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I I . I N F I N I T E R E V O LT LE A V I N G A B L I Z Z A R D in Denver, McWilliams arrived in sunny Los Angeles “a drop-out, in disgrace, acutely impoverished, an inter-state migrant with dim prospects but high hopes.” He was met at the Southern Paci‹c station by his uncle Vernon Casley, whom McWilliams would later call “the kindest man I have ever known” (SCC 1971, viii). Uncle Vern had already led a storied life that included stints in the Klondike and China. He and his wife, Lottie, had met in a Canadian saloon, where he dealt cards and she sang. According to McWilliams, the two “were not at all middleclass Main Street types: they were ‘outsiders,’ exotics. They slept late, drank beer in the morning, scorned middle-class conventions, and laughed at the prevailing pieties” (ECM, 26). For that reason, Uncle Vern may have been the perfect person to receive his recently besmirched nephew. As he drove McWilliams to the six-unit stucco apartment building that he owned near the corner of Normandie and Sunset Boulevard, he made no mention of Carey’s expulsion. That night, he took McWilliams to a bene‹t performance held in a circus-type tent pitched on the southeast corner of Sunset and Vine, at that time a wide boulevard lined by low-slung restaurants, nightclubs, specialty stores, and other small businesses. Hollywood actors had organized the event, and the glamour of the evening tempered the homesickness McWilliams was already feeling. The evening may have provided some temporary relief, but McWilliams’s new environment would require considerable adjustment on his part. The Los Angeles he encountered was a long way from Denver, not to mention Steamboat Springs. A sleepy outpost in the nineteenth century , it was recreating itself energetically, fantastically, and through sheer force of will. Unlike most cities, it did not consolidate itself slowly around a natural port, river, or crossroad. Rather, boosters promoted Los Angeles 15 relentlessly, attracting hordes of other Americans and foreigners in search of warm weather and a fresh start. The city’s white oligarchy had planned and built the city’s extensive trade, transportation, and utility infrastructure in the ‹rst decade of the twentieth century—well before anyone was sure it would be necessary. In 1900, Henry Huntington’s Paci‹c Electric Railroad linked the downtown area to the ocean and valley. New businesses sprouted along Broadway—which only a few years before had been a dirt road leading to the cemetery known as Eternity Street. Almost completely lacking in coal reserves, Los Angeles made a virtue of necessity by pumping large quantities of oil and fueling demand for it by manufacturing automobiles and building roads. In the meantime, a group of New York arrivistes was creating the city’s signature industry, ‹lmmaking, while a quite different set of engineers and entrepreneurs, spurred on by the commercial potential of regional air travel, was turning Los Angeles into the aviation capital of the United States. By 1920, the city’s population had surpassed that of San Francisco. Within a decade, it tripled again, making Los Angeles the nation’s ‹fth largest city. To accommodate the ›ood of new residents and businesses, residential and commercial development was maintaining a frenetic pace. In its headlong rush to match its oversized image of itself, Los Angeles was the Great Gatsby of American cities (Starr 1990, 69). Like the narrator of that Fitzgerald novel, McWilliams was initially appalled by what he witnessed. For all its growth and increasing wealth, Los Angeles struck him as an overgrown village devoid of any authentic history , culture, or charm. Every year seemed to bring another grand new theater to the downtown area, but even these entertainment palaces could not conceal the city’s essential shabbiness. McWilliams was far more impressed by the armies of aimless, shiftless people that populated it. “Main Street is a funny street, dirty, smelling, cheap & lousy restaurants,” he noted in his diary. “Bums, drunks, fruiters and the scum of God’s creation swarm its streets” (Jan. 23, 1923). Yet his reduced circumstances dictated that he make the best of it, and on Uncle Vern’s advice, he began checking the bulletin board at the YMCA for jobs. Soon he landed a position at the Los Angeles Times as an assistant to the credit department head. Having secured the job with a letter of recommendation from a Steamboat...

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