Los Angeles' First Educational Facilities - A History

I've been using my experience playing SimCity 4 to build sort of a living map of Los Angeles. Every city has its origin, and from that point there are basic things that have to arise. We've looked at seaports, airports, agriculture, and houses of worship. Today I want to look at Los Angeles' educational history.

In looking at education, we're really starting to get into the nitty gritty of how the lives of citizens are improved. In SimCity, education buildings were built to increase a city's EQ or educational quotient. The formula for EQ is base + genetics + education. Your base was directly tied to wealth. New citizens were born with 80% of their parents EQ, as education is passed on through the generations. Then the more effective education facilities in the city was the final factor.

At it's founding, Los Angeles was not as wealthy or populous as the big cities east of the Mississippi. It's economy was based on agriculture and shipping, and they had to start completely fresh building elementary schools, high schools, and colleges.

Los Angeles City Council was empowered to elect a school board by the Ordinance of 1853. The board could hire and fire teachers, and they were to take a census of all children 5-18. In 1854 the Board of Education gained a superintendent, and in 1855 the first public schoolhouse opened its doors.

Schoolhouse number one opened on the northwest corner of Second and Spring St. A year later, Schoolhouse number two opened on north Main St. They were both two story brick buildings, with two school rooms and two rec rooms.

San Pedro Street School, Photo credit: LAPL

The oldest still site still in use is the San Pedro Street School. The original building was a one room brick schoolhouse as shown above. With three schools under its jurisdiction, the first enrollment record dated 1865-66 indicates three schools, three teachers, and an enrollment of 244 pupils.

The elementary schools in SimCity had a capacity of 550 pupils, but they were multi room buildings with many teachers. The next step after providing residential areas with elementary schools was to build a high school that could cover the entire residential area. Los Angeles got its first high school in 1873.

Central School, photo credit LAPL

The cornerstone for Central School was laid July 19, 1872 and it cost $19,000 to build. Dr. Lucky was named principal. The building was up on a hill (poundcake hill) so that everyone could marvel at it, with cross streets of Temple and Broadway. The high school occupied four rooms of the Central School building.

The first graduating class (1875) had seven members. Curriculum was structured to meet the standards of the State University (University of California). In two decades Los Angeles has gone from trying to teach a new generation of merchants to read and write to sending a select few off to become doctors and lawyers.

Now with Los Angeles joining the San Francico Bay Area in an East Coast style education system, it would have to have a place to train teachers. The California State Normal School was founded on May 6, 1862 in San Jose (now the site of San Jose State). In 1881, the state opened the California State Normal School at Los Angeles.

California State Normal School at Los Angeles, photo credit LAPL

The State Normal School was built at fifth and grand. The above photo is from 1904 by which time the Normal School included it's own elementary school where novice teachers could get hands on practice. In 1882, when the Normal School opened, the High School students moved into the Normal School building.

With the Central School site back to just an elementary school, the decision was made in 1887 to move the building and build the Los Angeles Courthouse on that site. Unfortunately, the man who got the contract to move Central School underbid and when he ran out of money simply left the school up on scaffolding where it stood.

Central School on Stilts. Photo credit LAUSD archives

Look at that! That's not normal. That's a school, on stilts, with trolleys going underneath. The plan had been to move the school to Sand St., but the contractor got halfway up Temple and said "they heck with it, let's go bowling". Meanwhile, construction began on a school house just for the high school on Fort Moore Hill.

Second Los Angeles High School building, photo credit LAPL

Completed in 1891, it sat upon an abandoned Protestant cemetery. The site had been abandoned, and was mostly visited by grave robbers, so the city decided not to remove the bodies when building their school. The city also sold off some of the land as residential lots, again, without excavating any of the bodies. Los Angeles High School was the city's only high school until 1905.

So there you can see a whole system set up on furthering education and staffing the schools. California and Los Angeles had to build this system from scratch over their first fifty years of existence. The Catholic church had been doing it for a lot longer.

In SimCity, private schools were built if the public schools in your city fell beyond a certain level of quality. Underfunding your schools would see them decline, and sooner or later (with enough wealthy citizens) a private school would be built. The idea being that those with a wealth base (and thus a higher education quotient) wouldn't sit by idly and see that level drop in their offspring.

