INVASION
Tony, Tony, listen, listen.
Hurry, hurry, something’s missin’.
These are words my mother taught us for getting the attention of St. Anthony, who, she said, would guide us to whatever we were looking for but had not yet found. Hers was a perfect prayer for a blue sky family in the early 1960s, as colorfully casual as a tiki lantern, resistant to any doubt that we in our suburban frontier held the interest of heaven.
A crisis would develop. Mutterings, hard soles stepping hard somewhere in the back of the house, the whooshing sound of my father moving in his dark suit, moving with those quickened, long strides that sent us children edging into corners, up onto chairs, anywhere that was, as he would say to us, “out of the WAY!” My father’s keys were missing again. He was yanking open drawers and shoving hands between seat cushions. He was muttering, “For cripes sake.” He was late for Lockheed.
“It’s worked before. You just have to believe,” my mother would say, her voice upbeat. She would go to the sliding glass door, walk out onto the redwood deck, stand under the bamboo-thatched roof, move her lips in prayer just beyond my father’s vortex.
Tony, Tony, look around.
Something’s lost and must be found.
Soon enough someone, usually my mother, would be drawn to some unlikely spot, maybe to a clump of crabgrass near a Rainbird sprinkler. There would be the keys, waiting for my father’s exasperated swipe at them. After my father and his keys had disappeared in a puff of exhaust around the corner, headed in the direction of Lockheed, we children would move out of the corners of the house, would reclaim the empty spaces for ourselves, and all the best possibilities for the day would be there for us, as if by some small miracle.
Some evenings my father would bring home to me new images for the filling of empty spaces, pictures to hang in my bedroom next to the solar system, publicity photographs of Lockheed products. There were stubby-winged jets and fire-swathed rockets, satellites that hung in space like tinfoil dragonflies. And my favorite, the Polaris. “The most beautiful missiles ever fired,” a U.S. Navy Rear Admiral pronounced the nuclear-tipped A1X Polaris, having witnessed its successful submarine test on a summer day in 1960. The fully evolved, deployed Polaris, designed under the guidance of Wernher von Braun’s friend and fellow former Nazi, Wolfgang Noggerath, was capable of traveling 2,400 nautical miles in a few minutes and delivering, from its elusively mobile launchpad, three separate warheads to a single target deep within the Soviet Union—facts no doubt beautiful to a nuclear warfare strategist. The Polaris was beautiful as well to a boy who thumbtacked its picture on his wall, a pure and universal shape if ever there was one, white and smooth, perfectly frozen above the convulsed ocean surface through which it had just burst. Lockheed always photographed its missiles headed up, never killing end down. As a child I didn’t wonder what the Polaris was for. Perhaps once launched it just stuck there in the solar system’s firmament like a dart in the ceiling. Maybe it metamorphosed into one of my father’s pretty satellites with the glittery solar panels. That the Polaris was so obviously the future exploding out of the sea seemed reason enough to create it.
My mother gave me her own pictures, Catholic holy cards, Virgin Mary visitations, saints aglow, Christ baring His Sacred Heart while floating up in the clouds. And so airfoils and angel wings, blastoffs and holy ascensions, Our hovering Lady of Fatima, her cloaked contour so aerodynamic—all of these images, my father’s and my mother’s—mingled in my child’s mind to form a coherent iconography. An empty space was not so hard a thing to fill up if you were determined to see in it what you wanted.
That, my mother and father will tell you, is how they remember their brand-new tract home in their brand-new subdivision: as a certain perfection of potentiality. Nowadays, when suburbia is often disparaged as a “crisis of place” cluttered with needless junk and diminished lives, it is worth considering that it was not suburbia’s stuff that drew people like my parents to such lands in the first place, but the emptiness. A removed emptiness, made safe and ordered and affordable. An up-to-date emptiness, made precisely for us.
“We never looked at a used house,” my father remembers of those days in the early 1960s when he and my mother went shopping for a home of their own in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. “A used house simply did not interest us.” Instead, they roved in search of balloons and bunting and the many billboards advertising Low Interest! No Money Down! to military veterans like my father. They would follow the signs to the model homes standing in empty fields and tour the empty floor plans and leave with notes carefully made about square footage and closet space. “We shopped for a new house,” my father says, “the way you shopped for a car.”
