses. They plan to call it “Oakdale Estates.” Not even “Orange Grove Estates” as a memento mori.

By the early 1970s, only 350 acres of commercial orange groves remained in the Valley. Thirty years ago, it had dwindled to about 40 acres. And now 14. My colleague Julia Wick once did the arithmetic and calculated that these 14 acres represent less than one-thousandth of what the Valley possessed at its peak.

Here’s the thing with California’s oranges: The California gold rush, smack in the middle of the 19th century, was an enormous splash in the placer pan. Hundreds of thousands of men inundated the state, and within a fistful of years, they had changed everything — the landscape, the economy, the politics, the fate of Native Americans and of Californios, and of the United States itself. Few of them got rich, but almost nothing thereafter dimmed that lustrous light coming from the Pacific coast.

Then there came the other gold rush — slower, more modest, but with a steady yield that literally could be plucked from trees: the California orange.

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The gold in the ground was already beginning to peter out when the orange fruit rose on the Pacific horizon — a gleaming, glowing citrus sun, a stand-in for the sun itself on fruit crate labels, tourist guides, postcards. It was more than food — it was the symbol of the California lush life, a divine talisman of an otherworldly place. And in this oversold earthly Eden, the fruit of pleasure and delight was the orange, not the humdrum apple.

Even into the 1950s, kids living in snowbound American climes might find an orange — one solitary, precious orange — sagging in the toe of their Christmas stocking.

The Southern California writer Carey McWilliams declared, rightly so, that the orange was the true California treasure, “the gold nugget of Southern California.”

The citrus tree and its fruit had become “the living symbol of richness, luxury and elegance … the aristocrat of the orchards.” And a citrus grower was no Midwestern sun-to-sun laboring farmer, but a member of “a unique type of rural-urban aristocracy.”

On a few backyard trees, and in scores of acres of groves, the orange filled the vast valleys of Southern California across a citrus belt that ran for miles. People often quote the acidulous writer H.L. Mencken, who was a dab hand at writing with great verve about how much he hated just about everything.

He visited Los Angeles in 1926 and declared that “the whole place stank of orange blossoms.” But he was being metaphorical, commenting on the swoony gossip of Hollywood stars’ supposed romances: “I heard more sweet love stories in three weeks than I had in New York in thirty years … the whole place stank of orange blossoms.”

Back then, orange blossoms were the de rigueur flower of wedding bouquets.

But Mencken was also literally right. This whole place was as fragrant as a million nuptials. Coming over the Cajon Pass in the right season — and maybe even over the Tejon Pass too — the scent rose up and enveloped you; far into the 20th century, locals and visitors still spoke wistfully of it.

The Valencia orange

And here’s the thing.

Like many of the rest of us, the orange is not a California native.

There are two types of California oranges, and each has its own story.

The Valencia orange came here with the Spanish padres, the seeds planted in the San Gabriel mission garden around 1804. But these transplants were not always the sweet oranges we know, and sometimes their taste had a tinge of the bitter to them, and their rinds could be as tough as the leather vests on the conquering Spanish soldiers, the soldados de cuera.

It was a Yankee fur trader who crossed 3,000 miles of continent to settle here who perfected those mission oranges and made them make money. William Wolfskill was Kentucky-born, and as the snowballing of history and legend goes, he trekked with Daniel Boone, scouted the frontier with the brothers of Kit Carson, and certainly led pack trains on the Santa Fe Trail.

He was a Catholic and became at some point a Mexican citizen, which stood him in good stead, for in California, he was allowed to hunt furs, to hold land, and in time married a daughter of the illustrious Lugo family of Santa Barbara. As “Don Guillermo,” he presided over his properties from the Old Adobe, his homestead near the river.

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1. An advertisement on a vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection. 2. What a steal! A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection depicts a typical scene, apparently, in the “Orange Belt” of Southern California. 3. Orange groves used to dominate thousands of acres of land in Southern California.

But back in 1831, he found himself rather hard up in L.A., and took work as a shipbuilder and trapper. Ten years later he was a man of property.

Like his neighbor, the French winemaker Jean-Louis Vignes, Wolfskill planted vineyards along the Los Angeles River. He also grew pears, figs, quinces, lemons and apples — and oranges. His groves lay from Alameda Street to the river, more or less between 4th and 7th streets, near the present-day Arts District.

Wolfskill’s Valencia orange was coaxed into sweeter, sturdier qualities, and he and his son were soon shipping it eastward, and pdq, Americans cultivated a costly taste for the exotic harvests of faraway California.

But still — it had those annoying seeds.

And soon, it had competition.

The navel orange

Eliza Lovell Tibbets was a woman out of her time. She was a few years younger than Queen Victoria, and looked rather like her, in dress and bearing, and took to accentuating the resemblance.

