Zócalo is celebrating its 20th birthday! As part of the festivities, we’re publishing reflections and responses that revisit and reimagine some of our most impactful stories and public programs. Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews revisits Southern California author D.J. Waldie’s 2012 essay “The Darkness Behind Huell Howser” and considers why, over a decade after Howser’s death, the public TV’s great California chronicler retains such a hold on us.

“Do you know Huell Howser?”

I got that question recently while chatting with a counter guy at Erick Schat’s Bakery, which produces Dutch pastries and sheepherder bread in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.

It’s a question I get at least a couple times a year, in all different corners of California.

I suppose it’s a natural question. People might wonder if I, a longtime chronicler of California’s places, get asked if I know the public television reporter who took viewers into every little town and restaurant and museum, from Alturas to Zzyzx.

It’s a question that never ceases to amaze me. Or stump me.

Because the truth is that I can’t possibly know Huell Howser. And not just because I only met him a couple times. No one can possibly know Huell Howser anymore, because Huell Howser died 11 years ago, of prostate cancer, at age 67.

But the truth is also that people feel like they do know Huell Howser. Because he never really left us. His shows still air regularly on public TV stations in Southern California. And episodes of his California-exploring series—California’s Gold, California’s Green, Downtown, Road Trip with Huell Howser, and Visiting—still attract heavy traffic online.

Why does Huell Howser retain such a hold on us? The best answer to that question came from the Southern California author D.J. Waldie, in a Zócalo Public Square essay published shortly before Howser’s January 2013 death.

Waldie’s thesis was that Howser, in taking viewers to forgettable eateries and little-known places, was finding joy in the thing that Californians most cherish: our broken dreams.

Most people come to California, or grow up in California, dreaming of stardom or riches or invention or new and distinctive lifestyles. Instead, they end up sewing dresses in a little store in Tustin, or working at a dairy outside Turlock. You can feel pretty small doing that kind of work. But when Howser showed up, the public TV explorer in all his geeky ebullience, it made the life you settled for seem big.

“Howser wasn’t just pitching the muchness of California, an abundance anyone should be able to see unaided,” Waldie wrote. “He was pitching the almost infinite otherness within the ordinary of California, particularly when California is considered with joy.”

Waldie wrote that Howser’s deep connection with the regular “folks” of California was not his joy but “the melancholy behind his fierce public niceness.” His TV tours could strike sad notes, especially when his questions revealed wonderful old things that no longer existed. The same relentless dynamism that produces the many wonders of California also destroys the established. Our sunny love of the novel coexists with darkness and loss.

Howser liked to say that his goal was to encourage Californians to embark on their own personal adventures around the state, and investigate the places all around them. Howser modeled that kind of exploration, with a curiosity about everything that showed how fiercely unprejudiced he was.

As Waldie wrote, Howser was not urging Californians to take “a harmless field trip” but rather to begin “an encounter with the differences that reside, intractable, in everyday life—real differences between people, conditions, ethnicities, and cultures that can only be accepted for what they are and mostly with a smile.”

I don’t look or sound like Howser—he was a handsome TV guy with the distinctive accent of his native Tennessee, while I’m a rumpled print guy and fourth-generation Californian. But I suspect I get the “Do you know Huell Howser?” question because my reporting method is so similar to his.

That method: modestly planned, thoroughly unrehearsed wandering—which also happens to be the most practical way to get to know California.

Because Californians are so informal and so flaky (as anyone who has ever invited people to a dinner party knows), I rarely bother to schedule a bunch of interviews in advance when I’m visiting a town. It works much better to show up unannounced, act friendly, and start asking respectful questions about what people do.

I also say, as Howser did, “wow” and “gee whiz” when people are showing me things—a rusting old motorbike, a piece of street art, a loaf of bread—that would seem less than amazing to someone less geekily Californian.

There is no greater flattery in the Golden State than to take an interest in what others do. Californians, whatever their occupation, are instinctive artists, and asking them about their business or their home or their flea market—as Howser did—often elicits detailed and thoughtful responses.

That’s what I was doing at Schat’s. I had been pressing the counter guy. What is that bread? Can I try a piece? What makes it taste so good?

