Big Dreams (61 page)

“Number ten,” his mother said dismissively.

I asked her, “Is it a flounder?”

“No, halibut. But too small. He must throw it back.”

“Flounder are smarter than halibut,” the small brother told me.

“How do you know?”

“Nobody catches ’em so much.”

In the observable fact, there is always wisdom.

A
SUMMER MORNING
in Long Beach, the blue of San Pedro Bay and the sky hazy with petroleum. Ships coming to port from all across the globe.

The
Admiralty Bay
, a tanker from Valdez. The
Kauai
from Honolulu bringing pineapples. The
Hyundai Challenger
out of Yokohama. The
Samoan Reefer
from Porto Armuelles loaded with Chiquita bananas. The
Novo Mesto
from Inchŏn with a cargo of shoes and purses.

Around Point Fermin they went, past the lighthouse and Cabrillo Beach to cut through the San Pedro breakwater and enter the harbor at Angels Gate. Or they rounded in from the east and entered through Queens Gate, a gap between the Long Beach and Middle breakwaters.

Ships laden with fish pulled into Fish Harbor, off Terminal Island, where trucks parked on Bass Street, Tuna Street, and Sardine Street awaited them. Ships in need of repair glided along the Main Channel and under Vincent Thomas Bridge to the Turning Basin, then swung west to Todd Shipyards.

Passenger ships docked at passenger terminals. There were terminals for bananas, autos, gypsum, and borax.

Container ships made up the bulk of the fleet after tankers. They were serviced at container terminals at both ports. Giant gantry cranes did the unloading. They stacked the rectangular containers like children’s blocks. There was no mess. Nothing spilled out, nothing slopped over.

It used to be said that a longshoreman never had to bring his lunch to work because he could eat off the docks. Here an apple,
there a banana. Life slopped over then, it spilled out uncontained.

Longshoremen still worked the port, but there weren’t many of them. Nobody ever got laid off, but nobody ever got hired. The longshoremen looked at the gantry cranes and knew their future.

On the docks, you heard the grinding of machinery and the muffled roar of traffic. Seabirds circled on the wing. Gulls, cormorants, brown pelicans. The air smelled of gasoline.

O
RANGE COUNTY
, the home of Disneyland, had a history of giving rise to fantasies. Helena Modjeska, a Polish actress renowned for her Shakespearian roles, was among those who had succumbed to its allure. Before emigrating to Anaheim with her husband, Count Charles Chlapowski, and some friends in 1876, she had rhapsodic visions of what her new life would be like. Poland was under the Russian boot at the time, and intellectuals in Warsaw and Cracow looked on California as a country of light, air, and magic, where the forces of repression did not exist.

In a memoir, Modjeska recorded her feelings as she was about to embark:

Anaheim was the county’s pioneer town. Its settlers were German Jews from San Francisco who’d been recruited by John Froehling, a vintner in the city, to grow grapes under contract on the coastal plain. In 1857, they had traveled to a newly purchased tract of 1,165 acres on the Santa Ana River and made their home
(heim)
on the stream.

For a payment of seven hundred and fifty dollars, each member of the newly formed Los Angeles Vineyard Society got a twenty-acre lot. The society was a mixed group and included in its ranks some carpenters, blacksmiths, and merchants, as well as an engraver, a musician, a poet, and a bookbinder. They hired Mexicans to plant their rootstock, dig an irrigation system, and fence the property with forty thousand willow poles, and soon their vines were bearing so heavily that Froehling bought enough grapes from them every year to produce about 120,000 gallons of wine and brandy.

The Poles, on the other hand, were a frankly utopian crew. They hoped to model their community on Brook Farm in Massachusetts, although they knew nothing at all about farming, a dilemma that they tried to solve in an intellectual way. Sailing from Bremen, they docked briefly in New York and made a foray to Washington to pick up some government pamphlets on agriculture to study while they were steaming through the second leg of their journey, around Panama to San Francisco.

