Planting Seeds of Wrath in 'Steinbeck Country'

In the weeks before election day, Salinas officials slashed 20% of the city's staff of about 300. Included were a dozen unfilled positions on the police force and money for all library services. The library system was the only city department flagged for complete dismantling. Still, two of the three tax measures that would have saved the libraries went down to defeat.

"It's about time that people turned off reality TV and tuned into the reality around them," said activist Lauren Cercone. "This is a sad day. Because once these libraries are gone, all the cupcake sales in the world aren't going to bring them back."

As he toured the downtown Steinbeck museum, Riverside resident Tom Archer said he made the five-hour drive just to steep himself in the atmosphere of the author who championed the underdog in such books as "Cannery Row" and "East of Eden."

"Here's a man who extolled the virtues of the common man," the electrician said. "If he ever knew that years after his death the politicians would close off the poor to their opportunity to learn, he'd be absolutely disgusted with this town."

But in life, Steinbeck's relationship with the residents of the Salinas Valley -- who often appeared unflatteringly in his books -- was strained. After Steinbeck described the plight of migrant farmworkers in "The Grapes of Wrath," growers charged that the author was "a traitor to his class," said Herb Behrens, a volunteer archivist at the museum.

"They burned Steinbeck's books," he said. "There were threats on his life, and he was told that a warrant would be put out for his arrest if he ever set foot in the county."

Dennis Donohue, a local vegetable grower who lobbied for the tax measures to save the libraries, says Salinas has tried to come to terms with its love-hate relationship with Steinbeck -- in part by opening the museum honoring his legacy in 1998.

"I always say that John Steinbeck used us in life and we've used him in death," he said. "We've also used his spirit to look the community in the eye on this library issue and explain the gravity of our situation: Without libraries, one of the very essences of Salinas is in jeopardy."

On Monday night, 45 residents met at City Hall to consider ways of salvaging the book-lending system, including another emergency tax measure.

Before the meeting, standing outside in the autumn chill, resident Jose Carlos Fajardo said he regularly visited the Steinbeck library to peruse the collection and admire the enlarged black-and-white photographs of the author -- including one showing him accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

"That library existed in his spirit," he said. "I once saw an old Japanese lady there with a young Latino teenager. She was teaching him Japanese and he was instructing her in her Spanish.

"How can a city exist without its soul?"