Green Gold

Salinas may be best known as the birthplace of Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck, but it’s been lettuce not literature that has driven the area’s economy. For nearly a century, the city and the 60-mile long Salinas Valley have been called “The Salad Bowl of the Nation” because more than half the lettuce eaten in the U.S. has been grown on those fertile fields. The cool climate is ideal for lettuce and allows three – sometimes four – crops a year. The growers in the 1920s learned how to pack head lettuce in ice so it could be shipped all the way to the East Coast, expanding the market dramatically. Head lettuce became known as “iceberg” because of that packing method, and it dominated the fresh vegetable business through the 1980s. After a bag was invented in 1989 that can keep cut vegetables fresh for several days, ready-to-eat bags of salad popped onto the market, changing eating habits, tripling the value of lettuce crops and creating new markets for vegetables that can be mixed together for inventive salads. The more delicate leaf lettuce surpassed iceberg in acreage and income in 2002, as Salinas continued to be the nation’s major supplier of lettuce and salads. Note: a failed experiment to send iced lettuce east via rail was featured in East of Eden, both the Steinbeck book and the movie.


(Salinas Valley lettuce field courtesy of Stones55)

Steinbeck Turnaround

(Photo: Main entrance of the Steinbeck Center in Salinas by beastandbean, all rights reserved.)

It’s been 40 years since novelist John Steinbeck died (Dec. 20, 1968) and 25 since he was fully recognized as a valuable part of Salinas’ history. For the latter half of Steinbeck’s life, he was persona non grata in his hometown, where his 1930s books were burned and banned, particularly for depictions of rich growers exploiting desperate workers during the Depression. After “The Grapes of Wrath” was published in 1939, Steinbeck was denounced by some as subversive. That anger lasted for years. “They want no part of me except in a pine box,” Steinbeck wrote in a letter in 1953. He was living in New York in 1962 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature, and didn’t return to Salinas until his ashes were ready for burial in the family plot. Sentiment changed by 1983, when a group of civic leaders and agribusinesses organized to raise millions to build the National Steinbeck Center. It opened in 1998 in tribute to the words of the now-favorite son.

John Steinbeck's Homes (part 1)

(Photo: John Steinbeck's birthplace in Salinas. Courtesy of the owner.)

John Steinbeck is the only Nobel laureate born and raised in Monterey County – to date, anyway. He was born on Feb. 27, 1902, in the gracious Victorian in Salinas that is now a shrine, owned by a nonprofit group that operates a restaurant and gift shop in the house. That was the Steinbecks' principal residence, with summers and holidays at a Pacific Grove cottage they built when John was an infant. John and his first wife, Carol, took over the cottage as their home during the Depression. They lived there from 1930 to 1936 while John wrote six of his first novels, supported by a $25-a-month allowance from his father, the county treasurer. John's first critically acclaimed work, "Tortilla Flat," was published in 1935; the subsequent celebrity helped their departure. John and Carol moved to Los Gatos in 1936.

John Steinbeck's Homes (part 2)

After John Steinbeck published his masterpiece "Grapes of Wrath" and won a Pulitzer Prize for literature, he and his wife Carol moved back to Pacific Grove in 1941. They separated soon afterwards and John moved to New York City. He married again, separated again, and moved back to the Steinbeck cottage at 147 11th Street in 1948. John met and married his third wife, Elaine, in Carmel in 1949 and they moved to New York. He turned the family cottage over to his sister, Beth Ainsworth, in the 1950s, returning for only brief visits before his death in 1968. A silver box containing his ashes arrived at the cottage on Christmas Eve that year and sat in the garden for two days before the memorial service at Point Lobos, then burial in a family plot in Salinas. After Mrs. Ainsworth died in 1992, the family kept the cottage and still uses it as a private home.

(Photo: John Steinbeck's cottage in Pacific Grove. Courtesy of the owner.)

Clint Eastwood at Ford Ord

(Photo: Eastwood in the Army. Photo found in the collection of Darren Allison, ownership not determined.)

Clint Eastwood was a young GI stationed at Fort Ord in 1951 when he explored Carmel, Pebble Beach, Monterey, and Salinas on his $75-a-month salary. He said in later interviews the he didn't plan to own much in those days, but after studying business administration and acting in Los Angeles, and working at a series of menial jobs, Clint played the "Rawhide" TV series in 1959 as young wrangler Rowdy Yates. With that acting money, he bought a weekend retreat in Pebble Beach, "a tiny house" across from the Monterey Peninsula Country Club, for $20,000. A stream of hit movies followed and Clint surpassed John Wayne as the biggest box office draw in Hollywood history. He bought bigger houses in Pebble Beach and Carmel, the Mission Ranch and other notable properties in Carmel, Carmel Valley, Carmel Highlands and Pebble Beach. He is now one of the principal owners of the Pebble Beach Company, its posh hotels and world-famous golf courses.