Churches founding schools is nothing new, it's how they created new generations of priests and scribes.  It wasn't until the close of the 19th century that public secondary schools began to outnumber the private ones. 1870 was the first year every state had free elementary schools.

The Society of Vincent St. Paul had been founded in 1833 with the mission to tackle poverty in the slums of Paris. In 1854, Thaddeus Amat y Brusi of Barcelona, Spain was ordained a bishop, and petitioned the Pope to move the southern California diocese from Monterrey to Los Angeles.

The Pope approved. Los Angeles built St. Vibiana's Cathedral in 1876, so I guess Thaddeus had his see somewhere else for twenty years. In 1865, he asked the Vincentian friars to build St. Vincent's College for boys, the first institution of higher learning in Los Angeles.

St. Vincent's College, photo credit LAPL

Humble little thing, isn't it? The college covered an entire block, bounded by 6th, 7th, Fort and Hill streets. A small lane, St. Vincent's Place, ran north into campus from 7th Street. While those in the public school system had to go up to Berkeley to continue their education, those who went to parochial schools had a local option.

In SimCity, a city college could be built by the city, but a university was a reward. The churches were rewards just for meeting certain population caps, and the university is available after reaching 15,000 citizens. The parochial school system existed outside of the state school system, and in 1880 Los Angeles finally was granted a university.

But that's a story for another day.

Los Angeles' First Houses of Worship - A History

Last entry I introduced a new tool in talking about the planning of Los Angeles, SimCity. The model used by the city planning epic is great for looking at what cities need and how they fulfill those needs. One of my other favorite tools is looking at word etymology. When talking about oranges I showed how the word history shows the route the fruit traveled in eventually coming to America. Those oranges then needed to be shipped around America either by freight train or cargo freighter putting many people to work.

The word freight comes into English in the middle ages, in the sense of renting a ship for the transport of goods. The Dutch, like the Venetians, were shipbuilders because their lot of land was low to sea level and conducive to shipbuilding and trade. In fact, Nederlands (the Dutch name of the country) literally means low lands, as opposed to the German highlands. It's from middle Dutch/Low German yrecht a variation of vrecht which meant ships cargo that we get the word freight.

Interestingly, the word freight is related to the word fraught. Fraught means filled with, laden, and comes from the middle Dutch for load with cargo. It's likely the English bought Dutch ships for use in trade, and from there this words crept into the language. The word cargo is a Spanish loanword coming into the language in the mid 17th century. So you can see as the English started to become players in world trade with their territory claims in the New World, they borrowed words from the Dutch and Spanish who had been doing it for a good while longer.

A few centuries later, the English speakers who settled in San Pedro loaded the crates of oranges they received via freight train onto cargo freighters that took those oranges around the world. It's all kind of neat to think about.

But enough of this big picture stuff. I've prattled on for long enough about shipping and trade and commerce. I just wanted to wrap and reintroduce some themes before I talk about the other big motivator for human interaction, religion.

You can see why I was stalling.

I brought up SimCity 4 because last time I mentioned how Seaports and Airports were cap busters for Industrial and Commercial areas, respectively.  Airports also helped relieved the freight burden, whatever was the fastest way to get your goods moving.

In residential areas, the cap busters were usually things that raise property values; parks mostly. When your population reached certain levels you were alternatively offered a House of Worship or a Cemetery. At 1,000 you were offered a House of Worship at 2,000 a cemetery. A city would have three cemeteries and four houses of worship when all the caps were met.

Because Los Angeles was founded as a Spanish city, the oldest church built was Catholic. In 1784, Nuestra Señora Reigna de los Angeles Asistencia was founded as a sub mission (asistencia) to the Mission San Gabriel. It's mission was twofold, both to convert the natives in the area so as to fold them into the flock (and use them for labor) and to provide a place of worship to those growing crops to feed the population of Mission San Gabriel.

As the pueblo grew, there became less need for a sub-mission, and more need for a church to serve the inhabitants. In 1814, Franciscan Fray Luis Gil y Taboada placed the cornerstone for a new church on the ruins of the old adobe church, and by 1822 the church was completed.

La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles. Photo credit LAPL

In 1822, those living in Los Angles were no longer Spanish but Mexican. The Treaty of Cordoba had been signed granting them independence from Spain in 1821. So when the church was completed in 1822, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles served a liberated Mexican community.

