A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  In the early twentieth century demand for fish came from the East, Europe, and Asia, and fresh fish could not be shipped that far. Only drying—the Chinese method—and canning—the American method—could ensure solid profits.

  The abundant sardine promised a reliable source of revenue, so after an early salmon cannery closed, sardine canneries were built on Monterey’s shores. Initially, fish offal was tossed into the bay, until the Chinese taught cannery owners that this too was a valuable resource. The first fish reduction plant was built in 1915, processing not only offal but whole fish into the much more lucrative fish oil and fish meal—fed to chickens, cows, and pigs.

  Sicilian, Italian, and Portuguese men fished, and their wives and daughters packed, making about thirty-three cents an hour at cannery work until unions came in 1936 and wages rose. Conditions in the canneries were rugged—smelly and cold, workers sometimes standing in water up to their knees—but far from oppressive. Only women worked the lines. One of the biggest problems these women reported was daycare. They had to report for work whenever full boats came in after a night of fishing—large canneries owned a couple of boats and leased several more for the season. Whistle codes announced the start of the workday—at 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., and 5:00 a.m. What to do with sleeping children if you were a cutter, called to work first, or a packer, allowed to arrive a little later, perhaps at 8:00 in the morning?

  Women in the canneries, 1930s.

  A Fitting Tribute?

  Midway along Cannery Row at Steinbeck Plaza, a bust of John Steinbeck stands near the sidewalk. A story about that bust explains much about Steinbeck’s relationship with his first wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck.

  Unveiled in February 1973, the bust is signed “Carol Brown, Sculptress.” The identifying label is perhaps meant to distinguish between artist Carol Brown and her sister-in-law, Carol Steinbeck Brown. Married to brothers, both Carols lived in Monterey in the early 1970s. John’s former wife loved ceramics and, noted the sculptress, “that’s how we became interested in the bust. I don’t remember whose idea it was.” When work on the Steinbeck bust began, Carol Steinbeck Brown brought her sister-in-law lots of photos of John and scraps of paper with notes John had written. Together they went over memorabilia. Even though she harbored ill will toward her former husband, Carol wanted to make sure this bust was a true likeness. As the sculptress worked, every couple of weeks Carol Steinbeck Brown would visit, telling the artist to “Make his head bigger” and then swearing at the bust, venting her anger at the man who had left her for a much younger woman. Carol’s visits unsettled the artist. Indeed the first bust “collapsed because she said to make it so big.” When the project finally neared completion, Carol Steinbeck Brown considered the bust a collaborative effort and wanted recognition, her own name listed with the artist’s under the final work of art. She felt “so confident in editing or interpreting,” said the artist. “She felt she collaborated with John in the sense that she was secure in being a critic.” But neither John nor her artist sister-in-law gave Carol the recognition she craved. The artist signed only her own name to the bust. According to the sculptress, Carol Steinbeck Brown felt a “sense of being left out. She had collaborated with me on the bust and I had failed her. She had collaborated with John and he failed her.”

  Flora Woods: Monterey’s Notorious Madam

  Stately Flora Woods appears in Steinbeck’s novels as Fauna in Sweet Thursday and Dora Flood in Cannery Row, “a great woman, a great big woman with flaming orange hair and a taste for Nile green evening dresses.” Some have said that Steinbeck sentimentalized prostitution, created stereotypical whores with hearts of gold. But Flora Woods was, in life and art, the Ethel Merman of Monterey, cutting a wide swath.

  Flora’s Girls, a mural once on Cannery Row, by Eldon Dedini.

  During her three decades as madame, Flora owned several brothels on the peninsula. The Quick Lunch opened in 1917 and offered patrons a hearty lunch and a roll in the sack. (Steinbeck was surely thinking of this establishment when he wrote about Rosa and Maria’s restaurant in The Pastures of Heaven.) Flora’s other houses included the Golden Stairs and one located near the baseball park, which competed “for the attention and patronage of youth.” Flora’s most infamous establishment was the Lone Star Café, Steinbeck’s Bear Flag.

