We're All From Somewhere Else: A Southern California Childhood, 1953-1965

Hollywood souvenir shop postcards of Southern California, Mid-20th beach-movie dreamgirls, endless orange groves, extinct amusement parks, and those amazing freeways flowing out from L.A. like glorious rushing rivers—or sinister, smoggy tentacles, depending on your point of view. Each bulbous car on the interchange is a droplet in the multi-generational flood of dreamers, go-getters, black sheep, and miscellaneous drifters who poured into Southern California after World War II, just in time for the big bang of West Coast Culture.
This book explores the Southland of the author’s first twelve years when his post-greatest-generation parents drifted and finagled their way in and out of prosperity. From the civil rights movement to the surf craze, from trading stamps and the tract home explosion to Disneyland, nuclear preparedness and the stirrings of the Youth movement, this book takes the All From Somewhere Else freeway to everything Southern California.