You can tell the photo is from the 1920s, with the trolley and all the automobiles. So try and imagine this an unpaved plaza, and that church the tallest thing around. The oldest church in Los Angeles was dedicated December 8th, 1822 and still is used today.

La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles. Photo LAPL.

The church and plaza was the city center through Spanish, Mexican, and ultimately American rule in 1847. In 1861 the little chapel had to be rebuilt from materials from the old church. The 1861 version is the one that has been declared a California landmark and still stands today. In 1871 Los Angeles became a catholic dioceses with the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana.

Cathedral of Saint Vibiana. Photo LAPL

Up until now, we've stayed with the angel theme started by naming the mission after St. Gabriel the Archangel. Our Lady Queen of the Angels refers to Mary, Mother of Jesus. But a cathedral houses a bishop, which means the pope has to get involved. Pope Pius XI chose the cathedral's name, after third century Roman martyr St. Vibiana. Her remains were removed from the catacombs of rome and reentered inside the cathedral where they remain today.

So the pope in Vatican City has now recognized this catholic community in Los Angeles, and installed one of his officers. I bring this up because remember, in SimCity they were called Houses of Worship. America is a country of religious freedom. So this little Catholic community was about to get crowded with the statehood of California in 1849. The first Protestant church service on record was in 1850 (didn't take long) when Rev. J. W. Brier held a Methodist service. Luckily the Protestants were a bit blunter in their house of worship naming.

Los Angeles churchscape, photo LAPL

Before Los Angeles had a skyline, it had a church line. The church in the center is First Presbyterian Church at Fort and 2nd. To the right is Congregation B'nai B'rith, a Jewish temple. Built in 1872 it was the first Synagogue in Los Angeles, though Jewish services had been held in the city since 1854. St. Vibiana's Cathedral is in the background, and Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church South is at the far left at First and Spring. The photo is dated 1890.

So you can see the immediate impact California statehood had on Los Angeles. Suddenly LA went from a small Mexican Catholic community to an inclusive space where Jewish and European-American Protestants could all worship together. The old plaza chapel by the 1920s would also serve an Italian community, which practiced the Catholic faith and made and sold wine.

If SimCity taught me anything it's that residents of a city, when they're not growing and packing and shipping, need a place to reflect on their lives. I love the photo with all the churches within walking distance cause it shows the ideal of the new city. Much like America was originally pitched to Europeans, Los Angeles was pitched as a refuge for all.

Of course, it was pitched that way so real estate men could make fast cash on all the developable land, but that's the cynical way of looking at it; and I am no cynic.

~

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that word history can help an understanding of world history. I want to go back again, since this is a post dominated by Roman Catholicism, and talk a bit about how the Romans used words in spreading the Christian religion (once Constantine declare all the Romans to be Christian).

In 597, Pope Gregory I dispatched a band of missionaries to the Angles (Angle-Land = England). St. Augustine was leader of this band and in 601 he was named Archbishop of Canterbury. This brought the Roman alphabet and a whole slew of loan words to the Angles; abbot and alter and nun and purple as examples.

In other cases, words were repurposed. Heaven and sky were both words used at the time to refer to the atmosphere above us, but the Romans used the OE word heofon to get across where god was (Latin deus), and the place they wanted to avoid - hell. Sky and good still have common use, but the words the Romans gave religious significance have kept it.

I also wanted to bring up my own family history. My great-great grandparents (a Garbarino and a LaCaze) were married in Lousiana, and then my great-grandparents (a LaCaze and a Campbell) were married somewhere in Los Angeles. My Protestant great grandmother converted to Catholicism, and they were married in a Catholic church somewhere in Los Angeles.

For me, studying the history of Los Angeles is deeply personal. It's an attempt to see what this city was like for my great grandparents, for my grandparents, and for my parents. It's an attempt to understand why a family in Louisiana sold their home and moved to LA, and what kind of city was awaiting them when they got there.

Thanks for following along on my journey.

Los Angeles Municipal Airport - A History of Flight

In SimCity 4, there are two types of ports; seaport and airport. The main goal of the game is to expand your population with a proper balance of residential, commercial, and industrial zones. Roads and electricity are necessary for these spaces to develop, but city planners will also run into growth caps without building cap busters. Essentially, everything that isn't a zone or a road is a cap buster.