But in virtually everything else, she was ferociously opposite — unorthodox, even radical. She was a revolutionary in a bombazine dress, a committed abolitionist, a social utopian and tireless suffragist who was divorced not once but twice, at a time when a divorced woman was kept as far from proper society as Pluto is from Earth. In a word, Queen Vick would not have received her.

She was also a spiritualist, like many in her circle, and conducted séances. This she did share with Queen Victoria, who held séances, yearning for a little chat with her beloved ectoplasmic late husband, the sainted Prince Albert.

Not long after the Civil War, Eliza and her third husband, Luther Tibbets, moved to a conquered city in Virginia. Luther too was an energetic abolitionist. By one account, he was run out of Tennessee for trying to stop the lynching of a Black man. As far as some Virginians were concerned, he was also an integrationist carpetbagger. The threatening letters he said he got from the KKK, referring to “shed blood” and “assassination,” he handed over to the American military peacekeepers.

It wouldn’t take much for people like the Tibbetses to decide “the hell with that,” and around 1870, they joined like-minded families and came west, to the place we know as Riverside, founded by the abolitionist John Wesley North.

From here on, the origin mythology of the astounding new orange is as serendipitous and chancy as the odds of human evolution happening again.

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1. Men on tall ladders pick oranges on this vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection. 2. A 1924-postmarked postcard exaggerates the size, but not the importance, of California citrus. 3. A vintage postcard, bearing a 1920s postmark, shows a “modern orange-packing house.” 4. Men pack oranges into crates, depicted on a vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection.

Far off, in the Brazilian Amazon, there grew a seedless orange of fabled sweetness. Travelers marveled at it, and word of it reached the desk of William Saunders, an acquaintance of the Tibbetses and the man in charge of horticultural experiments at the gardens of the newly created U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Saunders had, at President Lincoln’s request, designed the striking layout of Gettysburg national cemetery. Now, in his new post, he thought this orange “might be of value in this country,” he recalled, and wrote back to the correspondent in Brazil (supposedly a “lady missionary,” or perhaps a woman visiting her brother’s rubber plantation), asking for some plants.

A dozen or so arrived at Saunders’ office — at a propitious time, for Luther Tibbets had just written, asking for suggestions for a crop that would grow in Riverside’s climate.

Saunders had ordered the new arrivals grafted onto some trees in the government’s greenhouses, and now he packed off three of the new trees — or was it five, as some accounts say? — to Riverside. Bahia navels, he called them (for the little protrusion at the bottom, which suggests that the orange had an “outie,” not an “innie.”)

And here’s where the legend gets, yes, juicy.

The Tibbetses planted the little trees out in the front of the house — no, others say, it was the backyard. Eliza Tibbets tended them with care, or no, she just nonchalantly watered them with whatever was left sloshing around in her dishpan.

Let’s say there were three trees. One up and died. Another was chewed up, or trampled, or both, by a cow. But whatever Eliza’s husbandry, and however many trees survived, they took several years to bear fruit, and the first crop might have amounted to a massive 16 oranges.

But that was enough.

There’s a navel joke in there somewhere on this 1907-postmarked postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection.

People went crazy for these oranges. Because they’re seedless, you need buds to grow new trees, and soon so many people were trying to steal “just one” from the Tibbetses’ trees that they had to fence off their yard.

The miraculous orange was renamed the Washington navel orange. This was around the time of the nation’s centennial, and the vogue was for everything Washington, though it does sound a little disrespectful to put the godlike name of ”Washington” and a synonym for “belly-button” in the same phrase.

Eliza Tibbets ran a mail-order business for her buds — five cents each. In time they would go for $5 or $10 apiece. (Three of the Tibbetses’ neighbors happened to be horticulturists. They helped to coax the fledgling trees along and took buds themselves, and soon started up prosperous commercial navel orange groves of their own.)

Thus was the massive Southern California industry born. In time, no American breakfast was breakfast without a glass of orange juice. Riverside got rich. Navel orange groves spread for miles. They ornamented their present and gave a glimpse of a grimier future; the smoking smudge pots that burned in the groves on frosty winter nights to keep the trees from freezing created some of L.A.’s earliest smog.

The original tree, seen here on a postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection, is still there, in front of a home in Riverside.

The last surviving Tibbets tree, the “parent tree” of this billion-dollar business, stands in Riverside today, fenced, guarded and commemorated with a plaque noting it as a California historic landmark.

The tree fared better than the Tibbetses themselves. Eliza fled the scorch of Riverside for the Santa Barbara coast, where she died, in 1898. Luther, never the best of businessmen, lost money in typical SoCal fashion — over water rights.

In 1902, as California thought to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the blessing of the navel orange, as 8,000 railroad cars of oranges were sent to market each year, Luther Tibbets was living in a Riverside poorhouse. His house had been foreclosed on, and he was himself, as the New York Times described him, a “white-haired, tattered public charge.” He died a few months later.