Whenever I think of the house they bought and the development surrounding it, the earliest images that come to mind are of an ascetic barrenness to the streets, the lots, the rooms. The snapshots confirm it: There I am with my new friends around a picnic table in the backyard, shirtless boys with mouths full of birthday cake, in the background nothing but unplanted dirt, a stripe of redwood fence, stucco and open sky. That was the emptiness being chased by thousands of other young families to similar backyards in various raw corners of the nation.
“Didn’t the sterility scare the hell out of you?” I’ve asked my mother often. “Didn’t you look around and wonder if you’d been stuck on a desert island?”
The questions never faze her. “We were thrilled to death. Not afraid at all. Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us. It was a whole new adventure for us. For everyone!”
Everyone was arriving with a sense of forward momentum joined. Everyone was taking courage from the sight of another orange moving van pulling in next door, a family just like us unloading pole lamps and cribs and Formica dining tables like our own, reflections of ourselves multiplying all around us in our new emptiness. Having been given the emptiness we longed for, there lay ahead the task of pouring meaning into the vacuum.
Listen, listen … look around … must be found.
We were blithe conquerors, my tribe. When we chose a new homeland, invaded a place, settled it, and made it over in our image, we did so with a smiling sense of our own inevitability. At first we would establish a few outposts—a Pentagon-funded research university, say, or a bomber command center, or a missile testing range—and then, over the next decade or two, we would arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands until nothing looked or felt as it had before us. Yet whenever we sent our advance teams to some place like the Valley of Heart’s Delight, we did not cause panic in the populace; more likely, a flurry of joyous meetings of the Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs. You can understand, then, why families like mine tended to behave with a certain hubris, why in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, for example, we were little concerned with a rural society extending back through Spanish missions to acorn gathering Ohlone Indians. We were drawn to the promise of a blank page inviting our design upon it. We were perfectly capable of devising our own traditions from scratch if need be.
My mother and father, for example, invented for us certain rites of spring. In the spring of 1962, the Valley of Heart’s Delight was covered with blossoms. Back then, the cherry and plum and apricot trees would froth so white and pink that driving around the place felt like burrowing through cotton candy. Spanish colonizers had planted the first of these glades. By the middle of the nineteenth century the valley was a center for growing the “fancy” fruits that needed rich soil, gentle rains, and frostless springs, a Mediterranean soft touch. Just two dozen years before my family’s arrival, this was a place of 100,000 acres of orchards, 8,000 acres of vegetable crops, 200 food processing plants, a small city of 50,000, and a half dozen villages that were, as one county planner fondly remembered, “enclaves in a vast matrix of green.”
“It was beautiful, it was a wholesome place to live,” by that planner’s recollection. And every year there would come a day in spring that called forth the blossoms, that seemed to make the world white and pink again in a decisive instant. That was a day eagerly looked toward, no doubt, by the people who had done the planting, the orchard people there long before us.
On warm evenings in the spring of 1962, this is what my father and mother would do. After dinner they would place my baby sister in her stroller and the four of us would set out from the too small, used house they were renting in an established subdivision (already half a dozen years old) named Strawberry Park. We would walk six blocks and run out of sidewalk. We would pick up a wide trail cut a foot and a half deep into the adobe ground, a winding roadbed awaiting blacktop. At a certain point we would leave the roadbed and make our way across muddy clay that was crosshatched by tractor treads, riven by pipe trenches. We would marvel at the cast concrete sewer sections lying about, gray, knee-scratching barrels big enough for me to crawl inside. We would breathe in the sap scent of two-by-fours stacked around us, the smell of plans ready to go forward. Finally we would arrive at our destination, a collection of yellow and red ribbons tied to small wooden stakes sprouting in the mud. These markers identified the outline of Lot 242 of Unit 6 of Tract 3113, exactly 14,500 square feet of emptiness that now belonged to us. All around the outline were piles of cherry and plum and apricot trees, their roots ripped from the ground, the spring blossoms still clinging to their tangled-up branches.
