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20 2 0 1 7 T R A V E L G U I D E T O C A L I F O R N I A California's lustrous reputation was tar- nished on the morning of April 18, 1906, when a massive earthquake rocked Northern California and leveled much of San Francisco; what the rolling, rumbling ground didn't knock down, the ensuing firestorm burned down. Some 3,000 people died. Now, it was San Francisco's turn to start over. San Francisco dramatized its recovery, and celebrated the new Panama Canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, with the splendidly showy Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. The Rise of Hollywood Just two years after that optimistic display, the nation plunged into World War I. After the war ended in 1918, still more migrants rushed to California. In 1920, Los Angeles (and much later San Diego and San Jose) surged past San Francisco in population. The orange groves and dusty byways of old Los Angeles began morphing into "LA"—more specifically, and more mythically, "Hollywood." Actors, writers, directors and producers streamed to Los Angeles, growing a quiet cottage industry of silent motion pictures into a technologically advanced business. Stars were born in a place that came to be called "the dream factory." Not a few of the Dust Bowl migrants who left the drought- stricken Midwest for California in the 1930s got their first impressions of their new home from the dream-weavers of Holly- wood. In the 1940s, creative people from Europe such as Billy Wilder and Thomas Mann, fleeing fascism and war to begin anew, lent the movies an Old World artistic sensibility. California's story since World War II has featured growth and more growth. Com- bined with in-country migration, global immigration made California the most pop- ulous state in the Union in 1962. A Center for Change From the 1960s on, California has been, in a positive sense, the most disruptive state in the nation. Student political activism, the hip counter-culture and early awakenings of the New Age movement found fertile ground in California. The in-season, sustainable, slow- food movement arguably took root fastest in California. American environmentalism in large part began in California, when Scottish immigrant John Muir founded the Sierra Club in San Francisco back in 1892 and took Presi- dent Theodore Roosevelt camping amid the natural wonders of Yosemite Valley in 1903. From the 1980s on, Silicon Valley has joined Hollywood as a creative lodestar for the whole planet. In the present decade, Sil- icon Valley reached northward, dramatically transforming the economy and even the cul- ture of San Francisco. The high-technology world has enshrined risk-taking, innovation, learning from failure and—you guessed it— starting over. Quoting another California innovation, the 1960s Whole Earth Catalog, Apple's Steve Jobs urged Stanford University graduates in a commencement speech in 2005 to "stay hungry, stay foolish." Californians, across centuries and cul- tures, always have. HOLLYWOODLAND, a housing development established in 1923 marked by this sign on Beachwood Drive, top, was the inspiration for the famous Hollywood sign; Marilyn Monroe, above. HISTORY JOHNNY HABELL/SHUTTERSTOCK ; LUCIAN MILASAN/SHUTTERSTOCK » ARTICHOKE QUEEN Castroville, an agricultural town of 6,500 in Monterey County that calls itself the artichoke center of the world, is home to expansive fields planted with this tasty member of the thistle family. The annual Castroville Artichoke Food and Wine Festival, featuring the likes of fried, sautéed and grilled artichokes, along with music and three- dimensional "vegetable art,'' takes place on the first weekend in June at the Monterey County Fairgrounds. In 1948, Castroville crowned visiting starlet Norma Jean Baker as California's Artichoke Queen. Norma Jean later won fame under her new name, Marilyn Monroe.