Let’s accelerate to today, to the Tarzana grove. A 2022 deal announced by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield would preserve one-third of the Bothwell property under the aegis of the Mountains Preservation and Conservation Authority. A double lane of citrus trees would march along Oakdale Avenue’s west side.

As of a couple of years ago, in Anaheim — itself a regular money machine of citrus prosperity — two acres only remained of the Pressel family orchards, a place of historic import for the history of citrus and of labor. This survivor, too, was meant to serve as an open-air “tree museum.” In their heads, visitors could try to multiply this meager urban plot times more than 30,000, projecting onto the stucco-to-stucco landscape all of the acres of citrus trees that once spread their branches across Orange County.

In June of 1932, California declared the last surviving Tibbets orange tree to be a state historical landmark. The following year, the Depression-era screwball comedy “Bombshell” was released. Its blonde star, Jean Harlow, is playing a blonde star, Lola Burns, and in one scene, her butler hands her a glass of juice and she takes a sip.

Burns: “Hey! This isn’t orange juice.”

Butler: “No, miss, it’s … it’s sauerkraut juice.”

Burns: “Well, take it away. It’s like dipping your tongue in lox.”

Butler: “But, I’m sorry, miss, but there weren’t any oranges.”

Burns: “No oranges? This is California, man!”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.

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September 22, 2024
Patt Morrison: California settled no-fault divorce decades ago. Why is it back in the news?

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Ugly? You have no idea.

Every nasty little private thing a marriage could churn up, every infidelity, every insult and threat, every drunken episode and squandered paycheck, every crying child — there they all were, spilled out from a witness stand in a courtroom.

Then and only then, after wife or husband had exhausted the litany of the other’s transgressions, could a judge declare them no longer a couple.

And that was the nature of divorce before no-fault divorce laws.

Not every divorce was that emotionally gruesome — not by a long shot — but almost everywhere in the country, a divorce required a wronged spouse, a sinning spouse, and some kind of proof to a legally satisfactory standard. That proof often took sleazy turns, which we’ll get into later.

California, ever the pioneer, was the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969. Other states followed suit — New York, the last, in 2010, about two whole generations later.

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Thereafter, at-fault divorces could still happen, and they still can. But with no-fault divorces, a couple could split amiably, without accusing or proving anything like bigamy or fraud or abandonment. Under California no-fault law, breakups weren’t even called “divorce” anymore, but “dissolution of marriage.” One becomes two; go in peace.

And now, some conservatives — including House Speaker Mike Johnson — want to end no-fault divorce; they believe it has contributed to making ours what Johnson once called a “completely amoral society.”

Ronald Reagan was governor of California when, a few days after Labor Day 1969, he signed the nation’s first no-fault law. His statement: “I believe it is a step towards removing the acrimony and bitterness between a couple that is harmful not only to their children but also to society as a whole.” Divorce is a “tragic thing,” but the new law will “do much to remove the sideshow elements in many divorce cases.”

Many years before, Reagan had starred in the sideshow. His first wife, actress Jane Wyman, went to court to end their eight-year marriage. She claimed one of the standard grounds for at-fault divorce: an elastic legal term, “extreme mental cruelty.”

Politics came between them, she told the judge — his, as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He’d drag her along to meetings and to conversations with friends about guild politics, but her ideas “were never considered important. … Finally, there was nothing in common between us, nothing to sustain our marriage.” (Wyman had already served a term on the SAG board of directors.)

The papers took pains to note that Wyman came to court “hatless, her hair in a pageboy bob. She wore a tangerine gabardine shirt-maker dress.”

Court reporters and a reading public were avid for all the dirt on movie star divorces.

In March 1955, 14 hours after he had picked up the best picture Oscar for “On the Waterfront,” producer Sam Spiegel found himself divorced from his actress wife (“blue-tailored dress, ash-blond hair in shoulder-length curls”), who’d accused him of leaving her penniless in Beverly Hills when he’d gone off to make “The African Queen.”

This is not the place for a history or consequences of divorce, before or after no-fault. Divorces have historically been hard to get; through the 1600s, the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies each approved about one divorce per year. In countries where marriage was as much religious as contractual, getting a divorce was an eye-of-the-needle undertaking. And divorce could be monstrously expensive, which put it out of reach of almost everyone.

Even as divorce got easier, the word “easy” was relative.

When Wyman won an Oscar for playing the title character in the movie “Johnny Belinda,” Reagan remarked that “I think I’ll name ‘Johnny Belinda’ as co-respondent.”

“Co-respondent” is a word almost every grown American once knew. It meant the third party in an adultery accusation in divorce court. (Think of Diana, the Princess of Wales, saying, “There were three of us in this marriage.”) When you wanted an at-fault divorce, you had to show specific “grounds,” reasons, and adultery was a common one — sometimes real, and sometimes faked.