His answer to my last question was perfect: The best bread comes from the baker most determined to make sure you never forget it.

The post Huell Howser Lives! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But my 4-year-old wouldn’t have it. I’d gotten to his school late, nearly 6 p.m., making him the last child picked up. “Let’s do something,” Ben said, with the air of a kid who knows how to play on working-parent guilt. He had, in fact, a specific ask: “Let’s ride the train to Chinatown and have dinner at the old restaurant.”

How does a 4-year-old come up with an idea like this? Well, we had made a similar trip before, one rainy weekend when my wife was also out of town. We live near the Gold Line stop in South Pasadena. When nothing else will soothe Ben, a train ride will. And since he’s not 5 years old yet, he rides for free. The Gold Line is cheap toddler entertainment.

OK, I told him, with a bit of dread. I felt tired. I tried to calculate the time—yes, it will keep us out a bit too late for a school night. But maybe the walking will tire them out, and they’ll fall asleep.

We drove home, walked over to the train and hopped on board.

People talk a lot of nonsense about L.A., about how it’s boring and it’s unreal and doesn’t have any true communities or centers and people don’t connect with each other and you can’t go anyplace because of the traffic. And then you get on a Gold Line train on a Tuesday night. And two women quickly introduce themselves and give up their seats so your two little boys can sit at the window.

The ride is less than 20 minutes. Ben asks about everything rolling by: the stores, the 110 freeway, the Highland Park neighborhood, the Southwest Museum, the houses in Heritage Square, and then Chinatown. We get off at that elevated station with a view of the town, and I point out the skyscrapers, the jail, and the San Gabriels.

It’s dark and cold and the streets are quiet, but stores are open. Two store owners, without much else to do, greet the little boys. So do the cab drivers on Alameda, lined up waiting for their chance to pick up passengers coming into Union Station.

The “old restaurant” is Philippe the Original, the French dip place, founded in 1908. We walk in and there isn’t a line. There is a crowd, though. Customers and staff are all intently huddled by the TV. Could the Lakers be finally doing something good? As I get closer, I see that they’re watching an old program of the just-deceased Huell Howser. And they’re riveted. Because Huell is visiting, and marveling, at this very place, Philippe’s.

Ben and Tom get cheese sandwiches, and I get the beef with a side of coleslaw. We take seats in the back, with the model Amtrak trains and the pictures of the old streetcars on the wall. There’s a map on the wall, and Ben thinks he recognizes it. “It’s the Metro train map,” he says.

He’s wrong, I tell him. It’s a map of the old Pacific Electric Railway, the train system L.A. famously lost. But Ben does have a point; the map looks a little like the maps you see on the Metro, of the train system we’re slowly building with that sales tax money. The past is reconstituting itself.

We finish eating, walk past all the people watching Huell, and head back to the Gold Line. Once on board, two people give up their seats again, and the boys are looking out the window when a beautiful, glamorous couple—they look like the sort of people who would be caricatured as snobs in an ironic movie about L.A.—introduce themselves to the boys. And soon Ben and the man are in conversation about trains, the Gold Line, and Ben’s toy trains. Tom, who will be 2 in a couple of weeks, starts flirting with the woman. He puts on the black hood of his sweatshirt; she fiddles with her jacket and unveils her own black hood. And the little boy and the glamorous woman play a game of hide-and-seek with their hoods. They are strangers in L.A., supposedly unconnected.

The South Pasadena station arrives too quickly, and we say a too-rushed goodbye to the couple. I have to carry the boys off the train, and for the first time all night, they whine. In L.A., no one ever wants the ride to end, even on a forgettable Tuesday night.

They’re both in bed, asleep before 9. As Huell would have said, isn’t that amazing?

The post It’s Chinatown, Son, and I Love It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That Howser, in stepping away from his celebrity, has adopted Garbo’s pose of being gone but always around is of a piece with his portrayal of another type from the same Californian golden age. Howser was the best of the “folks.”

