CENTERPIECE
SALINAS MAKES ITS PEACE WITH STEINBECK, A NATIVE SON

Author: By Charles E. Claffey Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, August 13, 1981
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

- John Steinbeck

"East of Eden"

SALINAS, Calif. - In the summer, the hills of the Gabilan Mountains to the east are bleached the color of grain and the Salinas River is low, stagnating in the sun.

To the west, the Santa Lucia range - dark and moist - rises abruptly from the Pacific, shielding the Salinas Valley from the open sea.

The two mountain ranges enclose Steinbeck's "Long Valley," stretching south for nearly 100 miles - 600,000 acres of the most fertile farm land in California.

The river that feeds the valley is an oddity, flowing south to north like the Nile and described by one of Steinbeck's characters as "only a part-time river . . . not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it."

But the Salinas is also the largest submerged stream in the nation, and its underground waters provide irrigation for the valley's fields. Last year the yield of the top 10 crops in Monterey County amounted to nearly $750 million.

The city of Salinas, 110 miles south of San Francisco and near the head of the valley, was settled not long after the Gold Rush of 1849. With the coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1872 it soon became the major trading center for the region and the seat of Monterey County.

Beets and beans were the principal crops until 1921, when a few bold farmers decided to experiment with growing lettuce and shipping it east to New York. The experiment succeeded, and brought dizzying prosperity to the area.

With that prosperity, however, the need for farm labor, or "stoop crop" workers, increased in the 1930s - at about the time the "Okies" were fleeing the dust bowls for the promised land of California.

In early 1936, Steinbeck published "In Dubious Battle," a novel dealing with migrant workers lured into the valley by the false promise of decent wages, and encouraged to go on strike by Communist organizers using them for their own purposes. When the workers struck, the growers brought in strikebreakers to drive them out of their camp.

The novel was a prelude to what many critics consider Steinbeck's finest work, "The Grapes of Wrath," an angry social document on the plight of dispossessed farmers.

James G. Costello, 67 a retired editor of the Monterey Peninsula Herald and a long-time friend of Steinbeck, recalls the violence that raged through Monterey County in the mid-1930s.

" In Dubious Battle' was based in part on a strike in the fruit-growing area of Watsonville (about 20 miles north of here*, and a lot of people blamed John for what happened in Salinas a few months after the book came out," says Costello.

"This was a redneck town then, and John was considered a liberal and he was disliked. It's only recently that he's been accepted in Salinas, rather than being considered the native son of a good family who went bad."

In October 1936, lettuce workers in the Salinas area struck for higher wages and better working conditions; rioting broke out. The sheriff of Monterey County mobilized men between the ages of 18 and 45 to deal with it.

"The growers hired a guy - an Army Reserve colonel - to form a private army. They were well-organized. They even had machine guns mounted on buildings," Costello says.

The climax of the strike, which lasted three months, occurred when the people of Salinas were warned that a Communist army was marching on the city. Red flags, taken from the highway and marking the migrants' route of attack, ostensibly proved the point. The flags were rushed to the state capital, Sacramento, as evidence. Planes were sent to reconnoiter as the growers and their mercenary army dug in for the expected battle.

Before any shooting started, indignant highway department officials requested the return of their flags - placed as danger signals on the roadside by their workmen. The crisis passed.

In the ensuing years, labor leaders like Cesar Chavez have won substantial
gains for farm workers. But many thousands more remain uncovered by union contracts, says Oscar Mondragon, director of the regional office of the United Farm Workers Union (AFL-CIO).

The union office is housed in a one-story, mustard-colored brick building on the eastern fringes of Salinas. Against the wall on the left as one enters the building is a table with candles; hanging above is a large picture of the Virgin Mary, and below it, a smaller one of Cesar Chavez.

Mondragon says that about 10,000 workers in his three-county jurisdiction are now under contract with a basic wage of $6 per hour. That wage was not easily won, he says. "We were on strike for most of 1979 to get it."

Mondragon is in the middle of negotiations with several companies to cover an additional 5000 workers. "We still have a lot of field workers who are not covered by contract." He estimates that in Monterey County there may be as many as 10,000 additional laborers outside the union.

When Steinbeck left Salinas in 1919 to attend Stanford University, the city had a population of about 4000; now it is more than 80,000.

While labor conditions in the valley have improved for farmworkers, the industrial employment situation in Salinas recently has taken a bad turn.

The latest blow came on July 14, when the Spreckels sugar refinery, which has been doing business here since 1899, announced it will close its factory at the end of the spring 1982 processing season. About 500 workers will lose their jobs.

In the past 16 months, other closings include the Firestone plant, the Peter Paul candy factory and the Dave Walsh Co. A total of 2500 workers have been put out of work or told they will lose their jobs.

It was the announced shutdown of the Spreckels plant, however, that was most poignant for older Salinas residents. As many as four generations of one family have worked at the plant, whose original red-brick building still stands, outlined against the Gabilan mountains.