My parents had laid claim to this spot in the usual way. They had sat in folding chairs in the garage of a model home while a salesman showed them maps of streets yet to exist, the inked idea of something to be called Clarendon Manor. They had been given a choice of three floor plans, the three floor plans from which all the dwellings of Clarendon Manor were to be fashioned. My parents had selected the 1,650-square-foot, four-bedroom floor plan, the one with the front door in the middle and the garage door on the right side. They had judged the price of that house—$22,000 at low GI Bill rates and no money down—to be a fair value and just within their budget. They had specified that the kitchen tile be yellow, the exterior trim white, the stucco blue.
My parents had been attracted by some of the features they saw in the Clarendon Manor model home. They liked, for example, the short brick wall with lantern that jutted out the side of the garage, creating a kind of courtyard just before the poured concrete stoop. They liked, as well, the sparkles in the living room ceiling, tiny chips of glass embedded in the white flocking that twinkled by lamplight. They liked these modest nods to tradition and romance, though what they liked most was the functionality of the house’s design, the way, for example, that the kitchen, dining nook, and family room merged to created an unbroken expanse of linoleum. This was design for maximum efficiency in the flow of family life, an important selling point for my mother and father.
Here was the deal sealer: By rising early and hurrying to the Clarendon Manor sales office on the day it opened, my parents had been first in line and so had managed to secure a prime lot. Lot 242 was one of very few that stretched wide around the bottom end of a cul-de-sac, a choice cut of land more than twice the size of a standard lot. Naturally, the price was higher: For an additional 8,500 square feet of Clarendon Manor soil, said the salesman, my parents would have to pay $200 more, cash up front. They were only too happy to purchase the extra emptiness.
Once the papers had been signed, the rented house in Strawberry Park seemed to my parents all the more constricting and stale, a house not just used but used up. There was nothing to do, however, but to wait for Clarendon Manor to come into existence, nothing to do but make our visits to Lot 242 on warm evenings. Our rite evolved with the season. Early on, my father would go from stake to yellow-ribboned stake, telling us where the kitchen would be, where the front door would go, which windows would be getting the most sun. Later, after the concrete foundation and plywood subflooring were in and the skeletons of walls were up, we would wander through the materializing form of our home, already inhabiting with our imaginations its perfect potentiality.
Our home, like millions of similar tract homes built throughout America at the time, was said to be “ranch style.” Its sober horizontality was said to owe itself to an old-fashioned, Out West wisdom about what a house should be. In truth, the design of our house owed more to a Frenchman named Charles Jeanneret, a man who found his optimism in mechanized shapes, even those (or especially those) made for war. Jeanneret, better known as Corbusier, was that prophet of Modernism who famously declared, “A house is a machine for living in.” He wrote this four years after the close of the First World War in his Towards a New Architecture, a manifesto containing, as well, these lines:
The War was an insatiable “client,” never satisfied, always demanding better. The orders were to succeed at all costs and death followed a mistake remorselessly. We may then affirm that the airplane mobilized invention, intelligence and daring, imagination and cold reason. It is the same spirit that built the Parthenon.
Corbusier’s theory was that houses, like airplanes, worked best when constructed according to rational, “universal laws.” One of these laws held that any machine, just like nature itself, must evolve toward ever purer forms. This is why the shapes of progress must look more and more like an airplane, must be ever more streamlined. This is why every bit of sentimental bric-a-brac was wasteful drag holding back our flight into a better future. This is why Corbusier hated Victorian decor “stifling with elegancies” and found the “follies of ‘Peasant Art’ ” downright “offensive.” Now was the moment to make “an architecture pure, neat, clean and healthy.” For, “We have acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And, “Everything remains to be done!”
Corbusier’s hugely influential “Purism” glorified not only the shapes of machines but the assembly line production machines made possible. He would exploit economies of scale. He would make the parts interchangeable. For the rationally minded new technology worker, he would create “towers in the park” surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. He would design vast high-rises that stacked families in hundreds of identical compartments, give them “open plan” living areas without room dividers, sit them in no-frills furniture that Corbusier preferred to call “equipment.”
