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Wallis and the Prince of Wales

IN 1964 A SAN DIEGO INVENTOR named James Tanner caused a major stir at the National Association of Broadcasters’ meeting in Chicago, where he planned to demonstrate a ratings truck capable of capturing the tuning of televisions that it passed on the street.

The truck, he claimed, could monitor up to 3,500 TVs every thirty minutes while moving at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour, giving new meaning to the notion of a ratings sweep.

Tanner had to cancel his demonstration, however, because he couldn’t get the truck to work. The idea died.

Erik Larson “Watching Americans Watch TV” The Atlantic Monthly March 1992

ON THE OUTSKIRTS of just about any city in America is a place like National City, just a few minutes from uptown San Diego. Nasty City, the residents call it. It’s the kind of place that reassures you if you’ve been getting paranoid about America’s impotence. When you begin to think that the Cuban Coast Guard might just decide to capture everything south of Illinois.

National City will take care of that for you if you just walk into any saloon on the boulevard, where you’ll notice that people can file steel on their whiskers and that most of them resemble Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. If you re feeling suicidal, you don't have to do anything terribly stupid like dumping on the U.S. of A. Just try poor-mouthing the San Diego Chicken.

If you watch and listen to the image makers and communicators in the media centers of New York, Washington and Hollywood, you can get a crazy head from an impression of America gone soft. But just travel to the outskirts of the big city and discover that it hasn’t all gone the way of mud flaps and running boards.

Ray Wood was a lawyer in National City, a young guy with busted teeth who looked like a beanbag chair and dressed like an all-night poker game at the Elks Lodge. He looked like the kind of guy who checked the coin chutes of pay phones, and just automatically felt under couch cushions.

Ray Wood wasn’t one of those uptight lawyers that cops distrust, one of those three-piece suiters forever checking to see if his fly’s unzipped. Ray Wood never checked and it was never zipped. He slouched into his office at the end of a tough day in court, and literally hung his coat on the floor.

The office looked like one of those prefab Quonset huts in Tijuana where you can buy Mexican insurance to cover your booze-soaked Ensenada run. There was a sign on the wall saying: Bless the Irish. The cops figured that anyone like this has to be straight, so they trusted him.

Joseph Wambaugh Lines and Shadows 1984

IN EARLY CALIFORNIA when night came, if no house was near, the traveller staked out his horse, often tying the rope to his own arm, that he might be awakened if the horse was startled by a wild beast, spread upon the ground the huge leather flaps which in those days loosely covered the saddle tree, rolled himself in his blanket, and lay down to sleep on the leather.

In San Diego County, I believe, it was the custom to guard against the approach of rattlesnakes by surrounding this couch with the horsehair rope which is used to stake out a horse. This, made ingeniously with the manes and tails of horses, is very rough, the ends of the hairs sticking out all over it, and these, it is said, the snake dislikes, as they probably irritate his skin; and feeling them, he turns aside.

Charles Nordhoff California: A Book for Travellers and Settlers 1872

MABs — MEDICALLY APPLICABLE BIOCHIPS — were to be the first practical product of the biochip revolution, the incorporation of protein molecular circuitry with silicon electronics. Biochips had been an area of speculation in the literature for years, but Genetron hoped to have the first working samples available for* FDA testing and approval within three months.

They faced intense competition. In what was coming to be known as Enzyme Valley — the biochip equivalent of Silicon Valley — at least six companies had set up facilities in and around La Jolla.

Some had started out as pharmaceutical manufacturers hoping to cash in on the products of recombinant DNA research. Nudged out of that area by older and more experienced concerns, they had switched to biochip research. Genetron was the first firm established specifically with biochips in mind....

Her name was Candice Rhine. What she did was accept advertising for the La Jolla Light. She approved of [Vergil’s] Volvo sportscar and she approved of his living quarters, a two-bedroom second-floor condominium four blocks from the beach in La Jolla. He had purchased it at a bargain price six years ago — just out of medical school — from a UCSD professor who had departed to Ecuador shortly after to complete a study on South American Indians....

[Edward] took the La Jolla Village Drive exit and wandered down Torrey Pines Road into the city. Modest and very expensive homes vied for space with three- and four-story apartment buildings and condominiums along curving, sloping streets. Bicyclists and the perennial joggers wore brightly colored jumpsuits to ward off the cool night air; even at this hour of the night, La Jolla was active with strollers and exercisers.

He found a parking space with little difficulty and deftly pulled the Volkswagen in. Locking the door, he sniffed the sea air and wondered if he and Gail could afford to move. The rent would be very steep, the commute would be long. He decided he wasn’t that concerned with status. Still, the neighborhood was nice — 410 Pearl Street, not the best the town had to offer, but more than he could afford, now at least....

