Do You Know The Way To Monterey?

It’s wonderful to go away for a while, even a brief while, and get another perspective. Maybe it’s just me; maybe I’ve been living here too long now, but for the past two days, I’ve had a feeling of almost-deja-vu. Like the place I was in was very familiar, just a tiny bit different.

I love Monterey, but I never realized how much it has in common with Martinez until this last trip. Maybe it’s because we’re working on the , and there are comparisons with Lodi and Redwood City and Livermore. Granted, those cities have some commonalities with our town, but Monterey has so many that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Historically, it has a leg up on us. Its history starts in the 1820s, while ours really officially begins in the 1850s, when the city was laid out and efforts were made to incorporate. But there is Monterey's robust fishing history, one we definitely share, with the commensurate fishing industry – canneries, etc. True, we don’t have that convenient Pacific Ocean quite so close, but we have a river, and at one time it’s said you could almost walk across the river to Benicia on the backs of all the salmon in the river in spring.

Monterey has John Steinbeck, we have John Muir. OK, no one ever made a movie from a Muir book, but our naturalist has plenty of bona fides, and doesn’t need a lot of PR – I mean, preserving Yosemite and helping create a national park system is a pretty good legacy, probably as good as leaving "Grapes of Wrath” and “Cannery Row” behind.

What Monterey has that we don’t have is a pretty good sense of marketing itself. It clearly has the tourism part down, again because of the ocean, and the aquarium. But there is a pride there, you feel it almost everywhere you go. It’s hard to turn around in Monterey without being reminded of something or someone who was there before you.

Martinez hasn’t gotten there yet. But we have the ingredients, if we ever want to try it. Our waterfront is not nearly as attractive (again, that darned ocean), but it’s beautiful in its own right. It’s too late to preserve the cannery buildings from the Italian fishing era, but we've got some boats, an entire host of homes from that time noted with plaques and plenty of people in town whose families were active fisherpeople. We could certainly find ways to celebrate it more.

Our downtown is still architecturally interesting historically, if the county would stop its architectural adventures. Muir, DiMaggio, fishing, industry, Jack London. . . a lot has happened here that helped shape our state and our lives today. We do pay tribute to these things now, but not the way they do in Monterey.

We have a train station that could bring tourists here from all over the place. We're not that far off two major freeways. It's not like we're inaccesible.

Of course, not everyone wants our town to be a tourist attraction, and I get that. There are downsides to that scenario as well. Not everyone here is a merchant, and would not necessarily find it beneficial to have lots of crowds from out of town clogging up parking and making it hard to get from here to there.

But it’s worth a conversation. Why can’t we take a field trip to Monterey like they did to those other towns earlier this summer? It might make for some interesting comparisons and stimulate some ideas.

If nothing else, it’s a lot of fun. Did I mention that it has an ocean?

EVENTS:

Today:

Saturday:

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TODAY IN HISTORY:

30 BC - Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last ruler of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty, commits suicide, allegedly by means of an asp bite.

1851 - Isaac Singer is granted a patent for his sewing machine.

1960 - Echo 1A, NASA's first successful communications satellite, is launched.

1964 - South Africa is banned from the Olympic Games because of the country's racist policies.

1981 - The IBM personal computer is released.

1992 - Canada, Mexico and the United States announce completion of negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

1994 - Major League Baseball players go on strike. This will force the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.