Viewpoint: Why the Smiles Are Gone

By FRANK MCCULLOCH Frank McCulloch has been a California newsman for 50 years.

It was just after 7 o'clock on a foggy May morning in 1941 when I arrived in San Francisco. I walked up Market Street, determined to prove this small-town boy was ready for his first newspaper job at the Daily News, and it struck me that a remarkable number of smartly dressed pedestrians smiled as I passed.

In the half-century since, the Daily News, the smartly dressed pedestrians and the smiles have all vanished from San Francisco.

Measure it where you will, nothing in California is as it was. There is a simple reason for the cosmic changes: 30 or 40 million people were never intended to live in this largely arid land. The trend lines from this population explosion need be extended only a little to bring the consequences into view. Fewer and fewer resources divided among more and more people can yield only less and less. But that will not deter the 4 million people forecast to arrive in the next decade from claiming a share of the dream.

Early this year, my wife and I carved out our own little piece of the dream when we moved to Sonoma, 40 miles northeast of San Francisco in the Northern California wine country. The countryside around us is filled with dairy farms and sheep ranches and orchards and vineyards. We keep telling ourselves that the pace is slower here -- although I yearn for the day when I glance in the rearview mirror and find no tailgater there.

New homes spring up almost daily on virgin hillsides. Oak-studded pastures give way to vineyards, which are preferable to shopping centers but invariably bring with them an ailment called wine snobbery. Its first symptom is an infusion into the vocabulary of French words having to do with the color, taste and price of wine. This disease has spread to the Sonoma County seat of Santa Rosa. It was a farm town itself not all that long ago, but as Gaye Le Baron, a columnist for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat recently reported, that gets harder and harder to remember.

Le Baron recently wrote about a classified ad that had been phoned to her paper by a woman offering what sounded like "well-aged Caumeneur" for sale. It was a wine the ad taker had never heard of, but that's something that happens to many of us Sonomans almost every day. The ad taker asked the lady to spell it.

"You know," she said impatiently, "c-o-w m-a-n-u-r-e."

It is good, especially in these turbulent times, to be reminded of our roots.