You can find the bastard progeny of those towers in skylines from Warsaw to Chicago. Housing projects gray and stark, they are today’s emblems of beehive alienation, the worst possible place to look for Corbusier’s optimism realized. No, to find that, you would do far better to go to where Purism met the American Dream, places where single-family homes were mass assembled from three blueprints and shopped for like cars, places like Clarendon Manor. In such blue sky subdivisions, Corbusier’s tower of identical compartments was unpacked and spread out, forming an architecture all the more “pure, neat, clean and healthy.” We who dwelt in them were as Corbusier had predicted. The era’s new worker, the aerospace worker, did want to live surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. We had indeed “acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And what we wanted were $22,000 Parthenons expressive of the same cold reason we saw in the lines of a jet fighter’s fuselage.
There was a man in the Valley of Heart’s Delight who made it his business to build the purest tract house forms of all. He was named Joseph Eichler. Joe Eichler had been a rather conventionally minded fellow until the day in 1936 when he happened to rent a home designed by Corbusier’s fellow Modernist prophet, Frank Lloyd Wright. With its bold spaces (a long, glass-walled living room) and latest technology (“radiant heating” via water pipes in the concrete floors), the home was to Joe Eichler a revelation, and when the cigar-chewing dairy wholesaler eventually decided to get out of butter and into subdivisions, he hired Wright disciples as his architects. They gave him a three-bedroom house with a sleek flat roof, floor-to-ceiling glass along the rear facade, post and beam ceilings, radiant heating, an open plan interior that spoke of free-flowing emptiness, all of this mass producible with a 1949 price tag of $9,000. By 1967, Joseph Eichler would build some 10,000 houses in Northern California, a particularly large concentration of them in areas closest to Lockheed.
From the street, Eichlers resembled lined-up, identical, earth-toned bunkers, their redwood-sided fronts punctured by the merest, if any, glass. You entered the private realm of the bunker through a door, and then—this was an Eichler trademark—suddenly found yourself standing in an open-air atrium. The atrium, an Eichler sales booster from the day it was introduced in 1957, was the extra dollop of emptiness you passed through before you met the true front door of the house and all the glassy walls and clean space within. “The Eichler design stunned us,” my father remembers of the first one he and my mother explored on one of their house-shopping expeditions. “The low lines, all that glass. We thought it was a marvelous house. It had this California look to it. It was like nothing we’d seen in the Midwest.”
Which, indeed, was the genius of the Eichler design, the way it congratulated its owner for fleeing places so encumbering as, say, the Midwest. Midwest weather made flat roofs and atriums impossible. Midwest people were suspicious of houses with no windows on the street and too few walls inside. A Midwest house (like the lives within it) stuck with tradition. No, the Eichler was like nothing you’d ever see in the Midwest. A whole new adventure for us, the Eichler said to its owner. For everyone! said the many streets lined with Eichlers, streets that ran in concentric circles closing finally around a swimming pool with a clubhouse, for that was the modern shape Eichler gave the entire neighborhoods he built from scratch.
My father and mother did not buy an Eichler home in an Eichler subdivision, a missed opportunity they speak of wistfully to this day. At the time, the Eichler price, though consciously pegged to aerospace salaries, was a few thousand dollars beyond my father’s bottom-rung pay. And yet the allure of the Eichler illustrates why we saw so little “ranch” in the house we did move into in the autumn of 1962. Compared to an Eichler, our house was a quieter shout of Corbusier’s machine-minded optimism, perhaps. But our house, too, was “open plan,” bright and low and streamlined, laid out unsentimentally enough to please any engineer. Most importantly, ours was nothing that could be mistaken for a used house of the past. Ours was a blue sky house, pure and simple.
