John Steinbeck was born 108 years ago today in Salinas, California, the “Salad Bowl of the World.” His family lived in a Victorian house that still stands on one of Salinas’s main streets. It is a restaurant now. And down the street just a couple of blocks sits the National Steinbeck Center, at the head of Main Street, which anchors the Oldtown district of the city. Freight trains crawl along in the near distance, running along the tracks above the underpass that the city’s many visitors use to get to Route 101. Route 101 that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles, running past green fields devoted to crops; some of them traditional, like lettuce, garlic, artichokes and others marking evolutions in America’s gustatory superabundance: maché, nuts, grape vines for wine. The city of Salinas is not a nonpareil of a resort like nearby Carmel. It is not ocean-kissed like its near neighbors of Monterey and Pacific Grove. There are other towns like Salinas that seem down at the mouth, even embittered. But if Salinas does not have the wallet-and purse-opening allure of a place that draws people solely for its beauty, it does exude an air of optimism, of something [...] Read More »