The routine was that a husband would be “caught” in a compromising position with some woman, either his actual girlfriend or a woman who’d been paid to go along with the put-up job.

Often, they bedded long enough in a hotel for a room-service waiter or a private detective with a camera to catch them and voila, exhibit A. Usually it was the husband; either he was actually cheating, or he chivalrously volunteered to the charade because men’s reputations were not besmirched by adultery the way women’s were.

The newspapers’ divorce stories of the 1950s were flat-out lurid. The Times reported — with photos of the unhappy couple and the co-respondent — on a woman whose aggrieved husband wanted custody of their little daughters, because his wife took the girls to a San Bernardino motel room where she was staying with another man. In a different case, an Air Force sergeant said his wife was pregnant by another man after they coupled in a parked car, and she in turn complained that he waved guns and knives at her “for purposes of obtaining her concessions and favors.”

Just … ugh.

Michael J. Higdon is a professor and associate dean at the University of Tennessee’s law school, and he can go as super-law-nerdy as you like on the topic of divorce laws. He remembers running across a 1934 New York Mirror newspaper headline from at-fault days, “I Was the ‘Unknown Blonde’ in 100 New York Divorces!”

And he shows his students a 1935 Bette Davis tear-jerker called “Dangerous,” about an on-the-skids actress who wants to marry the kind man who restored her to health and talent. She asks her husband for a divorce, but he refuses. So she tries to kill him in a car crash. It only cripples him and, spoiler, she eventually gives up on her kind lover and devotes her life to caring for the husband she couldn’t kill.

Reno, Nev., was known as the divorce capital of the world. A woman could establish residency there in six weeks, divorce her wayward husband and return home free. Unclear who is seeking the divorce on this vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection. Maybe both of them.

The more I thought about this, the more movies I remembered about at-fault divorce — some comic, like Cary Grant’s “The Awful Truth,” and some dramatic, like “Kramer vs. Kramer.” In the legendary 1939 film “The Women,” New York wives trundle off to Reno, where a six-week residency law lets them divorce their wayward husbands and return home free. (It amused me to read that among the fiercest objectors to California’s no-fault divorce law was Nevada, worried that it would lose its quickie-divorce trade. As matters turned out, it’s made a mint on quickie marriages.)

Higdon can dish the actual facts about what (to the Mike Johnson adherents) looked like the good old days of at-fault divorce, but in fact were not (just ask Bette Davis).

“If you don’t think deeply about what all this means, it could sound good — hey, it’s just too easy to end marriage, and we all agree marriage is a society building block, and we want to make sure people going into it really think about it and commit to it.

“It sounds good, right?” he asks. “The point is, we had that for a long time.”

And for a long time, he says, “we kind of needed it because women had so few rights.”

This 1912-postmarked postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection depicts a grim scene.

What changed, at about the same time no-fault began, was that a couple of decades of legal and cultural shifts — which many conservatives deplore — began making life different, larger and better for married and unmarried women.

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples could legally use contraceptives, in spite of states’ blue-nose “Comstock” laws banning that. In 1972 the right to contraception was extended to unmarried women.

Title IX gave women equal protection from college, workplace and legal discrimination (an unfinished project). And in 1981, the court dumped a law — from Louisiana, Johnson’s home state — that gave a husband “head and master” unilateral control over the couple’s joint property.

A weakness that emerged in no-fault is that fault-based divorces with evidence of abuse or adultery theoretically gave some power to the woman, who was usually the “injured party,” says Higdon. “Often alimony was awarded on the basis of that,” because typically “the economically weaker party is going to be the most harmed by divorce.”

But that was a time when a married woman’s property was often legally her husband’s property. Women were excluded wholesale from many trades, professions and university programs. Women who could get jobs could not — and still don’t — get equal pay to men doing the same jobs. And not until 1974 could women get credit cards on their own, in their own name.

So sometimes a woman’s only leverage in at-fault divorce was her passive power to get compensated for being wronged, and being awarded arguably enough money to support herself and any children, which didn’t always actually turn out that way.

At-fault divorce offered some protection for women at a time when almost every other law did not. (Of course penalties have fallen harder on women caught in adultery. It’s they, and rarely their male partners, who get put to death, historically and even today. And the bar for sexual misbehavior was often lower for women. In Kentucky, Higdon told me, a man could divorce his wife for “lascivious behavior.”)

“The reason we went to no-fault actually supports traditional conservative values,” is what Higdon thinks. “Around the late 1960s, early 1970s, people weren’t getting married as much, because they didn’t have to, because things were changing in society.”

The dwindling stigmas on illegitimacy and on unmarried sexual partners, legal contraception, more laws supporting women’s access to the workplace — things that some conservatives want to reverse — “made at-fault divorce look more and more off-putting.”