One spring Saturday my father rounded the corner of the cul-de-sac wearing his brown leather flight jacket, his hands at the controls of a machine with knobby tires taller than me and an enormous claw upraised. By then we had inhabited Lot 242 for nearly a year, the seasons had come around, and now had arrived the time for making a backyard lawn. Having taken the measure of the hard clay that Clarendon Manor was built upon, my father had devised a plan. The first step was to break the clay into clumps and so he had rented this tractor, had driven it across town and right into the yard through a portion of fence he had removed. To the delight of me and other children in the neighborhood who gathered round, he pulled us up one at a time onto his lap, the rattling of the beast passing through my father’s blue-jeaned thighs into our own bodies. We rode the machine as it ripped up the earth, and when the frenzy was over we each took turns sitting in the quieted claw.
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.
The 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.
My 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.
It was easy enough at the time to believe that someday the whole 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.
Several 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. She writes of “growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lies not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.” She reveals herself, in other words, to be a pessimist about human endeavor engineered and executed on a grand scale. How different from my tribe, who would say instead: If incautious children might drown in a river, let us erect a Cyclone fence, even drive the river underground, leaving behind a manufactured surface that was dry and safe, empty and speaking of promise. That, after all, is what was done with the creek that ran by Clarendon Manor.
A past manufactured, Didion lamented in 1965, feeling sorry for any boy growing up like I was. But I remember a great hulk of unmanufactured past that sat by the freeway a short drive from Clarendon Manor, the mansion of Sarah Winchester, wife of the rifle tycoon. The Winchester Mystery House (as it was called on billboards with skulls leering) was begun in 1884, and old Mrs. Winchester never stopped construction until the day she died in 1922. In recent times, the house and grounds have been renovated (or “remanufactured,” as Joan Didion might say), but when I was a boy it was all crumbling authenticity. I would sometimes be taken there for a class field trip or just something to do on a rainy day. A guide would lead us through rooms that had never been used, show us staircases that led to nowhere, point out windowpanes and tiles and even sink drains that, by Mrs. Winchester’s superstitious orders, always added up to thirteen. She believed she was haunted by wicked spirits angry over the killing her husband’s rifle had done, haunted, too, by good spirits who would ward off the bad ones as long as work continued on her house. She was as crazy as she was rich, and so her house with its one hundred and sixty rooms and forty-seven fireplaces and thirteen bathrooms stretched across six acres, a horror house to me simply for its dirtiness and darkness and wrongheadedness.
I did not like visiting the Winchester Mystery House, did not think much of Mrs. Winchester and her unvarnished past. I thought she was a silly old lady to cower in her morbid pile, as silly as were her bygone times. She was a wild extrapolation of what I imagined the orchard people to be, the best reason for there to be streamlined tract homes in clean subdivisions. We children would take the tour, and the dust and strangeness would tire us out and we’d be happy to emerge into the bright daylight. Happy to be free of the stifling obsolescence of the place.
If you had pointed out to any blue sky invader on the Mystery House tour that the new money in the Valley of Heart’s Delight was thanks to weapons potentially vastly more destructive than all the Winchester rifles ever made, we would have shrugged and laughed all the more at Mrs. Winchester’s guilt-driven insanity. We were not much interested in ironic abstractions. Rather than visit the Winchester Mystery House, we far more often visited the places directly next door, the Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23 Cinemas set back on a broad plain of parking lot asphalt, movie houses that were low and round and shallow-domed like flying saucers. The whole family would set off to see the movie that everyone was seeing, the big movie called The Sound of Music, and we would park our car between a Plymouth Satellite and a Dodge Polaris, and we would join our fellow citizens within the glowing belly of one of the spaceship cinemas, and there on the screen would be a Catholic nun, full of fun, singing to children with our own ruddy cheeks.
We were a tribe with hubris, as I say, but you can see how we came by it. By the time we were done with a place, everything around us seemed to cheer us on. Everywhere there were signs telling us that by moving to this empty new corner of America, we had moved closer to the center of the nation’s imagination.