In Anaheim, they found waiting for them a two-bedroom frame house scarcely big enough to accommodate them all, but they were not easily daunted. With a burst of communal energy, they began tilling the soil, but they discovered to their displeasure that the physical labor made their muscles sore. Moreover, they didn’t like the blood and guts of certain barnyard chores. It took three of them to butcher a single turkey. They were artists, not farmers, and they retreated, predictably, into art.

The odd thing about the Poles was that they seemed to accept their failure without complaint. They never howled or beat their breasts. One colonist, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of
Quo Vadis?
and a Nobel laureate in 1905, simply dragged a table into the shade of some trees and sat there smoking his pipe and writing in his notebook while the entire enterprise was going down the tubes.

“You ought to have seen how jolly they used to be,” a neighbor once remarked, “when everything on the farm was drying up in the sun and the animals were all sick and dying.”

The communards went through about fifteen thousand dollars in six months, a vast sum back then, and reckoned, as Modjeska put it, “that our farming was not a success.” Nobody would milk the cows, so they had to buy their milk and butter. Dogs ate the eggs that their chickens laid, and other farmers stole the muscat grapes from their vines. Range cattle devoured their barley fields in spite of Modjeska’s firing at them with her revolver.

After less than a year in Anaheim, the Poles sold the farm and sank the proceeds into return tickets to Poland—all but Modjeska, who stayed on to make her mark in the American theater, playing opposite such great actors as Edwin Booth. She retired at last to a mansion in the Cleveland Mountains, not far from her old homestead.

The vineyards were gone from Orange County now, of course, and so were the orange groves and most other traces of agriculture. There was nothing beautiful to engage my eye as I drove toward Anaheim on the Santa Ana Freeway, just the same old march of cars and houses.

The absence of promise, the dullness of the undifferentiated malls, the containerization, the way Orange County seemed to stick a knife into your brain and drain it of ideas—the landscape might be oppressive to me, but those who lived in the county were enchanted by it. According to a recent poll in the
Times
, they were among the happiest and most optimistic of all Californians.

Almost all the people in the survey had declared that they were “very happy” or “somewhat happy” in Orange County. The single factor determining a person’s happiness appeared to be his or her relative wealth. The more money that you made, the more likely you
were to be “very” rather than “somewhat” happy, but even among the county’s disadvantaged, those earning less than twenty thousand a year, only 4 percent admitted to being “not too happy.”

Fully a third of the respondents agreed that “living in Orange County is the closest thing to paradise in America.”

In the paradise of Orange County, real estate was a central concern. The median price of a house was among the highest in the state, and the homeowners, said the
Times
poll, were very attached to their property. They were also attached to their automobiles and enjoyed them as objects, status symbols, and private universes. They liked to wax, buff, decorate, and personalize them. They liked how they looked in them, and they liked to see how other drivers looked in
their
cars, engaging in an act of mass voyeurism on wheels—but they were worried about the traffic on the freeways.

In theory, they believed in car pooling and in mass transit, but they confessed that they would never join a car pool, or ride a bus, a trolley, or a subway.

“What it comes down to,” the
Times
pollster had commented, “is that people are hoping for a miracle that won’t cost them anything and that will allow them to commute the way they always have, which is driving to work.”

The citizens of Orange County had expressed some other concerns in the poll. They felt that the chief social problem among adults was alcohol, with “lack of values” finishing second. Among the young, drugs replaced alcohol at the top, but “lack of values” again garnered the second spot. Promiscuity fell near the bottom of both charts.

The Bible was still an important text to most people, with 30 percent of the survey group taking it as the literal truth, but they were not as rigidly conservative as you might imagine. They supported a woman’s right to abortion and the right to rent pornographic videos. A majority rated the “moral climate” of the county as “somewhat permissible” and endorsed an unwritten rule that mutually consenting parties could do whatever they wanted to each
other as long as they did it in the privacy of their own container.