“No-fault was a way to get people to marry. If you’re in a marriage, there’s lots of protection. Say at the end of 30 years, it’s better if [couples] were married than not, because with marriage comes property protection. Imagine 30 years with someone, and they drop dead — and you’re not protected. Marriage protects in ways that cohabitation does not.”

And no-fault divorce still offered legal protections to divorcing couples, but without the trauma of “guilty” and “innocent” parties. A judge has only to be satisfied that the couple’s differences were irreconcilable.

There’s no end to the debate and studies about who suffers more in a divorce, economically, personally and socially. Men’s rights groups have sprung into existence in the wake of changes in family law. And divorced women may find themselves fighting to get their court-ordered child support, and winding up as principal breadwinner and primary parent.

Yet Time magazine has reported that 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and a 2004 Stanford business school study concluded that while divorce traditionally leaves women worse off than men financially, it delivers women an unexpected and “life-preserving” benefit: In no-fault states, the study found that women’s suicide rates dropped by a startling 20%, and wife-beating fell by as much as 12.8%.

Higdon has looked ahead to the fallout we could be in for if we end no-fault divorce, and he worries that making divorce harder once more will make more people reluctant to get married.

And if people think common-law marriage is a good alternative, think again. First, he says, there’s all kinds of misinformation and urban legend, like, “My mom told me that after prom if me and my boyfriend check into a hotel, then we’re legally married.” Not.

Only eight states recognize common-law marriage, and California is not one of them. And “no state,” says Higdon, “allows common-law divorce. [Society] wants you to go through the court, to make sure no one is getting screwed in the dissolution process.”

Several law websites point out that in many states, an unmarried couple’s children don’t automatically get the same benefits as the children of married couples, like inheritance or child support, and they need paternity agreements or even paternity tests.

There’s nothing but an addressee (a mister, if you’re wondering) on the back of this vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection. The card bears a 1908 postmark.

There’s still a grotesque reality television show called “Divorce Court.” It thrives on the rowdy spectacle of real divorcing couples fighting over the same red-meat sins of at-fault divorce — adultery, extravagance, neglect, anger, all with vulgar language and shouting that no real courtroom would tolerate.

It’s the natural grandchild of TV’s original “Divorce Court.” That show premiered in 1957, here on local station KTTV, then owned by the L.A. Times — K-Times-T-V — and those three-hanky episodes were actors’ reenactments of actual divorce cases.

And if you ever go looking for some real deterrents to marriage, just try binge-watching those.

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.

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May 24, 2024
Patt Morrison: Is that graffiti or art? How L.A. draws the lines

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Some acquaintances from Ireland were in town, and we were having lunch in their 20th-floor downtown hotel suite. I was being an armchair tour guide — out the windows, there’s L.A. Live, and back behind those skyscrapers, City Hall, by fiat once our tallest building.

One of them pointed and said, “What’s THAT?”

I didn’t even have to look.

“THAT” is Oceanwide Plaza, the Chinese-owned skyscraper project, dead in the water and half-finished for five years, its floors like unfrosted cake layers, inviting trespass and vandalism and all that vivid graffiti frosting. Any nimble-bodied person with sturdy legs and maybe a bail bondsman’s phone number could make the climb to join in turning the building into L.A.’s largest, brashest outdoor look-at-me canvas — like that Norman Mailer book title says, “Advertisements for Myself.”

Hard to make all of that make sense to the Irish visitors. But it’s L.A. in a nutshell.

Yes, we hate it, yes we love it, and yes, as is our habit, we let time mosey on by as we futz around over what to do.

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This city, supposedly the mural capital of the world, flaunts the title, fears it, is worthy and unworthy of it. And now we find ourselves wrangling again: Is art outside always outsider art? Or art at all?

One camp believes nothing can be art if it doesn’t have a nice frame around it and a price tag on it. Another camp believes that almost any spray-can concerto is art, and the sprayer an embryo Rembrandt. And there’s everyone else, somewhere in the middle.

At the beginning of this century, the city had a 10-year mural moratorium to sort out the chessboard mess of interests and counter-interests: how to keep murals thriving while keeping them from intruding illicitly into neighborhoods, how to keep businesses from simply ginning up wall-sized ads and calling them art, how to distinguish legal from illegal handiwork, and, frankly, good from bad. It’s a seesaw we’re still riding.

In two years, the world comes knocking at our door for the World Cup; then in another two, it’s the Olympics. Can we really not get our act together and dazzle them with something else world-class?

The first graffiti art I ever saw here were the river cats, Leo Limon’s whimsical feline faces on the storm drain openings into the Los Angeles River. They gave life — nine lives — to our rarely running cement eyesore.