  “Notorious” Flora made the news regularly throughout the 1930s. When fire destroyed Ricketts’s lab in 1936, the front page of the Monterey Peninsula Herald ran both a large photo of the burning lab (Ricketts lost everything) and a small column: “Firemen save Flora Woods.”

  Others were less eager to save her properties. In the mid-1930s, a local judge launched a campaign to wipe out Monterey County prostitution and Chinese gambling houses, most of which were in Salinas and Monterey. “Can Monterey Find an Honest and Sensible Way to Regulate Prostitution?” queried the Monterey Trader on January 17, 1936. “The state law bans prostitution … but the public puts up with various compromises,” particularly in Monterey, where “a lax and apathetic public,” the article complained, “has handed control of municipal affairs over to a ‘wideopen town’ majority” and thus the problem “gets out of hand.” The state of things made it “possible for Flora Woods to run her business to suit herself and to dictate to the public, or rather to the public’s officers, just where and how she will operate. And inasmuch as Madame Woods gets away with it, the increasing smaller fry follow suit.”

  She seems to have gotten away with quite a bit. Bowing to public pressure in 1936, she did close her ballpark location—but one suspects that deals were struck, allowing the Lone Star to stay open. In 1942, all brothels were closed by the army. Ricketts wrote to Sparky Enea, the cook on the Sea of Cortez trip, about the “sad story of the Lone Star. Everything was moved out, including of course all the beds—and boy were there a lot of them! The front of the building was torn off, and now the place is being used to store fish meal. What a fate!”

  A Steinbeck Theater?

  In 1959 the city of Monterey proposed that the theater on Cannery Row be named the Steinbeck Theater. He wrote back,

  Your suggestion… is of course flattering. I can only warn you that my own success in the theater has not been all rosy. You may be taking on a jinx. Having one’s name on an institution smells slightly of the epitaph and I can only assure you, but perhaps not prove, that I am not dead, certain pronouncements of critics to the contrary….

  I could not stop you from using my name if I wished, since it is probably in the public domain. Would it be out of order in view of our long association, and because he was one of the greatest humans I ever knew, that Ed Ricketts’ name be substituted for mine, or if because his name is not yet as widely known as it deserves, that our names be used together?

  Rodgers and Hammerstein, Buck and Bubbles, Mike and Ike, Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean, Cohn and Schine, Aucassin and Nicolette, corned beef and cabbage—these seem not to suffer from a duality. If your projected theater could be named the Ricketts and Steinbeck, any reservations of mine, self-conscious or sentimental, would instantly disappear, and a name that deserves remembering could be at least proposed. Thank you for the compliment. Could you, however, among the cultural clutter, sometimes put a little gut-bucket in the theater? I would feel safer if Pee Wee Russell has some small niche in the world of Bach and Rene Clair.

  The theater did open, and Barnaby Conrad’s film Flight had its world premiere there.

  Hauling sardines, circa 1940.

  Cannery Row

  In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck devotes about a page to the canning industry. Steinbeck’s terrain is not commercial Cannery Row but after-hours Cannery Row, when the habitat “became itself again,” quiet and magical. In the half-light of sunset or dawn, during the long nights, the little enclave is like a tide pool, he writes—describing the characteristics of each human “specimen”; studying the interconnectedness of these characters and parties of human “aggregation”; tracing the fragmented histories of how individual
s got the way they are; and crystallizing the universality of lyrical breaking-through moments. Steinbeck once enigmatically remarked that Cannery Row was written on four levels, levels that book critics missed. Perhaps these levels are those above, four planes parallel to those seen by Ricketts as the basis of a holistic ecology—naming and characterizing the species present, determining how they interact as a community, elucidating the complex life history of each species, and recognizing the “niche concept” by which communities of totally different species are found in widely different geographical areas.

  Steinbeck’s dedication of the novel (“For Ed Ricketts who knows why or should”) says it all.

