Posts by Mike McPhate

On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. The 42-year-old senator had just won the California primary, a crucial victory in his quest for the U.S. presidency. Supporters believed Kennedy could heal a nation torn by divisions of race and the Vietnam War. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and former Gov.…

Like pretty much every startup, the California Sun launched with a mix of sweat, borrowed money, and optimism. We recently passed the six-month mark, and the response has been encouraging enough that we’re doubling down with a redesign of the newsletter and website. We’ve partnered with the makers of Proof, an editorial suite aimed at…

Blend Burning Man and Nascar and you might get something like the art sculpture race held every Memorial Day weekend in Humboldt County. Known as the “triathlon of the art world,” the annual Kinetic Grand Championship challenges teams to race human-powered works of art across three days and 50 miles of sand, mud, pavement, and…

William Randolph Hearst not only ruled over a sprawling media empire. He wielded power as a congressman, a Hollywood heavyweight, and a real estate tycoon whose holdings were so vast that a magazine dubbed him New York City’s “number one realtor.” Naturally, he needed castle. If Hearst was among the 20th century’s most powerful men,…

An orangutan at the San Diego Zoo once gained national fame as a serial escape artist. Born at the zoo in 1971, Ken Allen outwitted zookeepers in three widely publicized breakouts from his enclosure during the 1980s. The shaggy, red-haired ape never went far. He simply wandered the grounds, as if a tourist, looking at the…

America’s first Black millionaire was an immigrant from the Virgin Islands who became one of California’s founding fathers. William Leidesdorff was born in 1810 to a Danish sugar planter and a Caribbean woman believed to be of African and Spanish descent. In his early 30s, he found his way to Alta California, then under Mexican rule, and…

Marijuana once fell from the sky in Yosemite. In December 1976, a drug smuggler’s plane ran into engine trouble over the park and crashed near a high-altitude lake about 10 miles from Yosemite Valley, killing its two pilots. Word got out to the valley’s community of so-called dirtbags, a ragtag group of outlaw rock climbers,…

1California’s Lost Coast is the longest stretch of undeveloped beachfront in the continental U.S. Highway 1 starts in Southern California and hugs the coast pretty much the entire the way north until petering out in Mendocino County. Why? Engineers building the road in 1919 found the coastal area between Mendocino and Humboldt counties so forbidding…

With floods, wildfires, and earthquakes, Californians have plenty to worry about. But don’t forget the raining lava. To be sure, the threats posed by California’s volcanoes are by no account imminent. But the terrifying rivers of lava now inching across Hawaii have been a reminder of how devastating they can be. California last experienced an…

In 1982, a Los Angeles truck driver named Larry Walters rigged 42 helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair, took a seat, and untethered the craft. He soared rapidly. At one point, the pilot of a passing airplane radioed that he saw a man in a lawn chair at 16,000 feet  —  3 miles  —  who…

Yuba City, about 35 miles north of Sacramento, is home to one of the largest Sikh populations in the world outside of the Indian state of Punjab. In the early 1900s, the first Punjabis immigrated to California, where they worked at lumber mills, farms, and the railroad. The most famous among them, Didar Singh Bains, arrived in…

1. San Francisco International Airport has a therapy pig. It’s become fairly common for volunteers to walk therapy dogs around terminals as a way to cheer up stressed-out travelers. But Lilou, a pink-nosed 3-year-old, is believed to be the world’s only airport therapy pig. She wears a variety of costumes and performs tricks, including waving…

Tucked in a grassy canyon along the Central Coast is a high school where students chop wood and tend livestock between their history and calculus classes. Doubling as a working farm, the campus differs from the typical American high school in another crucial respect: No one among the faculty or the roughly 90 students ever…

Two centuries ago, delivering mail across the icy Sierra Nevada was virtually impossible during the winter — until the arrival of a blonde-bearded Viking with piercing blue eyes and an uncommon fortitude. John Thompson had immigrated with his family from Norway when he was 10 years old. Enticed west by the gold fields of California, he settled…

There was a time in California when pretty much everybody went to the drive-in movie theater. Pioneered in New Jersey in 1933, the idea caught on quickly in warm, car-loving California. By the 1960s, more than 220 were operating across the state. The outdoor theater was conceived in part as a family-friendly alternative to the…

1. San Francisco and Oakland are the nation’s capitals of same-sex marriage. According to figures released in 2016, San Francisco had the highest rate of men marrying men, at 3.2 percent of marriages, and Oakland had the highest rate of women marrying women, at 2.1 percent of marriages. N.Y. Times Cast members performed the musical…

In California, a county, a bay, a university, and a state park all bear the name of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist whose fame was once regarded as second only to Napoleon. “Yet Humboldt,” writes Andrea Wulf, a Humboldt biographer, “is almost forgotten in the English-speaking world.” Born to wealth in 1769, Humboldt walked…

Two centuries ago, an estimated 10,000 grizzly bears roamed as rulers of the California wilderness. Then came the juggernaut of humankind known as the Gold Rush. Settlers who poured into California seeking riches killed the burly giants with abandon, first out of fear, then for bragging rights. By 1889, the grizzlies were already scarce. It…