Next, I was thrilled by “Old Woman of the Freeway,” enormous and brilliant on a highway-facing wall, the presiding saint of the 101, painted by the master muralist Kent Twitchell. If traffic was moving well, she was the reason; if it wasn’t, she shared your stationary misery.

She was partly obscured by construction, then whitewashed for advertising space, restored by decree and killed off again by ugly graffiti. She was to have been revived in Sherman Oaks, but a property owner wouldn’t give Twitchell access — and one random local wildly claimed to see something “evil and satanic” in her blue eyes. She’s been restored to grandeur and safety on a wall at L.A. Valley College, her crocheted afghan flying like a kite.

Until the Whittier earthquake and a landlord put an end to it in 1987, the south wall of an 1880s building on Fair Oaks in Pasadena used to read: “ ‘My people are the people of the dessert,’ said T.E. Lawrence, picking up his fork.”

T.E. Lawrence was “Lawrence of Arabia,” the British officer and writer who took a vital role among the Arabs in World War I. So dessert/desert. A happenstance glance at it always made me laugh, and even now, I see the building and smile at its ghost.

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1. The Pink Lady of Malibu was controversial in her day. This photo appeared in the Nov. 1, 1966, Los Angeles Times. (George Fry / Los Angeles Times) 2. Lynne Westmore Bloom poses with a sketch she used as a model for the Pink Lady. This photo appeared in the Oct. 27, 1991, Los Angeles Times. (George Wilhelm / Los Angeles Times )

The one I wish I had seen was there and gone before I lived here: the Pink Lady of Malibu, exuberant, whimsical, utterly joyous. Hers is a tale of pink paint, bluenoses and brown coverup. She stood 60 feet tall above the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road, and for nine months in the happening year of 1966, the Northridge artist Lynne Westmore Bloom slung on nylon ropes and climbed the rockface by full moonlight to erase the old graffiti, then to sketch and paint the lady. She was magnificent, pink-fleshed and naked, holding a nosegay of flowers, dark hair streaming as she strode across the cliff.

The bluenoses of L.A. County harrumphed. A traffic hazard! The earlier graffiti hadn’t seemed to bother them overmuch, but this? It took six days and 14 gallons of brown paint to obliterate the Pink Lady. Westmore got fired from her job, got death threats, got marriage proposals, and, along with her painted lady, got a permanent place in L.A. lore.

First California and then the federal government passed laws protecting murals and muralists, with complicated exceptions and requirements. California’s Art Preservation Act, in 1979, mandates “recognized quality,” a case-by-case judgment of experts. The federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 has its own regulations. Kent Twitchell invoked both of these laws in a lawsuit after his mural of fellow artist Ed Ruscha was painted over in 2006. The matter was settled for $11 million.

Even these protections do nothing if the people who should be enforcing them don’t, or don’t even know about them. In 1999, an Eastside mural, “The Wall That Cracked Open,” was almost completely covered over in flat gray, evidently by a county anti-graffiti program. Artist Willie Herron had painted it on the wall of his uncle’s building in 1972 to memorialize his murdered little brother, John.

Multiply that incident by the hundreds. The supervisor of the county’s graffiti abatement program told The Times back then that she was unaware that the mural protection laws even existed. The city of L.A.’s anti-graffiti program chief said that her people have “very clear instructions not to paint over any murals. We find the artist and then we have the mural restored,” and often coated with a protective concoction so graffiti can be wiped off. Gang graffiti, it turns out, is as much a danger to mural art as overzealous, underinformed civic enforcers.

The credit as L.A.’s first known muralist goes to Einar Petersen, who ornamented mostly inside walls with historic, storytelling murals ordered up and paid for. He painted hundreds, murals of a jungle and of the Garden of Gethsemane at the old Clifton’s cafeteria, five panels of L.A. history at the Rosslyn Hotel — now, predictably, covered up, damaged, destroyed.

A conservator for the Getty Conservation Institute works on David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “América Tropical” at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument in 2017. Painted in 1932, the mural was quickly whitewashed for depicting a dead Indigenous peasant tied to a cross.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

The present-day mural wars arguably began in 1932, over “América Tropical,” on Olvera Street, a work commissioned for L.A.’s Olympic year and painted by the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Once the sponsors got an eyeful, they ordered the mural painted over. Its message was in its subtitle, and it was not subtle: “Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism,” a panorama not of contented campesinos but of tortured and tormented Latinos and Native Americans laboring under the policing eye of the U.S.

For decades after, the whitewashed wall carried its own kind of power, and Siqueiros knew it; it’s said that when its restoration was suggested in the 1960s, he was against it, because the force of censorship was maybe even more potent than the mural itself. It was at last conserved and displayed in 2012.

