Happy Birthday John Steinbeck

Today is John Steinbeck’s birthday. I grew up in Monterey, CA, which is part of Steinbeck country. He was a great writer (he won the Pulitzer and the Nobel for Literature) and a loyal native son. And, as a Monterey person, I kind of feel like he is part of me.

He wrote about many things in the area of my hometown. Cannery Row, along a part of the shoreline in Monterey, was immortalized in his book of the same name. Cannery Row is an important part of the geography of my childhood. I spent much of my childhood and teen years on Cannery Row. The carousel on Cannery Row was a kid hangout. The 812 Cinema on Cannery Row was where I watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday nights after doing a show (I was involved with community theatre during high school). You had to walk up a set of rickety stairs to get to the “cinema”–which consisted of a bunch of pillows lying on the floor in front of a smallish screen. The pillows, Monterey being a hippie town, all smelled like patchouli (possibly the worst smell ever). It was first come, first served for pillows. They also had some beat up chairs in the back, but those were for losers. The 812 burned down when I was away at college.

Doc, a character in Cannery Row, was based on Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts. Doc Ricketts was a marine biologist who had a lab on Cannery Row. One of his labs burned down in the 1930s, but he had another that survived into my high school years. By that time, it was owned by a theatre person who made it into a private club for theatre folks. We would go there after a doing a show and hang out and look at all the weird things in bottles around the dusty old place.

Cannery Row, as the name would imply, started out as a row of sardine canneries. Growing up I had friends whose families made a living from fishing and canning. Up until my college years, Cannery Row was still a street of old cannery buildings, some still working and others turned into different businesses. Monterey was and is a hippie town, so there were many bead stores, head shops, craft stores and restaurants that served sprouts on the Cannery Row of my childhood. Whenever I see sprouts on a salad, I think of Cannery Row (I’m not kidding). There were also tons of scuba divers walking around. Cannery Row, for whatever reason, was a great place to start a dive–so you could always count on bunches of people walking around half-in/half-out of their wetsuits.

In my college years it started to get extremely commercialized. I don’t really recognize it anymore–there are tons of tourist shops and chain restaurants–it’s sad to see how different it is.

One “newcomer” (I think it opened in the 1980s) that is actually really cool is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, considered by some to be the best aquarium in the world. When it first opened, it had a “petting” area where you could touch and pick up sea stars and other creatures like that. It was out in the open and I don’t remember much supervision. One day, I watched a toddler walk over, take out a sea star and plop it in his mouth. Just a couple of the legs were sticking out. The mom, unable to think straight, just started screaming. She didn’t try to get the creature out, she just screamed until a staff member ran over to help. I was young and stupid and knew nothing about toddlers, so I was laughing so hard at the whole situation that I wasn’t much help. Since then they’ve reorganized the exhibit so there are staff members all over the place and there are rules about who touches what and when.

Happy Birthday Mr. Steinbeck. Don’t swallow any sea stars wherever you are…