Edward drove to the La Jolla Museum of Modern Art and walked across the concrete to a payphone near a bronze drinking fountain. Fog drifted in from the ocean, obscuring the cream-plastered Spanish lines of the Church of St. James by the Sea and beading on the leaves of the trees....

[H]e made the long drive to North Torrey Pines Road, past the Salk Institute with its spare concrete architecture, past the dozens of new and resurrected research centers which made up Enzyme Valley, surrounded by eucalypti and the new hybrid fast-growing conifers whose ancestors had given the road its name.

Greg Bear Blood Music 1985

AS A RECENT GRADUATE of the University of California, San Diego, I was pleasantly surprised to see my school reviewed in The American Spectator. Mr. Norden’s description of life at UCSD is accurate, and I was glad to see that it was not stigmatized as a pinko-leftist university. Like any major university, UCSD has its leftist element. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of students see this minority for what it is — a bunch of irrelevant, loudmouthed, sixties rejects....

— Timothy Milauskas UCSD, Class of 1990 Muir College (Yes, the easy one) Bostony Massachusetts “Correspondence” The American Spectator July 1992

TOBY: I FIRST STARTED DOING DRUGS when I was fourteen. Mostly, it was soft stuff — smoking dope, alcohol, and amphetamines. There was a group of seven or eight of us. We’d sit out on a bank behind the junior high school, smoke dope, drop pills, drink liquor, and talk about sex, music, and sports. That was a wonderful time of life....

I figured all the horror stories I’d heard were just teachers and parents using scare tactics.... I was curious. So I started using heavier drugs. By this time I was sixteen, and pretty soon I was doing drugs five, six days a week....

My best friend was a guy named Tom, and he was pretty wild. He was doing drugs faster and harder than I was, and he knew how to play all the angles. Pretty soon, he started dealing, and that opened up a whole new world for both of us. He teamed up with this guy named Joseph, who was a graduate student at San Diego State, and a couple of times a month they’d make a cross-border run into Tijuana and bring back huge quantities of marijuana and cocaine. They were selling it to street dealers out of Joseph’s apartment, and making a profit of about two hundred percent. They’d invest one thousand or two thousand dollars, and in a single afternoon would have four thousand or five thousand dollars in cash.

Now we not only had an abundance of drugs, we had lots of money too. Tom would stuff my pockets full of twenties and tell me to go spend it. The irony is that we were much more scared of our parents finding us with all that cash than we were of getting caught by the police. We had to spend everything. If our parents found that much money lying around, they’d know what was going on. I mean, how do two sixteen-year-old kids explain three thousand dollars’ worth of pocket change? Mostly, we’d spend it on perishable items, because we couldn’t bring hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes and stereo equipment into the house. So we’d buy Dom Perignon by the case and huge quantities of cocaine, and then we’d throw parties under the railroad tracks at Torrey Pines. It’s amazing how ten teenage kids can spend three thousand dollars in a single night, and having nothing to show for it except blistered nostrils and nasty hangovers.

Tim Wells and William Triplett Drug Wars: An Oral History from the Trenches 1992

WHEN SAN DIEGO'S RICK SINGER ran for Congress, he handed out “WasterCard Fool’s Gold Card.” Although Singer’s congressional bid failed, his mock MasterCard joined several others Singer now markets through Poli-gags Co. They include the “Hasta La Vista Card” (which looks like a Visa card but carries the slogan “say adios to your dollars”) and “The American Excess Card.”

Singer says his intent is to irk the government. But the

credit-card companies aren’t laughing. Visa has just filed suit.

“Corridor Talk” Adweek October 31,1988

OUR BOYS NEVER HAIR OUT. The black panther has black feet. Black feet on the crumbling black panther. Pan-thuh. Mee-dah. Pam Stacy, 16 years old, a cute girl here in La Jolla, California, with a pair of orange bell-bottom hip-huggers on, sits on a step about four steps down the stairway to the beach and she can see a pair of revolting black feet without lifting her head. So she says it out loud, “The black panther.”

Somebody farther down the stairs, one of the boys with the major hair and khaki shorts, says, “The black feet of the black panther.”

“Mee-dah,” says another kid. This happens to be the cry of a, well, underground society known as the Mac Meda Destruction Company. “The pan-thuh.”

“The poon-thuh.”

