There was a time—maybe real, maybe just whispered about over campfires and canal banks—when the world's most glamorous airline, Pan Am, charted a course not just to Havana or Honolulu, but non-stop to Bakersfield and Pismo Beach. This was the age of jet-set optimism,...
By C. M. Halloran, Pacific Ethnohistory Quarterly, Spring 1979 In the spring of 1950, amid Cold War tension and California’s golden postwar optimism, a little-known Norwegian ethnographer named Rolf Thiegurdsen launched one of the most bizarre and forgotten...
Old Sparky: The Devilish Summer Spirit of Kern County Skate Culture There’s a certain time of year in the south end of the San Joaquin Valley when the sun turns the asphalt into a griddle, the air stands completely still, and even the shade feels like it’s given up....