Palm Springs: The Landscape, the History, the Lore Book

Palm Springs: the Landscape, the History, the Lore is an intimate, first-person narrative that is partly an old fashioned nature journal and partly a history book backed up and fleshed out with four years of intense research. To leave the celebrities completely out is, of course, impossible. But here they play only a supportive role to the not-so-famous pioneers: Mother Nellie Coffman, Auntie Pearl McManus, Judge John Guthrie McCallum, Dr. Welwood Murray, and Zaddie Bunker, the Flying Grandmother, a woman who embodied women's lib a good many years before it went public. Their stories are classic Palm Springs biographies, as Palm Springs, in their time, was a classic model of front-porch America. Main Street, wonderfully devoid of glamour, could easily be caught napping on a drowsy Sunday afternoon, the skinny dogs, at least five or six of the pack, sprawled in the middle of things, chewing their fleas; the chickens scratching out a living in the dust, chasing grasshoppers back into the fields; the Indian burros nodding in the shade, occasionally letting loose a volley of hysterical shrieks. "New Siren for Fire Truck" and "Palm Springs Bird Wins National Canary Contest" were headlines to gladden the heart.

In vivid prose, Mary Jo Churchwell creates a far-reaching story of Palm Springs, carrying us to both the interior of the city and the outback of the newly-created Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument.

In 1946 Churchwell's father, Hugh E. Stephens, M.D., moved the family from Santa Barbara to Palm Springs. After graduating from Palm Springs High (class of 1960), she attended College of the Desert in Palm Desert and the University of California at Riverside. After living a full life in the Idaho wilderness, marital troubles sent her back to Palm Springs. Whether or not you can't go home again, she was home again.

The Desert Sun - Bruce Fessier

I remember much of the book's recent history, like the 1991 Girl Scouts bus crash on the road to the Palm Springs Aerial Tram, and]the terrifying tram accident in 1984 that killed a woman when a 30-pound hunk of metal crashed through a tram roof. Churchwell writes about the massive Salton Sea bird die-offs, which I also recall from the 1990s, and puts it in a clear perspective. She recalls building sand castles and drinking from bota bags in dream-like scenarios at the Salton Sea as a youth. I could relate to the book . . . just as I could more easily see what distinguishes us from L.A.