The seaport should be attached to an industrial zone, farmland being the cheapest industrial zone to build. I've already written about the building of LA's seaport, and one of the county's biggest agricultural exports. The seaport also needs to be placed partially on water, and not just on any grade of beach. In my LA Harbor article I talk about the money that went into preparing San Pedro, before building any of the structures. Between the Southern Pacific freight trains and the freighters docking at the Port of Los Angeles, tons of oranges and other goods were shipped around the country.

In the SimCity model, industrial areas (farms and factories) produce goods that need to be shipped. Trucks are the least efficient, and clog traffic. Trains and seaports can handle higher volumes of goods, wish will inspires more industry to move in.

Commercial areas (retail areas and office buildings) operate the exact opposite way. Whereas goods need to be shipped as quickly and as efficiently as possible, commercial areas form at the places where traffic is clogged. Not gridlock, but retail only works if there are plenty of customers to lure into your shop.

At the turn of the century, Los Angeles underwent an extreme real estate boom. Culver City, Huntington Beach, wealthy men developed former farmland and sold off houses by the lot. With a real estate boom comes the need for more jobs, and the farms need to turn to factories while the retail shops turn to offices.

The transition from farms to factories is fairly simple. The factories can provide more jobs and churn out more goods, and with the air pollution caused by factories the city instantly becomes undesirable for farmers.

With retail shops and offices, it's a bit more complicated. Your city needs middle class citizens before it can offer middle class jobs, which requires an education system amongst other things.

Once you have an office center set up, the accoutrements that come with being a commercial center start to come all at once, as it did in Los Angeles. In 1921 Los Angeles got it's first radio station, KQL which could send out programming to the masses paid for by companies wishing to get their advertising to the masses.

Of course, if you wanted to sell your company's goods in other cities, you needed to be able to take meetings in other cities. Passenger train stations had been present in LA since the 1880s, but after the first World War passenger air travel became the desirable way for executives to travel.

The land where the airport would be built was originally a land grant known as Rancho Sausal Redondo. Much of the land was used for cattle and sheep grazing, and later for wheat and barley. In the 1920s, a small portion of the land was made into a makeshift airstrip for pioneer aviators. In 1927 a group of Inglewood citizens pushed for the development of a major airport, lead by Harry Culver (who developed Culver City) as well as others.

In July of 1927, real estate agent William Mines, representing the owner of the ranch, offered 640 acres to be turned into an airport for the city. This airport was known as Mines Field, and Charles Lindberg flew in the first passenger plane with Will Rodgers as a passenger.

In 1928 the Los Angeles City Council approved the site as the official airport of Los Angeles, and on 1929 the airport opened Hangar one, and on June 7th 1930 the whole airport was officially dedicated.

Los Angeles Airport dedication, photo credit LAPL

Hangar one still stands, as it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The building cost the city $35,000 and was leased to Curtis Wright Flying Service. You can see the crowd that gathered for the dedication getting a flyover from a fleet of biplanes.

Earlier photo of the dedication, photo credit LAPL

 Los Angeles Municipal Airport, as it was then named, hosted the National Air Races. The 1933 race was won by James R. Wendell in the Wendell-Williams "44". The model 44 was featured in the 1939 movie Tail Spin produced by 20th Century Fox starring Alice Feye, Constance Bennett, and Nancy Kelly as female aviators.

The city purchased the airport in 1937, making a rectangle of land twenty miles from downtown part of Los Angeles. Commercial flights would not begin until 1946. In the meantime, it was a significant airstrip in a city which had the likes of Howard Hughes developing aircraft.

Los Angeles International Airport is now one of the busiest in the world, but in 1928 it was just a site for hobbyists to get together and dream of a world where flight was commonplace.

The Hollywood Canteen - Helping The War Effort

The intent of this blog was always personal, a place for me to record the history of the LA I read about on the internet. It's a weblog in the truest sense, like a captain's log on a sci-fi series. Today's entry has been written about before, and probably more thoroughly done, elsewhere. Before this afternoon, I never knew that a building I had been in many times before, Amoeba Records, sat on the site of one of World War II era Hollywood's most important night spots.

1451 Cahuenga Blvd. was originally the spot of a livery stable. That stable became a nightclub fittingly called the Old Barn, and with a war on in 1942 it reopened as the Hollywood Canteen. The canteen had sister outfits in New York featuring Broadway stars and in London. Much like the USO provided entertainment for soldiers abroad, the idea of the canteens was to give soldiers on leave an experience they'd never forget.



