Free Blue Sky Dream by David Beers Page B

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.
    It was easy enough at the time to believe that someday thewhole world would speak our language. I remember a Saturday morning not too many years after we had moved into our new home. My mother and father read in the newspaper about a new sculpture erected as a symbol of cultural arrival by our fast-growing city. We drove over to see the thing and when we arrived at its base and looked up, we very much liked what we saw: Benjamino Bufano’s “The Universal Child,” big blue eyes atop a tapered stainless steel cylinder shaped like a beautiful missile.
    S everal valleys over from ours, Joan Didion watched the coming of my tribe with dread. We moved her to write, in a 1965 essay, how it felt to be a “native daughter,” to have “come from a family who has always been in the Sacramento Valley” and to see that “the boom was on and the voice of the aerospace engineer would be heard in the land. VETS NO DOWN! EXECUTIVE LIVING ON LOW FHA!”
    Fifteen thousand aerospace workers, “almost all of them imported,” had arrived on the outskirts of Sacramento to join Aerojet-General, a maker of missile boosters. Joan Didion’s family was, like the orchard people of the Valley of Heart’s Delight, a family tied to agriculture with a hundred years of circular rhythms behind them. Hers were a people primly insular and tragic minded, according to the native daughter. Her Valley was a place where “incautious” children visiting from out of town often would drown in the river, disappear forever, and the old locals would see a proper lesson in that, would say, as Joan Didion’s grandmother did: “They were from away … Their parents had no
business
letting them in the river.”
    Joan Didion saw fifteen thousand out of towners coming to stay forever and concluded that Sacramento had by 1965 lost its “character,” that because of us it was “hard to
find
California now.” She looked at the children of Aerojet-General and thought …
    Their grandmothers live in Scarsdale and they have never met a great-aunt. “Old” Sacramento will be to them something colorful, something they read about in
Sunset
. They will probably think that the Redevelopment has always been there, that the Embarcadero, down along the river, with its amusing places to shop and its picturesque fire houses turned into bars, has about it the true flavor of the way it was. There will be no reason for them to know that in homelier days it was called Front Street (the town was not, after all, settled by the Spanish) and was a place of derelicts and missionaries and itinerant pickers in town for a Saturday night drunk … They will have lost a real past and gained a manufactured one.
    In another essay written five years later, Didion gets at the profound difference between her people and mine.