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John Steinbeck’s Salinas

By Roxana Lewis, CTC, L.A. Rail Tours

Two years ago, on the 100^th anniversary of John Steinbeck’s birth, I found myself for the first time in the famous author’s hometown, Salinas.

Several factors presented themselves to create this opportunity. The first, I am, like Steinbeck, a California native. We are a fiercely protective lot. Secondly, I majored in Comparative Literature at Berkeley. This was providential insofar as I had to read Steinbeck and he had the audacity to attend Stanford, Berkeley’s archrival. And lastly, I was organizing a series of trips throughout California using the wonderful Amtrak rail system, which would send me tracking to Salinas.

Who can forget that riveting scene in the movie East of Eden when Raymond Massey, James Dean’s father, has a trainload of lettuce sitting on the track with melting ice and melting assets pouring out onto the track? Yes, Salinas is a stop on the California rail system.

The excursion I developed was for the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, and I dubbed it, Ride the Rails, Read Steinbeck. It involved boarding the southernmost portion of the famous Coast Starlight train from Los Angeles and disembarking at Salinas. Enroute the group would read from their favorite passages of the master’s works: Tortilla Flat, Travels with Charley, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. We would then be thoroughly imbued with Steinbeck and arrive in Salinas to feel his spirit sauntering down Main Street. We would visit his ancestral home, walk past his high school auditorium, pass his father’s store. We would visit the fabulous National Steinbeck Center Museum, which is a moving memorial to the author’s life and writing. The excursion was a smash hit.

Salinas is a northern California city. It is located a short 21 miles from its more famous coastal neighbors, Monterey and Carmel. Before the National Steinbeck Center Museum opened, Salinas was a town passed by on the road to somewhere else. .

John Steinbeck is the drawing card for Salinas and it is played up well. When you step off the train in downtown Salinas you enter a time warp. Perhaps, because its glitzier coastal neighbors have hogged the limelight, diminutive Salinas has been allowed to stay pretty much as Steinbeck left it. Even today vast quantities of fruits and vegetables are grown in the area and have given the Salinas Valley the sobriquet “Salad Bowl of the Nation.”  It is agrarian and its current population is 64% Latino.

While Salinas may be the poor cousin from the wrong side of the tracks, it is a gem for Steinbeck lovers. The town can be easily walked within a compact mile. The warm circumference of its circle offers a wealth of places that are the meat of the Nobel Laureate’s work. You can have an ice cream on a too warm California day at the soda fountain where Steinbeck had his. You can walk past the movie house where the young boy Steinbeck spent his leisure Saturday afternoons. The history is all there today. There are few places where Americana has not been usurped by Blockbuster and the Big Mac. Salinas still retains the charm of Steinbeck and deserves a detour.