Historian Kevin Starr, in his series Americans and the California Dream, traced the story of the “folks” who came to California beginning in the late 19th century and identified them as Protestant, fundamentalist, mildly Evangelical, prejudiced, narrow in conventional ways, and stoic but secretly yearning. The “folks” frequented the cafeterias downtown, worshipped at Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, gathered at annual state picnics in Long Beach to reminisce about back home, and joined the “lonely clubs” that were a feature of Los Angeles and San Francisco until the 1950s. The “folks” were mostly lower-middle-class Anglos, many from the border south, who came here—particularly to Los Angeles—for health and happiness in the sunshine. They found sunshine, at least.

The “folks”—however much they were mocked by later, big-city migrants for their provincialism—defined the everyday culture and politics of California past the mid-20th century in their expectation that the state would remain permanently theirs. They managed one last triumph: the passage in 1978 of the Proposition 13 property tax limitation measure. State demographers now chart the back-migration of the last of the “folks” to former hometowns in Kansas, Missouri, southern Illinois, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Oklahoma—perhaps as many as two million departures since 1991. While they sojourned here, they had made California one of the whitest of states. Their departure has helped to speed California’s transition into one of the most racially and ethnically hybrid.

Howser—Tennessee-born, drawling elongated vowels, bursting with enthusiasms—chose not to leave. He has never, despite playing the part on television, been genuinely one of the “folks.” For one, he’s better off than most of them, thanks to his business skill and a natural parsimony. He’s also fiercely unprejudiced. But the melancholy behind his fierce public niceness, the cheer that was supposed to make up for the regrets of the transplanted, still binds him to the “folks.” And it was in their service that he went everywhere in California and embraced every quirk of local circumstance, all the while delivering warm gusts of wonderment that were only partially synthetic. He showed them the California that they had dreamed of—completely harmless but always interesting. He wanted them to fall in love with their state. If only they had loved California as much as he needed to.

A long line of ballyhoo defined the making of California in the last century, so much so that sometimes California seemed to be nothing more than a sales pitch, only the hurrying spiel of a dealer in snake oil. But we still bought the pitch. We still swallowed the snake oil and, recognizing the amazing power of both, we made plans to repackage what remained of California for the next wave of migrants ready to buy. Our gullibility was matched only by our cynicism.

It would be a mistake, however, to lump Howser with the loud Bible and drum thumpers of that former California, ready to service your hopes while picking your pocket. Howser played one of the “folk” as larger than life and cannily for profit (at least until he stopped, for reasons that are his own for now), but the insinuating glee with which he took on California had more purposes than the standard con. Howser wasn’t just pitching the muchness of California, an abundance anyone should be able to see unaided. He was pitching the almost infinite otherness within the ordinary of California, particularly when California is considered with joy. I don’t know if the joy was a pose, too, like the piety of the minister who continues to preach after his faith is dead. But it’s hard for me not to see the subversion ever present in Howser’s joyous demeanor.

Howser told Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd in a 2009 profile that his intent was to encourage viewers to begin personal adventures into the circumstances of their place, as if to turn each neighborhood joint or roadside attraction into the equivalent of the Mississippi River and to set out rafting with Huckleberry and Jim. That, of course, was the sales pitch, backed by so much “gee whiz” that your teeth rattled. The product wasn’t a harmless field trip, however, but an encounter with the differences that reside, intractable, in everyday life—real differences between people, conditions, ethnicities, and cultures that can only be accepted for what they are and mostly with a smile. Finding things beyond the bend in the road equally wonderful and alien—a kind of “aw shucks” cosmopolitanism—may be less of an enlargement of the moral imagination than some might want, but Howser never promised to redeem us in our broken paradise, only to make us more native to it.

In all those years of watching, the “folks” radiated their earnest pleasure back at Howser’s televised presence, happy to go the Beverly Hills dog show with him or the Los Angeles Super Show of lowrider cars or the contested U.S.-Mexican border or anywhere, in fact. They were happy to see him happy.

In numbers, political influence, and market share, newer migrants have eclipsed the “folks” who once made California in their image. Howser—the epitome of a Californian who wasn’t disappointed—may not have been one of the “folks,” with all their limitations. But by playing one on TV, Howser showed all of them how they might have been happier to be Californians.

The post The Darkness Beneath Huell Howser appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.