It’s almost impossible to convey what CA was like back then.
You could decide on Monday that you wanted to be in, say, the printing business. Knowing utterly nothing about it. And in under a week, you could go visit some printers and get hired....doing something. Maybe it would just be sweeping the floor, but in a month, if you showed any aptitude you’d be running a machine. In three months, if you stuck around, you would be given a raise. Without even asking.
It was truly the land of near infinite opportunity. Great schools, great roads, great weather.
If liberals could only figure out a way to f**k up the weather, they would.
A bit before my time, I suppose, but in reading novels from the mid-20th century, one gets the clear impression that in much of America you could just head out the door, start driving, and anywhere you stopped you could find a cheap place to stay, some sort of employment, and a halfway decent life. You could stay or go and eventually settle into a life that suited you. Perhaps that wasn’t the case in reality as much as it was in books and on TV, but it wasn’t a totally ridiculous notion. Today — can you imagine just saying, “I’m driving west; got no real plans, but I think it’ll work out OK”? America is just very different now.
Exactly. You are exactly right. It REALLY was the Golden State. From WWII to the 1990s the state was an economic dynamo. Now Texas is having our lunch. What’s so nauseating is when a huge Fortune 500 company like Occidental Petroleum decides to move from L.A. to Houston, the attitude among most politicians seemed to be: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. They don’t care. Their hatred for the oil industry trumps any sense of rationality, jobs, or economy.