Happy Sunday.
Here are a few stories you missed in the California Sun over the last week.
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Sun sampler
1
The Big Sur coast.
In 1970, a former Press Democrat reporter named Don Engdahl walked the entire California coast, from Oregon to Mexico. In dispatches tapped out on borrowed typewriters, he gushed over the wild Lost Coast — “you must go there to believe” it — and the Edenic, soft sands of San Diego. But no section of coast impressed him as much as Big Sur, which he described as perfect. “The Big Sur area is, briefly, truly magnificent country,” he wrote. Here’s a bucket list of nine must-see destinations. 👉 Lonely Planet
2
Last week, the Los Angeles podcaster Amber Nelson recounted on Twitter how she was invited to a friend’s house for dinner and, later that night, was asked for $20 to pay for it. “This is weird, right?” she asked. The tweet set off a lively discussion, as others shared experiences with unexpected bills. In her newsletter, the S.F. Chronicle food writer Soleil Ho asked readers if billing dinner guests is really a thing. The responses, she tweeted later, destroyed her faith in humanity.
3
A composite image from the Alabama Hills.
Last year, a popular camping recommendation site created an algorithm to sort through visitor reviews of 45,000 campgrounds in the U.S. It crunched data on the number, quality, length, and character of reviews and spit out a ranking of the top 10 American campgrounds. The No. 1 California destination: the Alabama Hills, a Martian landscape of jumbled boulders at the foot of the eastern slopes of the Sierra. The Dyrt
Pictured above, the Central Valley photographer Micah Diele brought a space suit with him on an Alabama Hills camping trip. He also cut a fun short film, “The Final Frontier.” YouTube (~1:30)
4
TV reporter: “You see Hoover Street here, officials say it’s one of the most dangerous streets in all of Los Angeles and now … “
Crash!
With timing so perfect it seemed staged, the KTLA reporter Gene Kang was delivering a live segment last Thursday about a deadly hit-and-run collision in South Los Angeles when two vehicles collided directly behind him. One of the motorists fled. YouTube (~1 min)
5
Gilberto Godoy Jr., via L.A. Taco
There’s a part of Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, where the sound of the city is roosters crowing. When Griffith Compton donated his property to the county in 1888, he stipulated that a part of it be set aside for agricultural use. Known as Richland Farms, it’s now home a thriving cowboy culture, including the descendants of Black families who migrated from the rural South and Latinos who arrived from rural Mexico. The photographer Gilberto Godoy Jr. produced a photo essay on a nonprofit working to revive Compton’s ranchero roots with a new multicultural equestrian center. L.A. Taco
6
Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe at the Tiffany Club in Hollywood on Nov. 19, 1954.
Bettman Archive, via Getty Images
In 1955, Ella Fitzgerald was struggling to land nightclub gigs in Los Angeles. Marilyn Monroe, a fan, told the club owners at Mocambo that if they booked Fitzgerald for 10 days in a row, Monroe would show up every night. “Ella got booked, and Marilyn was true to her word,” said Geoffrey Mark, a Fitzgerald biographer. On opening night, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland reportedly also showed up. The friendship of Fitzgerald and Monroe was featured in an article on “5 stories of sisterhood and support.” Washington Post (gift article)
7
Scenic Yreka was once named the State of Jefferson capital.
Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images
James Pogue, a journalist who has written extensively on rural American resistance, looked into the secessionist movement brewing north of Sacramento:
“The Jefferson project is sometimes invoked as a gentle nod to regional solidarity — the local NPR network is called Jefferson Public Radio — but it has increasingly come to signify a defiantly conservative strain of politics. To others, Jefferson represents something more insidious: a barely concealed desire to carve an ethnostate out of the only part of California where whites still constitute a majority.” Harper’s Magazine
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