Salads, Salinas and Steinbeck

Editor’s Note:  This is the second of two columns from a recent trip to California. Originally planned to appear on Dec. 22, it was held for a Christmas column.

SALINAS, Calif. — Those who read the note at the end of my Dec. 8 column – “Next: The World’s Salad Bowl and the National Steinbeck Center” – may have wondered what salad had to do with John Steinbeck.

  The connection is that northern California’s Salinas Valley, “the world’s salad bowl,” is where the Nobel Prize-winning author was born and raised.

  Steinbeck has been my favorite writer since junior high school. I went from Hardy Boys mysteries to “The Grapes of Wrath.” What made me take Steinbeck’s masterpiece home from the library instead of “The Secret of the Old Mill” or “The Missing Chums” is long forgotten. Perhaps an older kid or a teacher recommended it. Whatever the reason, that book changed my life.

  It was the first time I read a book and found myself pausing to re-read passages because they were so beautifully written. Steinbeck’s books made me want to be a writer. Without them, I might never have worked for a newspaper.

  Last month I finally made it to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Salinas is 60 miles from San Jose, where my wife and a friend and I had gone for a Boise State University football game. We took Amtrak from San Jose to Salinas. At a museum next to the the train station,  we were treated to an unexpected history lesson about the Salinas Valley,

  The valley’s climate is perfect for growing vegetables – lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and tomatoes among others. If you had salad with your dinner last night, chances are it came from the Salinas Valley. Over half of the lettuce sold in U.S. supermarkets is grown there.

  The valley also was conducive to dairy farming in its early days. So conducive that too much milk was produced. The excess was used to make a mild white cheese. A local land baron, David Jacks, cornered the market on it. Jacks lived 19 miles from Salinas, in Monterey, Calif. Today we know the cheese as a staple of Mexican cuisine, Monterey Jack.

  The train station is a short walk from the Steinbeck Center and the author’s boyhood home.  Billed as “one of the largest literary museums in the United States dedicated to a single author,” the center opened in 1998 to honor Salinas’s most famous native son and “to create a forum for his writings and one that would inspire and launch successful literacy and educational programming.”

  Large and spacious, the center is home to priceless Steinbeck artifacts – his passports, pipes, glasses, checkbooks, letters, manuscripts, collections of his books, photographs, displays devoted to his books and – this one absolutely knocked me out – Rocinante.

  For those unfamiliar with Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel, “Don Quixote,” Rocinante was the name of Don Quixote’s horse. It was also the name of the truck Steinbeck drove and lived in with his dog  while traveling the U.S. on a journey that provided material for his last book, “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” 

  There in the center, gleaming greenly with a camper shell on its bed, was Rocinante. Not a replica, but the real thing – Steinbeck’s fully restored1960 GMC pickup truck, complete with a replica of Charley seated on the passenger seat. At risk of repeating myself, priceless.

  The center isn’t merely a repository of oddments. Visitors learn a good deal about its honoree as a person. Surprisingly for someone who would go on to become world famous, he was shy as a boy and young man, seldom if ever going to parties or other social events. His family lived in a Victorian home in the city of Salinas, but he worked on farms and as a hod carrier and ditch digger.

  The Victorian home where he grew up has been restored as The Steinbeck House, a restaurant and gift shop. All of the waitresses who work there are Steinbeck fans and volunteers.

  Our waitress shared couple of stories about the author as a boy, describing him as “a handful.” He piqued the ire of a local farmer by skinny dipping in his water tank. One of his memorable pranks was tying up a friend in his basement, then forgetting and leaving him there all day. Only when the Steinbecks were having dinner that evening and heard strange noises emanating from their basement did he sheepishly remember. 

  Asked when he started to write, he said he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t write. Success didn’t come easily, however. He acquired a sizable collection of rejection letters. He and his first wife worried about money, of which they had very little.

 “Tortilla Flat,” his book about a group of hard-drinking paisanos in Monterey following World War I, changed that. His first best seller, it ended his days of poverty. Seeking privacy from well meaning but intrusive admirers, he built a fence around his property and named it Garlic Gulch.

  In all, he wrote 33 books, many of them a joy to read. But if there’s one Steinbeck book you absolutely should read, it’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” 

  Ironically, its author had reservations about how good it was. Ironic because it sold over 15 million copies, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and more than 80 years after its publication remains high on the lists of great American novels.

  So it wasn’t just some so-so book that changed my life. Thank you, Mr. Steinbeck, for writing it. And thanks to the National Steinbeck Center for helping me get to know you better.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.