Palm Springs: The Landscape, the History, the Lore

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 original 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.