In California Everything Old Is New Again (Because It's Not That Old To Begin With)

I was just looking through some old pictures from a trip to the East Coast a few years ago. There is so much history on the right coast of our country. It’s a little difficult for us “Left Coasters” to understand in a land where people are always trying to turn back time (or pull back and stretch in the case of our pretty faces) instead of embracing it.

Of course people in Europe, the Middle East and just about everywhere else on this globe will shake their heads when they read this. To them B.C. actually means ‘Before Christ’ instead of ‘Before Cable,’ the standard by which many of us judge the passage of time.

To illustrate my point, many of the photos I was looking at were of bridges, churches and battlefields and all had nifty plaques showing that they were all from the 1700s. It’s amazing and almost incomprehensible to me to look at something that was built when our country was founded, if not before. Out here in Southern California, we measure history by things like ‘this is where Jimmy Durante ordered a hot dog in 1952.’ Our historic buildings are old theaters, restaurants and spots where scenes from certain movies were filmed (and by old I mean just a hair older than my oldest pair of white socks).

We don’t have Civil War or Revolutionary War battlefields; we have fields where movies about the Civil and Revolutionary Wars were filmed. While we do have the famous California missions that dot our coastline, their ages pale in comparison to the settlements at Jamestown. We have no Plymouth Rock but we sure as heck have the Hollywood sign.

No matter what you consider history, as southern Californians, we have our own special type of it. I can’t say I’ve been to one of America’s first colonial taverns but I can probably show you the library where Charlie Chaplain once visited (silently of course) or where Clark Gable ate a pastrami sandwich on July 6, 1934.

But when all is said and done, there is one thing I’m sure of. The East Coast can’t brag about having the actual Brady Bunch house. And believe me, that is history no one can ever replace.