  Cannery Row also maps Steinbeck’s memories. Stand in front of the lab, book in hand, and read the beginning of chapters 3 and 5 to look at Cannery Row through Ricketts’s eyes, sharing his vista—”participating,” just as Steinbeck did, just as he wants his readers to do. Today that may seem impossible in a Cannery Row that is chock-a-block with restaurants, t-shirt shops, and bars. Many feel that Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s spirit has evaporated in the zeal for commercial development. Indeed, when Steinbeck came through the area in the 1960s, long before Cannery Row became a tourist mecca, he was glum at changes made—as most of us are when returning to places of the heart, enclaves of the spirit, spaces lost to time. But an aura lingers.

  “Chicken walk” on Cannery Row, 1945.

  Other Cannery Row Sites

  Next to the building that was once the Lone Star brothel is Cannery Row’s “vacant lot,” once full of abandoned pipes, where Mack and the boys took the “chicken walk” up the hill.

  The Wing Chong grocery.

  The walk is now paved and renamed Bruce Ariss Way, and the lot is home to three little fishermen’s houses—moved here in the mid-1990s—each furnished to reflect workers’ ethnic diversity. Ariss was a local artist, editor, friend of Steinbeck and Ricketts, and, for more than sixty years, a legend in the community. A 1989 mural panel (one of several painted by local artists to hide a Cannery Row construction site) was moved here, and another one of his paintings of 1930s Cannery Row is at the group entrance to the aquarium.

  Writing about Cannery Row

  Typically, Steinbeck did not revisit old work. The exception is the Cannery Row material, stories that engaged him for more than fifteen years, from 1938, when he had in mind a “magnificent story about Monterey,” to 1955, when he finally got the whole of that story out of his head.

  After finishing The Grapes of Wrath, he started and then abandoned a satiric play he thought “might be fun,” “The God in the Pipes.” It tells of a man leaving Salinas—where the “people [are] so wise naturally that they need never read nor study”—to consult a Monterey prophet, the “Boss” living in a cannery pipe. He was airing some of his rancor toward Salinas.

  The novel that did get written came after a 1943 stint overseas as a war correspondent; nostalgia for all he’d left found its way into Cannery Row, a knotty little book about the bums and whores, the flotsam and jetsam edging in around Doc’s marine laboratory. It is one of his best novels, a must-read for anyone visiting the peninsula and anyone wishing to understand Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s holistic vision.

  The book and its hero, Doc, were beloved by many. In 1947, Burgess Meredith wanted to work with Steinbeck on a play or film of Cannery Row, with Meredith as the charismatic Doc and with, he said, “Humphrey Bogart standing by.” In 1948, Steinbeck came to California to scout locations for a film of Cannery Row. He thought about an opera. In 1953, he started work on a libretto for a musical based on Cannery Row. He ended up with a consciously extravagant novel, Sweet Thursday (1954), intended for the musical theater. Rodgers and Hammerstein used this novel for one of their only musical missteps, the rarely performed Pipe Dream (1955).

  Whimsical Sweet Thursday is Steinbeck’s swan song to California. It lacks the heft of Cannery Row, consciously so. Steinbeck’s last California novel is a wry and frothy creation: “The playful sun picked up the doings of Cannery Row, pushed them through the pinhole, turned them upside down, and projected them in full color on the wall of Fauna’s bedroom.” Anyone picking up the novel should keep that perspective in mind. It’s a cockeyed book, maybe a fictional wake as well. In it Steinbeck scatters the ashes of his best friend, writing Ricketts into a crazy little love story, and then sending him and his girl into the setting sun that shines briefly on Doc’s “laughing face, his gay and eager face.”

  The two-story building at 835 Cannery Row once housed the Wing Chong, or “glorious, successful,” grocery, which opened on November 16, 1918. Five years earlier, Won Yee had immigrated to America, where he saved money and moved to Monterey to open his market, one of about a dozen Chinese residences or businesses along a two-block stretch of Cannery Row. In Cannery Row he is Lee Chong, whose “position in the community surprised him as much as he could be surprised,” writes Steinbeck—perhaps a wry comment. In the back of his store, the real Won Yee ran gambling tables and sold bootleg liquor during Prohibition and opium at other times. If police raided, patrons escaped through a tunnel that came out behind the Hovden warehouse.