“América Tropical’s” spiritual child is Noni Olabisi’s relentless mural “To Protect and Serve.” The prolific Black muralist, who died a couple of years ago, painted the Jefferson Park work in 1997 and filled space with Black Panthers and celebrated Black radicals, helmeted police and hooded Klansmen. Its funding sidestepped public coffers to keep clear of the kind of censorship that had blotted out “América Tropical.”

SPARC helped to pay for Olabisi’s mural and is working to keep it spruced. The Social and Public Art Resource Center has spent almost five decades battering down the barricades between street art and what Siqueiros called “easel art,” standing up for “activist and socially relevant artwork.”

One of its co-founders is Judith Baca, whose monumental horizontal mural along the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley changed many Angelenos’ POV about graffiti art. Over more than a half-mile, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” shows the histories of Californians whose stories are rarely told, and scores of young people turn out to join professionals to keep the 1978 mural perpetually refreshed.

Not far from there, around Pacoima’s city hall, you’ll find Mural Mile, block after block of artworks done with color, ingenuity, humor, passion and meaning, and changing all the time.

A fellow named Banksy changed some minds about graffiti art too. The anonymous British artist chooses public spaces for his guerrilla work, and inadvertently created a paradox: His works can sell for millions, and people have been caught trying to get them off public walls to take to auction houses.

Banksy’s L.A. mural, 2010’s “Swing Girl,” is downtown, visible only from a deep alley between buildings — which is the point it makes about overbuilt places. The word painted on the wall is PARKING. Banksy almost whitewashed out the last three letters, and hanging from the first part, PARK, he painted a swing with a little girl perched on it.

It’s arguably graffiti, but not the kind that generates a gut-punch reaction among some Angelenos. For them, graffiti is a synonym for defacement and vandalism — and gangs marking out turf and messaging their enemies with menacing scribbles. Who wants to see those sinister scrawls creep into their neighborhoods?

Two incidents, both in the 1990s, caught the tone of Angelenos’ sentiments. One was the 1991 arrest of “Chaka,” who had written that name over and over, literally 10,000 times, on freeway bridges and signposts from Orange County to San Francisco. Then, 24 hours after he was let out of jail, he was caught in the downtown courthouse. He’d written CHAKA on an elevator door — on his way to see his probation officer. In 1996, after college scholarship and work offers, finding God and taking a job painting church buses for a Christian camp, he was arrested for tagging again.

A year later, a Woodland Hills teenager who’d been tagging above the San Diego Freeway fell 100 feet, fracturing his spine, both ankles and his left arm. Not everyone felt sorry for him. One Times letter writer summed up the sentiments of no small number of people: “I do not see the artistic expression involved in scrawling your street name across a piece of concrete like an animal marking its territory.”

This Skid Row mural was completed in 2014. Its message was urgent then, and is no less so 10 years later.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The best graffiti has something to teach, something to say, and that something is more than “my tagging crew is bad-assier than yours.” On Julian Street in Skid Row is the phenomenal Skid Row mural, paid for and painted by locals.

It is poignant and pointed.

It’s a mock-official, green and white sign, bearing the city seal, the words “SKID ROW CITY LIMIT” and at the bottom, “POP Too Many.”

A man — a writer named Charles Bukowski — who used to work up the road from Skid Row, sorting mail at the Terminal Annex, once wrote something that suits that image quite aptly. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.

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March 12, 2024
Patt Morrison: What gives L.A. that Thanksgiving feeling? It certainly isn’t the weather
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Cognitive dissonance, SoCal style: The calendar says it’s November, but the sky swears it’s April, maybe even July.

It’s Thanksgiving. And for a hundred years and more, pilgrims from the East and Midwest to this Pacific coast have sometimes found themselves a bit flummoxed over how to carry off a holiday built 400 years ago around the original Pilgrims on the Atlantic coast.

“Nobody gets much thrill out of Thanksgiving Day here in the West,” is how Times columnist Harry Carr moped over the holiday doldrums in 1923. “You have to be somewhere near the tracks of the Pilgrim Fathers to get much meaning out of Thanksgiving.”

But we manage, somehow. We suffer through a snowless, Puritan-free holiday by surfing, rock-climbing, skiing — when the smell of smoke isn’t necessarily burned turkey, but might be brush fires.

In 1957, Thanksgiving Day marked the hunting season for the West Hills Hunt Club — the horseback, top hat and riding-coat kind of hunting — with the “Blessing of the Hounds.”

The singularly American version of Thanksgiving plays by rules more rigid than Christmas. Christmas observances are global and elastic; Thanksgiving is one day of fixed, ritualized practices no matter where in these United States you celebrate it.

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There’s a charming movie from 2000 called “What’s Cooking?” It’s set in Los Angeles, with a damn fine cast playing four families — Black, Vietnamese, Jewish and Latino — bringing their own varied flavors of life and food to the Thanksgiving table, trying in the midst of family freak-outs and cooking catastrophes to pull off the impossible: a perfect Thanksgiving. (The mash-up of scenes of four families’ potato-mashing techniques is classic.)