Joan Didion did not like it that such a tribe had found its way to the outskirts of her Sacramento. Now that the people of Aerojet-General were using the latest materials to manufacture optimism on the same farmland that had made her people hard and tragic, Didion was forced to rethink what might be the “true” California. “Which is the true California? That is what we all wonder,” the native daughter wrote in 1965. Was it the dusty Main Streets of the Central Valley that she knew so well from her childhood? Or was the “true” California her vision of my tribe, “the legions of aerospace engineers who talk their peculiar condescending language and tend their dichondra and plan to stay in the promised land”?
If she had asked my father the aerospace engineer or my mother who had joined him on a whole new adventure, they would have told her: There is no “true” California, only latest improvements in design. Our fellow tribe members in Seattle or Houston or Colorado Springs or Bethpage or Cape Kennedy or Huntsville would have told her the same thing about the “true” Washington, the “true” Texas, the “true” Colorado, the “true” New York, the “true” Florida, the “true” Alabama.
Within twenty years of the opening of Stanford Industrial Park, within ten years of my family’s arrival, the Valley of Heart’s Delight was no longer a place of “enclaves in a vast matrix of green.” It had become a vast matrix of expressways and freeways and Clarendon Manors, a vast matrix of companies making technology primarily for the government. The population had grown many times over in those two decades, and we no longer heard the Valley of Heart’s Delight called that anymore. In fact, no one I knew had ever used that sentimental name. While I was growing up, my family simply had called it the Valley, or, as it was officially termed on the government studies and the plans of various developers, the Santa Clara Valley. It would not be until a time distant, well into the 1970s, that we would begin calling our home Silicon Valley.
There was yet another rite of spring practiced by my family, a rite that became possible once the occupation was all but complete, once nearly all the blossoms had been replaced by settlements like our own. On an evening that was bright and windy but too warm to be winter anymore, my father would come home from Lockheed with a kite or two, balsa sticks wrapped tightly with colorful tissue paper. If the next morning was a Saturday, he would put the kites together for us, tear us a tail from an old sheet, make a string bridle that held the kite just so, help us launch the kite and send it up over the tract homes. For just this very purpose, my father kept what seemed a mile of twine on an enormous spool, and so the kite would climb higher and higher until it became a shimmying dot against the blue.
At that point my father would go into his garage and make a small parachute. He would unfold a paper napkin and tie its corners to four strands of string, drawing the other ends of the string together and knotting them around a bolt for weight. He would stick a bit of reinforcing tape in the center of the napkin and pass through that a bent pin, making a hook that poked out of the top of the parachute. Next my father would write our phone number on the parachute with the words: IF FOUND, PLEASE CALL.
“Ready for takeoff?” my father would say as he grabbed hold of the taut kite string and hooked the parachute onto it. And then a miraculous thing would happen. Driven by the wind, the parachute would skitter up the line, joining the kite high in the sky in what seemed an instant. When it reached the top my father would say, “Give ’er a jerk!” and the parachute would fall away from the kite and drift in whichever direction the wind was blowing until we could see it no longer.
Then would begin the wait for the phone to ring, the wait for someone to call and say they had our parachute. If hours went by, my mother might suggest a prayer to St. Anthony.
Tony, Tony, listen, listen.
Hurry, hurry, something’s missin’.
“You have to believe.”
If we said the prayer and did believe, the ring would come and someone would say, “Got your, uh, I guess it’s a parachute, here. Landed in my backyard. Almost ran over it with the mower.” My father would write down the address and he would get out the street map. He would pinpoint our destination, and we older kids would set off on our Stingray bikes, having been given a reason to trace a route we never would have traced otherwise, so empty and so much the same was every street for miles around. We would leave our cul-de-sac named Pine Hill Court (where there was neither a pine nor a hill) and we would pedal far beyond Springwood Drive and past Happy Valley Way, ending up in some cul-de-sac we had not known existed. And there would be a man about my father’s age with a similarly receding hairline and knit sport shirt, a man who seemed to be pleased at the serendipitous fun our parachute had brought into his Saturday, a man who safely could be assumed to do blue sky work for a living. Anywhere we cared to drop a parachute from the sky there would be someone like him, a house and family like his and ours. That is why I think of our game as a spring rite for blithe conquerors.