This is one in an occasional series of summertime essays.
Summer came late to Southern California. Starting in the 1870s, it was a season specifically for outdoor leisure in the East, where the well-to-do fled to cool Adirondack lodges and the sweating urban masses subwayed to beach playgrounds such as Coney Island. But Southern California was solely a winter destination, an October to April place where the old or the tubercular could retreat from the damp and the cold. According to the best tourist guides of the time, Southern California was a semi-desert, a description that emphasized desert a little too much. Local hotels and resorts made money when the East shivered, but they languished in the summer.
Los Angeles businessmen -- among them Harry Chandler, publisher of The Times -- thought every season should show a profit. In 1920, Chandler helped spin off the All-Year Club from the city's other booster associations and, with funding from the county Board of Supervisors, began the selling of summer.
It required a lot. Even in the dark middle of the Depression, the All-Year Club spent $167,000 annually on promoting year-round Southern California tourism, and it was only one of a dozen other such tourism organizations. The club hired the best ad men, beginning with Don Francisco, appreciatively noted by Time magazine as the man who had "organized the campaign that kept Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California" in 1932. The ad campaign vilifying Sinclair, a socialist and popular novelist, seems like the flip side of selling leisure in the sun. The message was climate, not Sinclair's "End Poverty in California" program. But boosterism was politics, too, and it could have a mean streak.
"Come ... for a glorious vacation," urged the All-Year Club. "Advise anyone not to come seeking employment, lest he be disappointed, but for the tourist, attractions are unlimited." In 1938, the Oklahoma City Times bitterly editorialized against some of the club's ads, which explicitly told its state's rural families not to sample the Southern California attractions, lest they decide to stay.
Despite the mixed messages, summertime tourism boomed. Thanks to better roads and cheaper train fares, it was easy for middle-class Midwesterners to vacation in the West. (Easterners headed to Florida for exotic sunshine and beaches.) By 1939, when more than 1.5 million tourists visited Southern California, summer visitors outnumbered those in winter by 30%.