All these kids, seventeen of them, members of the Pump House crowd, are lollygagging around the stairs down to Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California, about 11 a.m., and they all look at the black feet, which are a woman’s pair of black street shoes, out of which stick a pair of old veiny white ankles, which lead up like a senile cone to a fudge of tallowy, edematous flesh, her thighs, squeezing out of her bathing suit, with old faded yellow bruises on them, which she probably got from running eight feet to catch a bus or something. She is standing with her old work-a-hubby, who has on sandals: you know, a pair of navy-blue anklet socks and these sandals with big, wide, new-smelling tan straps going this way and that, for keeps. Man, they look like orthopedic sandals, if one can imagine that. Obviously, these people come from Tucson or Albuquerque or one of those hincty adobe towns. All these hincty, crumbling black feet come to La Jolla-by-the-sea from the adobe towns for the weekend. They even drive in cars all full of thermos bottles and mayonnaisey sandwiches and some kind of latticework wooden-back support for the old crock who drives and Venetian blinds on the back window.

“The black panther.” “Pan-thuh.”

“Poon-thuh.”

“Mee-dah.”

Nobody says it to the two old crocks directly. God, they must be practically 50 years old....

[T]he Pump House itself [is] a concrete block, 15 feet high, full of machinery for the La Jolla water system....

The surfers around the Pump House use that word, mysterioso, quite a lot. It refers to the mystery of the Oh Mighty Hulking Pacific Ocean and everything. Sometimes a guy will stare at the surf and say, “Mysterioso.” They keep telling the story of Bob Simmons’ wipeout, and somebody will say “mysterioso.” ...

The Mac Meda Destruction Company is ... an underground society that started in La Jolla about three years ago. Nobody can remember exactly how; they have arguments about it. Anyhow, it is mainly something to bug people with and organize huge beer orgies with. They have their own complete, bogus phone number in La Jolla. They have Mac Meda Destruction Company decals. They stick them on phone booths, on cars, any place....

But the big thing is the parties, the “conventions.” Anybody can join, any kid, anybody can come, as long as they’ve heard about it, and they can only hear about it by word of mouth. One was in the Sorrento Valley, in the gulches and arroyos, and the fuzz came, and so the older guys put the young ones and the basket cases, the ones just too stoned out of their gourds, into the tule grass, and the cops shined their searchlights and all they saw was tule grass, while the basket cases moaned scarlet and oozed on their bellies like reptiles and everybody else ran down the arroyos, yelling Mee-dah....

[Phil Edwards] may be an old guy, he is 28 years old, but he and Bruce Brown, who is even older, 30, and John Severson, 32, and Hobie Alter, 29, never haired out to the square world even though they make thousands. Hair refers to courage. A guy who “has a lot of hair” is courageous; a guy who “hairs out” is yellow.

Tom Wolfe The Pump House Gang 1968

THE LAST THING I REMEMBER was walking along Broadway in downtown San Diego, near Horton Plaza. Interesting area. Here’s this beautiful multilevel shopping mall with brightly colored architecture and lots of near trendy shops — fronted by a little park filled with dozens of down-and-outers.

Anyway, it was midmorning and I’d just hiked here from my place in Del Mar, about twenty-five miles up the coast. Don’t know why, on a Wednesday, I had this urge to see preoccupied men and women in proper business attire scurry in and out of office buildings, or to cross streets crammed with cars, trucks, taxis, and buses. It usually happens about as often as Qaddafi goes to a bar mitzvah.

So, after locking my bike in front of the plaza, there I was, waiting to cross Fourth Avenue, surrounded by lots of the aforementioned wage slaves, three down-and-outers, and a young male Chicano with the world’s biggest and loudest dual-speaker Sony radio superglued to the side of his head.

That’s it.

Mike Sirota Bicycling through Space and Time 1991

THE NAVY ORDERED WIN SPENCER to San Diego in faraway California.

He was placed in charge of training cadets at North Island. The naval air station there had come about as a result of a joint Army and Navy board report; the training school was named Rockwell Field on July 20, 1917.... Potash fields of kelp were commandeered, and hangars, construction works buildings, bungalows, and offices were tastefully erected. On August 20, 1917, the War Department took complete control. On September 8 the Navy moved in, occupying two old buildings and the Curtiss seaplane hangar. There were 413 officers, 144 cadet officer trainees, and 1576 civilian enlistees at North Island....

[T]he Spencers arrived in Los Angeles and then took the train on November 8, 1917, to San Diego, a pleasant, sleepy town of 100,000 people with a paradisiacal winter climate on the edge of the blue-gray Pacific. The palm trees reminded [Win’s wife] Wallis of Florida, but the colors were more subdued and delicate. Wallis and Win moved into the rambling Hotel del Coronado, a hodgepodge of Victorian gingerbread with rich African mahogany fixtures and a driver-equipped Otis cage elevator of ancient vintage. The semicircular dining room was handsome, and the rooms, including the Spencers’, looked over rolling lawns and dwarf palms to the sea.

While Win spent his days at offices downtown, Wallis looked for an apartment. Eventually, she found 104, the Palomar, 536 Maple Street, with a fine view of an imitation Spanish fountain patio and Balboa Park, which still had many signs of the big 1915 Exposition....