Steinbeck worked at the refinery during the summers of 1919 and 1920, says Rev. M. L. Kemper, 82, retired pastor of the First Presbyterian Church.

"I was a few years older than John," Rev. Kemper says, "and when I left in the summer of 1920 to go to theological school, he took my job as night chemist.

"I wish I could tell you I saw something outstanding about him in those days, but I just remember him as an ordinary boy. It wasn't until the Grapes of Wrath' was published (in 1939* that I even knew he was the same fellow I used to work with."

Rev. Kemper says Salinas has a "reputation for being a wild Western town, and that may have been true 60 years go, but now I think it's a very cultured community."

Its cultural attainments notwithstanding, Salinas still retains much of the flavor of the Old West.

Urban renewal has refurbished much of the downtown area, but it has not eliminated the red light district and Chinatown. Both sections, however, have been relocated several blocks away from where they were when the novelist described them in "East of Eden."

On weekend nights, streetwalkers promenade along Soledad street, competing with the enticement of a mission on the corner bearing a sign,"Jesus Saves."

At the turn of the century, many of the Chinese coolies who built the railroads settled on Soledad street, and some of their descendants have remained. The new Chinatown is a few blocks away, near a Buddhist temple said to be one of the largest in the state.

One of the city's biggest annual events is the California Rodeo, held in the third week of July, and drawing as many as 20,000 people. Besides the big nighttime parade - Colmo del Rodeo - another highlight of Rodeo Week is the Steinbeck Classic, a competition between drum and bugle corps from the Western states.

This year, in June, the city held a 12-day Steinbeck Festival, with actor Burgess Meredith as the keynote speaker. Meredith, who starred in the 1939 movie version of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," became a close friend of the novelist during the shooting of the film.

"Of Mice and Men" was set near Soledad, a farming community in the valley about 25 miles south of Salinas. The main drag through the city, Front street, looks like a film set for a Depression-era movie.

Residents say the downtown area has changed little since the publication in 1937 of Steinbeck's story of two migrant workers - George and Lennie - and their doomed dream of owning a farm and a few acres of land.

Front street is bordered on one side by the tracks of the Southern Pacific - the city once was the railroad's southern terminus - and on the other by a business block with many buildings that have been around since the turn of the century.

Earl Morrison, Soledad's acting city manager, says: "We don't ever expect to be a tourist attraction, but we've been trying to fix it up as best we can."

Migrant workers "still flock here during the harvesting seasons," which in the valley is most of the year, Morrison says.

"They live in houses all around here, and some of them even stay in garages. We learned about one resident here who rented his garage to eight workers and charged them each $50 a month."

Monterey, 20 miles west of Salinas, is the locale of Steinbeck's comic novels, most notably "Tortilla Flat" and "Cannery Row."

When the sardines vanished in the late 1940s, the factories of Cannery Row were abandoned. Today, a cluster of restaurants and shops stand in their place, many of them occupying the original cannery buildings.

James Costello first met Steinbeck in Monterey at the home of Costello's grandmother, Hattie Sargent Gragg. The writer would come often to the house to "listen to my grandmother tell stories and legends about the paisanos. He and my grandmother were both very much interested in the history of the Monterey Peninsula." Some of these folk tales found their way into "Tortilla Flat."

"Steinbeck was a very generous man," Costello says. "When he won the Pulitzer in 1940 (for "Grapes of Wrath"*, he gave the $500 prize money to a friend who was a reporter on the Herald to take a year off and write a novel." The reporter finished the novel, Costello says, but it was never published.

Webster (Toby) Street, 82, is a retired attorney in Monterey who first met Steinbeck when they were both members of the English Club at Stanford.

Their friendship, he says, never prevented Street from criticizing Steinbeck or his work - even after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.

"After he wrote Of Mice and Men,' Street says, "the quality of his work decreased considerably. He must have known that writing stuff like The Short Reign of Pippin IV' was a waste of his time and talent.

"I remember writing to John at the time Pippin' was published - he had been established in New York by then - and telling him, You'll never find any stories at the Stork Club and 21. Why don't you come home?' "

Steinbeck did come home - briefly - in 1960, when he drove 10,000 miles across the country with his French poodle in a camper. He later wrote about his adventures in "Travels with Charley."

He tells in the book of driving up to Fremont's peak in the Gabilan Mountains (Gabilan is Spanish for hawk) and looking down on the Salinas valley and "the town of Salinas where I was born now spreading like crab grass toward the foothills . . . I felt and smelled and heard the wind blow up from the long valley. It smelled of the brown hills of wild oats.

"I remember how once, in that part of youth that is deeply concerned with death, I wanted to be buried on this peak where without eyes I could see everything that I knew and loved, for in those days there was no world beyond the mountains."

CLAFFE;07/25,13:04 CORCOR;08/14,14 B07891744