Posts by Mike McPhate

For most Californians, an outing to see the spring wildflowers involves driving an hour or two to preserves in the valleys, deserts, or foothills. But the flowers used to be everywhere. In 1847, the soldier Joseph Revere provided one of the earliest descriptions of the vast bloom within the Los Angeles basin: “In the plain itself,” he…

If you spot a large tree in San Diego’s Balboa Park, there’s a good chance it was planted by Kate Sessions. The pioneer botanist finalized a deal with San Diego on this week in 1892 to lease a plot of city parkland for a nursery. In exchange, she agreed to plant 100 trees a year…

Jackie Robinson, who emerged from a small house on Pepper Street in Pasadena to become an American icon, was born this week in 1919. Before he broke baseball’s color barrier, Robinson was an Army second lieutenant at Camp Hood in Texas. As recounted in “Jackie Robinson: A Biography,” on the evening of July 6, 1944,…

About 50 simple white crosses line a dusty road leading to a military post in the Mojave Desert. They’re not for soldiers killed in combat, but motorists who died in crashes along the 31-mile Fort Irwin Road linking the Barstow area and Fort Irwin National Training Center. The accidents have been blamed on the design of the…

L.N. Varon, a resident of Imperial Beach, was a collector of autographs, soliciting them routinely in letters to famous people. In 1983, he got an answer from Steve Jobs, who was known to be a reluctant autograph giver. His letter is pictured below, typed on stationery branded with the Apple computer letterhead and containing both the…

Search for “Agua Caliente tribal reservation” in Google Maps, and you’ll see a bizarre checkerboard design draped across Southern California’s Coachella Valley, pictured below. It’s not an error. The borders of the Agua Caliente reservation emerged as a byproduct of America’s westward expansion in the 19th century and the technological innovation that facilitated it: the railroad.…

Peer out to sea from the southernmost stretch of California coast, and you can catch a glimpse of four rocky isles. Many San Diegans are unaware of Mexico’s Islas Coronados, but their history and natural beauty are captivating. The rugged islands have attracted Mexican pirates, Russian otter hunters, Japanese fishermen, and American rumrunners. In 1933,…

In the early 1900s, the best way to cross the desert from San Diego to Arizona was by horse. Then a local businessman named Ed Fletcher had an idea: He proposed laying wooden planks across 7 miles of soft sand, a sort of beach boardwalk without the ocean. Joseph Lippincott, a prominent civil engineer, was quoted…

One of the University of California system’s 10 campuses is not like the others. Founded in 1965, the university at Santa Cruz was modeled on the “living and learning” environments of Oxford and Cambridge. Students and professors would eat, sleep, and study in close proximity at one of a number of small colleges spread across…

During a visit to Britain in 1982, President Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II discussed when she might visit the U.S. According to the royal biographer Robert Hardman, Elizabeth felt obligated to go to Washington, D.C. But she was thrilled to hear Reagan say, “Forget all that. Come to Hollywood.” On Feb. 26, 1983, she arrived aboard the…

The oldest house in Los Angeles County is encircled by a ring of aging mobile homes just off the 5 Freeway in the working-class city of Bell Gardens. Hidden from view and largely blocked off to the public, Casa de Rancho San Antonio contains the story of California. As historians tell it, the adobe structure was built…

California was once a rugby powerhouse. After a troubling series of deaths in American football — 18 high school and college players in 1905 alone — Stanford, UC Berkeley, and several other California campuses renounced the sport in favor of the English import: rugby. Berkeley’s president, Benjamin Wheeler, urged California’s high schools to join the transition, and…

In Northern California’s Shasta Cascade region, a rail line winds through the Upper Sacramento River canyon with a series of twirls and turns that seem inspired by rollercoasters. The highlight is the Cantara Loop, a nearly 360-degree pivot across the river that they used to depict on postcards. It’s gorgeous — surrounded by mountains and…

Early motorists used to fill their tanks at curbside pumps, a recipe for traffic that quickly proved untenable. The solution was the drive-in gas station, and they proliferated rapidly across American cities. By 1929, the U.S. Census counted 8,650 filling stations in California, many clustered along the streetscape of Los Angeles, where residents’ love affair…

The first ostriches arrived in Southern California in 1883, brought by a British naturalist named Charles Sketchley, who hoped to make his fortune supplying their feathers to the fashion industry. The long-necked birds transfixed locals, who began showing up at Sketchley’s property near Anaheim in large numbers. He started charging 50 cents for admission, kick-starting what…