Just by showing up in uniform, soldiers were given a free meal, and the chance to dance with beautiful women. At the Hollywood Canteen soldiers got to meet movie stars, chat with them, get an autograph, maybe even get a dance and a kiss. You see, the whole thing was run by celebrities volunteering their services.

Servicemen chatting up a pair of starlets. Photo credit LAPL

The founding members were actor John Garfield and actress Bette Davis. The head of the Music Corporation of America Jules Stein headed up the finance committee. They received generous funding from Ciro's Nightclub founder Harry Cohn, who was also the head of Columbia Pictures.

Bette Davis, looking as ravishing as ever. Photo credit LAPL

Davis made a good career playing a mean girl for Warner Bros. She won Academy Awards for Dangerous and Jezebel, and was nominated every year from 1938 to 1942. Forty-two was a big year for Davis, as she became heavily involved in the war effort. Before starting the night club, she once sold $2 million in war bonds in two days. 

Cutting a cake dedicated to the Russian Army. Photo credit LAPL

The clubs were open to all allied soldiers, even if it was mostly American servicemen who frequented them. Here we see a cake dedicated to "Our Gallant Russia" on their 26th anniversary. Bette Davis is preparing to cut the cake with three Russian soldiers and the chef looking on. The man in the suit is a Russian Counsel.

Brief history lesson: The Red Army was formed in 1918 as the communist combat groups of the Russian Revolution took over the country after the first World War. Russia remained an Allied Power in the second World War, and suffered the heavy bulk of the casualties. Clearly at this point, US-Russian relations were just fine. 

It wasn't until after the war and Russia declared they wanted to create the Eastern Bloc because European countries kept trying to invade them that communism became identified as this huge evil power trying to take over the world. This photo is from 1944, two years later the Red Army would become the Soviet Army. 

Soldiers getting autographs. Photo credit, LAPL

The lines were long to get in, and you'd have to wait in line for your meal, wait in line to get an autograph. Still, it's hard to be cynical about the women of Hollywood volunteering their time to try and help the war effort in whatever little way they could. 

The Hollywood Canteen became so popular that in 1944 Warner Bros made a film called the Hollywood Canteen starring Betty Davis. The year before, United Artists made a film called Stage Door Canteen, the name of the New York counterpart. This musical was shown on KCET this past weekend as part of their Cool Classics series, inspiring this post. You can watch the film below. 

The newsreel that I lead with was shown with the film, as the Classic Cool series always accompanies the film with a cartoon, newsreel, and music video to give the piece context.

The cartoon this week was a Superman serial. There were seventeen films produced, first by Fleischer Studios and then by Famous Studios which succeeded Fleischer. The Fleischer brothers had made the animated feature Gulliver's Travels that came up in my entry on Paramount (there's a picture there of Gulliver's opening at the Paramount Theater downtown). Paramount released the Superman films, which during the Famous Studios period became propaganda films showing Superman besting Hitler and Nazi soldiers. You can watch the last of these short animated films, Secret Agent, here:

The Orange, the California Ambassador

As an English major, one of the classes I took at the University of California was on the history of the English language. Etymologies of English words are often fascinating, watching the words pass from one language to the next. It's said that nothing rhymes with orange, and part of the reason for that is the word comes to English with a Persian origin.

The citrus fruit we know as orange is the sweet variety (there's also a bitter orange), and it's an ancient hybrid of a Pomelo and a Mandarin. The orange was originated in Southeast Asia, and are believed to have been cultivated in China in 2500 BC. In many languages it's known as the Chinese Apple, but the English refer to it by Persian name.

Many English words for food come from Old French, because when the Normans invaded England in 1066 they made French the language of the court and the words they used for food became the dominant word in English. The English were still the ones raising the food, which is why we have disparities like cow/beef, pig/pork, deer/mutton.

The Persian word for orange is narang, just like naranja in Spanish. This makes sense considering most of Spain was occupied by Arabian Muslums from the 8th to the 15th centuries. Before the word enters English, it gained a from vowel in Old Occitan, spoken in Catalonia and Southern France. They called it auranja, which became aurange or orrange in Northern France and Southern England.