For the longest time, in Los Angeles as elsewhere, Thanksgiving was principally a religious holiday, a tip of the capotain Puritan hat to the dogged Calvinism of the Mayflower crowd. The Times routinely printed, at astonishing length, Thanksgiving Day sermons from well-known local pastors.

That, at least, felt like home for the hundreds of thousands of Protestant middle Americans who migrated to L.A. and, in the land of Spanish missions, built themselves white clapboard New England-style steepled churches.

In 1896, The Times patted its city on the back: “It was a wise foresight that first ordained that church service should precede Turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Grace before meat is peculiarly fitting on this particular holiday … before dinner, [the ordinary American] may be devout — after dinner, he is comatose.”

In 1899, on the cusp of the 1900s, The Times did a good deal of throat-clearing to announce a new secular civic celebration. “Thanksgiving day will be celebrated in Los Angeles this year as it never was before. … Heretofore Thanksgiving day has been one of the quiet holidays of the year, devoted to the services in the churches and, of course, to football.” But now, “there will be a military and civic parade, patriotic exercises at the cycle track, a football game, golf, a banquet, a sacred concert, and a number of other sources of amusement and pleasure.”

California’s Thanksgiving observances and re-creations celebrated the Massachusetts Native Americans but breezed right on past the local Native Americans who had been all but erased from the city’s demographics. In the 1899 Thanksgiving parade, a group of white pioneers marched; it was named, without irony, “Native Sons of the Golden West.”

A turkey asks a fair question — “What should I be thankful for?” — on this vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection.

On a 1923-postmarked card from Morrison’s collection, a correspondent asks her brother — who was possibly away at school, given the St. Olaf College mailing address — “Will you have turkey?”

Thirty years on, L.A. Thanksgivings were frankly secular and uniquely ours: sports, games, picnics at the beach, a “fairyland” parade downtown, warm-weather pleasure drives through the hills.

The studios gave everyone the day off. In 1940, The Times assiduously documented the movie stars’ holiday doings: Broderick Crawford heading off on a Honolulu honeymoon; housemates Franchot Tone and Burgess Meredith throwing a dinner for friends; Errol Flynn motoring to Palm Springs for the tennis; Donald Crisp and George Brent out on the water on their respective yachts; Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor golfing with Jack Benny and his wife, Mary Livingstone; and “the Bela Lugosis are going to his mother’s for dinner.” (That’s your straight line, amateur comics — go for it.)

Thanksgiving 1929, a month after Wall Street — as Variety headlined it — laid an egg, The Times noted in many column inches of type that free food was served for the “unfortunates” at the Salvation Army, the Midnight Mission and sundry churches. In years before, food giveaways were staged in poor neighborhoods, and veterans in the Old Soldiers’ Home in Sawtelle — now the VA grounds in Westwood — were fed lavishly.

The county jail’s Thanksgiving menu made the news, probably because of who would be eating it.

Sweet potatoes, fruit Jello, and roast pork — not turkey — would be served to all the inmates, from the lowliest cutpurse to what amounted to the celebrity wing, and its residents:
- Alexander Pantages, the millionaire theater magnate convicted of raping a 17-year-old dancer.
- Asa Keyes, once the L.A. County district attorney, who sent men to the cell he now occupied; he was convicted of taking a bribe.
- Leo (Pat) Kelley, back in town from San Quentin’s death row, for resentencing for the lesser charge of manslaughter, for murdering his older, married “cougar” girlfriend. Kelley said he’d put on 25 pounds in San Quentin — and he probably packed on a few more at Thanksgiving.
A vintage postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection is addressed to “Dear Little Raymond,” and bears a 1912 postmark. It was sent from Florida to Brattleboro, Vt.

That episode is a clear contender for winning the most-SoCal-Thanksgiving-incident-ever sweepstakes. But if mine were the sole vote, the palm has to go to this, from Thanksgiving 2000.

Wendy P. McCaw, a woman we described as the “billionaire environmentalist-libertarian,” bought the venerable Santa Barbara News-Press in 2000, and just this past July, declared the paper was bankrupt and closed it down.

For Thanksgiving of that first year, an editorial urged locals to donate generously to a local food bank, but with an asterisk: no turkey, please. “We cannot — in good conscience — recommend continuation of a tradition that involves the death of an unwilling participant … donate a turkey if you wish, but you can also donate all the other goodies associated with a holiday meal. Beans and rice are a good protein substitute for turkey.”

Santa Barbarans did not all take kindly to the suggestion, and to show their displeasure, donated 700 more dead turkeys than the food bank had asked for.

Regale your holiday guests with this Thanksgiving verse, found on a 1915-postmarked postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection.

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
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Patt Morrison

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November 23, 2023