Bad News: We’re No Longer the Nation’s Biggest Nuts
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By Peter SchragIt’s just a half-century since California was widely regarded as the nation’s cradle of kookiness. It was because of the sunshine, famously said Jesse Unruh, the “Big Daddy” speaker of the Assembly in the 1960s, that we grow so many fruits and nuts.
The evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, one of America’s first radio preachers, built her mega-church here; it was from Southern California that she reportedly vanished into the Pacific in 1926 and, claiming to have been kidnapped, mysteriously reappeared (in Mexico) a month later. The media, of course, ate it up.
California was the birthplace of the “Ham and Eggs” initiative, narrowly defeated at the polls in 1938, which promised a $30 check “every Thursday” to every unemployed Californian of