That was progress, really, in a county where the John Birch Society had thrived, where the airport was called John Wayne International, and where, in Yorba Linda, there was a museum honoring Richard Nixon, who’d also had his Western White House at San Clemente on the coast.

Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim paved the way to Disneyland, the very capital of happiness in Orange County. Walt Disney had called it the “happiest place on earth,” in fact, but as I looked at the many cheesy gift shops and motels selling Disneyana, I wondered if I could handle happiness in such measure. Already I was beginning to question the wisdom of my mission, thinking that to tackle the park without an obligatory child or two in tow might do me significant damage.

A
T THE ANAHEIM PUBLIC LIBRARY
, I did some browsing and learned that the Disney family had ancient ties to California. Walt’s paternal grandfather, Kepple, was the first to break for the Coast, leaving his farm on Lake Huron in 1878 for a belated junket to the gold mines. He brought along his two older brothers and his oldest son, Elias, a devoutly religious youth of nineteen. Elias could spout Bible passages whole and was a firm believer in hellfire and brimstone and probably in the literalness of the Holy Book.

During a stopover in Kansas, Kepple and the boys made Elias the butt of a cruel joke. They hired a bordello whore to relieve him of his virginity while they watched through a peephole in a closet door. Elias fended the woman off and angrily refused to continue the trip. Once Kepple had sobered up, he felt guilty about what he’d done and gave his son a grubstake before going on.

Elias was a troubled, unstable, restless soul. He bought a farm with his stake, but he didn’t stay put. Instead, he bounced around working as a machinist and an apprentice carpenter and finally landed in Denver playing his fiddle outside saloons. Too shy to court his
sweetheart, Flora Call, in Kansas, he followed her to Florida when she moved there with her family, and they were wed in 1888.

Elias kept struggling for the next few years. He failed at being a cattle rancher, managed a resort hotel in Daytona Beach, and enlisted in the militia, only to desert it when a war with Spain did not materialize. Flora invested her savings in a Florida orange grove, but the oranges died in a killer frost.

In the humid, swampy climate, Elias contracted malaria, so the Disneys moved to Chicago, where Walt was born in 1901, a child of the new century and the fourth of five kids. The city soon rankled Elias with its sinfulness and once again he fled, buying another farm, this time in Marcelline, Missouri, deep in the Bible Belt.

Walt would later remark that his years in Marcelline were his most satisfying. He gave all the barnyard animals names and liked to draw sketches of them, a hobby that bore fruit in his cartoons and his movies. So attached to the farm did he become that after his success in Hollywood he built a workshop on his estate that was a replica of his childhood barn in Missouri—a barn that was not a barn but merely a cleansed and sanitized version of one.

The Disneys didn’t last in Marcelline, either. Swine fever ravaged all their hogs, and the ever-susceptible Elias caught typhoid fever. Now in his early fifties, frail, humorless, and embittered, he moved the family to Kansas City and put Walt and his brother, Roy, to work delivering newspapers for a franchise that he operated, skimming their wages in the process.

Roy was the first to rebel. He took an apartment of his own and got a job as a bank clerk. Then, in 1918, Walt broke free by adding a year to his age and joining a Red Cross unit bound for France. He was assigned to the same company as Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, stretching the laws of probability to their very limit. Kroc would remember him as “a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went to town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures.”

Walt also had a quiet business on the side. He made phony Kraut
Sniper Derbies, or KSDs, the rare, battle-scarred helmets that American soldiers prized as souvenirs. He’d take an ordinary helmet and doctor it, shooting bullets at it and then tarnishing the holes and the burn marks so that they’d look old. It was the sort of tactic he would later perfect. Instead of banging his head against the hard facts, as his father did, Walt learned to be playful—to alter the facts, transforming them to suit his taste.

After the war, Walt went back to Kansas City and began cartooning with a vengeance. He was clever and gifted, a natural storyteller, ebullient, dedicated, ambitious, and willful enough to surmount the many hurdles that were placed in his path.