Valencia, Spain was in Muslim occupied Spain and became known for its sweet oranges. Orange trees are ubiquitous in the region, and the industrial center on the coast is known as the Orange Blossom Coast.

William Wolfskill acquired land from the Mexican government in 1831, and started planing grapevines. Wolfskill also sold lemons and oranges to gold miners, beginning Southern California's vine and citrus industries almost singlehandedly.

He owned farmland all over the southland, and is credited with coming up with the Valencia Orange varietal (named for the city in Spain) on his farm in Santa Ana. The hybrid was later sold to the Irvine Ranch, who made it's cultivation a top priority.

Orange Crate Label

Oranges, and their association with sunshine and health became part of the myth used to sell Southern California as the area prepared for a real estate boom. In the late 1880s, many of the orange growers formed cooperatives (cooperatives are common in farming so everyone gets a fair price for their product) as seen on this label for the Redland Cooperative Fruit Association.

Higher levels of organization would mean better bargaining power, and as such the Southern California Fruit Exchange was founded in Claremont.

Nice to see a little color on the blog for a change, no? The navel orange was the other big variety grown in the area. The navel orange had been imported into the United States in 1870 from Bahia, Brazil. The Portuguese import was categorized by the department of agriculture, then sent to California and Florida. Navels are more common as a table fruit, whereas Valencias are juicers.

Claremont was identified mostly as a college town even back then, and you can see the building on the label is labeled College Heights Orange and Lemon association. From there to Southern California Fruit Exchange. By 1905, it represented 45% of the California citrus industry, and dropped Southern from it's name. In 1908 it became Sunkist Growers, Inc.

You can see the orange wrapped in cellophane labeled Sunkist on both the labels. Sunkist became an umbrella for these collected exchanges. Sunny Heights grown in Redlands and packed by the Redlands fruit co-op. College Heights "Washington" Navels, packed in the Claremont, California packing house and sold by the San Antonio Fruit Exchange. Let's check out one of these packing plants.

Citrus packing house in Covina. Photo credit LAPL

They don't look particularly happy, but at least there's plenty of natural light. All the female packers have their own crate, and they're stuffing them with oranges off the line. The label says Florencia, and the crate is stamped with Sunkist Oranges. A closer look at the label, since they're such fun works of art.

Valencia oranges, Damerel-Allison Association, in Covina, California. 

The name Sunkist was a version of sun-kissed, but made unique so it's easier to copyright. Much like the Sci-Fi channel becoming Syfy. This bit of branding was done by the ad agency Lord & Thomas founded in 1873 in Chicago which is still in business today.

Sunkist had to find new ways to get people to buy oranges year round. One such way was the heavy promotion of orange juice, which became the second most purchased drink at soda fountains only to Coca-Cola. Here's one of their early magazine ads, informing readers to look for the official Sunkist juicer at their local soda fountain.

Ads asked consumers to take the daily orange, eaten or drank, and went heavy on the vitamin content and health benefits. Lemon juice was promoted as a hair tonic. Lemonade was healthy! Have an orange before bed! California had a ton of oranges, and a great orange packaging machine. Now it just needed the rest of the country to by them by the ton.

When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, there were two places inside where visitors could buy Sunkist orange juice. There was the Sunkist Citus House on Main Street serving fresh squeezed orange juice and lemonade, as well as Sunkist, I presume in Adventureland.

The Sunkist Citrus House lasted until 1997, when it became the Gibson Girl Ice Cream Parlor. Sunkist, I Presume became the Bengal Barbecue in 1990. The Citrus House also featured orange cheesecake and lemon meringue pies. All the orange juice was freshly squeeze in front of the guests with one of the machines featured in the ad, which did most of the squeezing work but still had to be fed one at a time by hand. The lemonade came from concentrate, too easy to have a bad batch when you're making lemonade.

Most kids today know Sunkist for the soda bottled by 7-Up/RC Cola. Thanks to aggressive marketing around the turn of the century through to the 50s, oranges were as closely associated with California as movies. Florida has taken over the orange crown, but the orange was California's main game too once upon a time. It created jobs for thousands, it gave us something to ship from that new port in San Pedro, and it cemented orange juice's association with health and vitality.

And because the orange and California were so closely linked, California became associated with health and vitality. Millions moved out west on that promise of a healthier lifestyle. All because of good marketing.