Win and Wallis moved often those months — an indication that they were restless and unhappy. They went back to the Hotel del Coronado, the second floor of which was commandeered as officer quarters by the Navy, and then to Pine Cottage, later renamed Redwood Cottage, at 1115 Flora Avenue. With its tiny, 12-foot-long living room, sun porch, and minuscule bedrooms and its quaint, gabled exterior, it was like a witch’s house in a Grimms’ fairy tale.

They went on to the slightly larger 1029 Encino Row and then to 1143 Alameda Street, their home for over three years. The cottage is virtually unaltered today. With a slanting, vaulted roof of heavy shingles, it stood on the corner of a quiet, sleepy intersection. The porch, darkened now with ivy and Virginia creepers, was in those days open to sunlight. The front door let the visitor into the side of the 34-foot living room with its vaulted, 16-foot ceiling and its high dormer window. To the left as one entered were British-style windows with window seats. The floors were fine hardwood, and the ceiling pitch was pine beamed. The small dining area to the right led to a Spanish-tiled kitchen with fir-wood closets, and there was a small but sunny barbecue yard. The furniture was all pinewood early California or oak and chintz quasi-British.

Wallis celebrated her twenty-second birthday on June 19, 1917....

[S]he began to make friends in San Diego, including Katherine Bigelow, whose husband had been killed in action in France; Rhoda Fullam, daughter of a naval officer later a rear admiral;

Mrs. Claus Spreckels, rich in land and sugar interests; young Marianna Sands; and Grace Flood Robert.

On November 11, 1918, the San Diego Union was delivered, along with the milk bottle, to the doorstep of Wallis’s house. She picked it up and read the news that the war had ended in Europe.

Hundreds of San Diegans ran from their homes in night attire, screaming and yelling. Wallis joined the crowd that rang bells, set off firecrackers, blew whistles, and danced as the sixty-piece U.S. Navy training camp band under Win’s command led a sailor parade carrying scores of flags through the streets, followed by the sailors’ band of the battleship Oregon. Win led the naval air servicemen, the California Women’s Army Corps, the Boy Scouts, the city employees, and the doughboys. By midnight the city had run out of confetti, and the still cheering crowds stripped the drugstores of talcum powder and shook it over one another....

On December 8, 1919, [Henry] Mustin took command of the air detachment, Pacific Fleet. He had moved to Coronado ahead of [his wife, also Wallis’s favorite cousin,] Corinne, who followed in mid-January 1920. Wallis rejoiced in Corinne’s presence in Coronado. Wallis also became a close friend of Lily, the attractive wife of John Henry Towers, known to everyone as Jack, one of the most dominating figures of the early years of naval aviation....

The Mustins, the Spencers, and the Towerses filled the long, blank evenings of naval-base life at the Hotel del Coronado playing bridge, bezique, and backgammon.

On April 7, 1920, a big event took place. The Prince of Wales was in San Diego with his cousin Louis Mountbatten on his way to Australia aboard the battle cruiser Renown. He arrived early in the morning and received the San Diego mayor, L. J. Wilde, and the governor of California, William E. Stephens, along with the press, on the boat deck. Addressed by Wilde as “Your Royal Highness,” he told him to “cut out that stuff,” in an odd, half-American, half-Cockney accent he had developed because he hated the plummy diction of the British upper classes.

Wallis must have been deeply galled by the fact that she was not invited to the elaborate luncheon held on board the battleship New Mexico in honor of the prince, followed by receptions aboard the Aroostook and the HMS Renown. The guests were taken out to the vessels by minesweeper....

Slim, short, goldenhaired, charming and informal, the young prince conquered San Diego at once. He came ashore with Mountbatten at 2:30 p.m., shook hands with the war veterans, and addressed some 25,000 people at the Stadium, while close to 70,000 thronged the sidewalks to watch him in the motorcade.

Wallis was in attendance with Win that night at the Hotel del Coronado for the mayoral ball. But in another major blow to her pride, she was not included on the banquet guest list. She and the Mustins were among the thousand guests who thronged the ballroom, which was hung with native California wildflowers and the British and American flags. The band of the USS New Mexico played current hits; a local adagio dance team performed exhibition waltzes and “the Whirlwind One-Step,” and the men in full-dress uniforms and girls in expensive gowns soon joined them on the floor, forming, according to the San Diego Union's somewhat overwrought society correspondent, “a scene of kaleidoscopic gaiety.”

Wallis only saw the prince far off, in Royal Navy tropical whites, shaking hundreds of hands. He left early, to go, according to some eyewitnesses, to Tijuana to sample the local pleasures. That was typical of him; he hated receptions and banquets and wanted only to enjoy life.

Charles Higham The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life 1988

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