  The Queen of Cannery Row, Kalisa Moore.

  Cannery Row Development: Steinbeck’s Advice

  Asked in 1957 by the Monterey Peninsula Herald what his advice for development of Cannery Row would be, Steinbeck noted with playful exaggeration that developers could consider several possibilities: one solution might be to re-create the “new-old” of the cannery days:

  A number of these buildings still stand. The purchasers might keep them as national monuments. Their tendency to rust could be halted by spraying them with plastics. Maintenance of this reminder of our historic past would, however, require that the rocks and beaches be stocked with artificial fish guts and scales. Reproducing the billions of flies that once added beauty to the scene would be difficult and costly.

  But with strides in chemistry and with wind machines, the odor of rotting fish and the indescribable smell of fish meal could be wafted over the town on feast days. Perhaps this era should be kept as a monument to American know-how. For it was this forward-looking intelligence which killed all the fish, cut all the timber, thereby lowering the rainfall.

  His honest solution was far better:

  I suggest that these creators be allowed to look at the lovely coastline, and to design something new in the world, but something that will add to the exciting beauty rather than cancel it out…. Then tourists would not come to see a celebration of a history that never happened, an imitation of limitations, but rather a speculation on the future.

  Perhaps his vision was realized in the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

  In a 1953 interview, members of the Yee family, who continued to run the store until 1954 (and still own the building), were asked what question was most often put to them by tourists. Their answer: queries about Steinbeck’s Old Tennis Shoes whiskey, “We could have made a fortune if there had been a brand of whiskey named Old Tennis Shoes,” said Frances Yee.

  Next to Lee Chong’s, at 851 Cannery Row, was banana-yellow Kalisa’s, another Cannery Row institution. The building was a brothel, Steinbeck’s “La Ida’s” and in fact La Ida’s Café. Kalisa Moore met Steinbeck when he came through the area in 1960 on his trip with Charley. She is memorialized with a bronze bust by Jesse Corsaut on Bruce Ariss Way.

  The modern anchor of Cannery Row is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, located at 886 Cannery Row. This site once was home to the Hovden Cannery, one of the first canneries to open and the last to cease operation, in 1973. With a ten-boat fleet in the halcyon years of the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was one of the largest of the area’s sixteen canneries. Stanford University bought the site—to prevent a luxury hotel from going up across from Hopkins Marine Station—and later sold it to the Packard Foundation for the aquarium that the foundation funded, and which opened, in 1984. Cannery history is eloquently and briefly told near the entrance, and the aquarium itself is a fabulous p
lace, exhibiting marine life of Monterey Bay and beyond.Past the aquarium, along the bike and walking path that parallels Ocean View Avenue (and covers the tracks of the old Del Monte Express), the sweep of the bay overwhelms any strolling visitor. Walk here and you may become a water-gazer.

  The Monterey Bay Aquarium, 886 Cannery Row.

  Alvarado Street at Franklin, circa 1946.

  Lara-Soto Adobe, 460 Pierce Street.

  Steinbeck’s Monterey

  Several spots in Monterey retain the Steinbeck mark, and one way to see the town Steinbeck haunted is to take a walk on the “Path of History,” as indicated on maps available at the Monterey Chamber of Commerce offices in Custom House Plaza and insets in the sidewalks. The Monterey Old Town Historic District was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

  Most of Steinbeck’s Alvarado Street watering holes have been replaced by the Monterey Plaza Hotel. The Keg, Johnny Garcia’s place, draws Steinbeck for a mournful drink in Travels with Charley. In 1940 he wrote part of Sea of Cortez from an office above the Wells Fargo Bank at 399 Alvarado Street. Before Doc leaves town on a collecting trip in Cannery Row, he stops to eat at Hermann’s, at 380 Alvarado, a burger joint that was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Doc orders a hamburger (15 cents) and a beer (10 cents) and thinks about what a beer milkshake might taste like.