Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisLA
The few things I knew about San Francisco as a kid growing up in LA in the early 70’s from the commercial was rice o roni was a favorite treat. I knew it was hilly and they had a famous bridge. I also knew I had relatives in Oakland whom came down to LA often and it was close to SF. I also got the impression Oakland was some sleepy country community, and didn’t realize it was big city too.
San Diego I thought was an amusement park, that name just didn’t give off a big city in my little head. I guess the commercials we see in LA advertising the San Diego Zoo and Sea World didn’t help.
Las Vegas in my mind was this huge city sort of like New York. It seems like that’s all the adult relatives would talk about in LA was going to Vegas on the weekend and gamble. Let’s just say when I seen it for the first time at 14 years old in 1978 it was shocking to see how small it was. The lights at night was pretty, but we arrived in the early morning driving in so you really got to see how it looks with out all of its glamour at night. Also back then I don’t even think the city even had a population of 200,000 so it was small and the Las Vegas Strip was much of nothing compared the present.
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Regarding San Francisco, I have a similar experience myself growing up in LA in the 1970s and 80s. San Francisco was Rice-A-Roni, but also a fascinating place with steep hills, fog, cable cars, and the famous orange bridge. Oakland didn't enter my mind until much later, and I actually like it, along with Berkeley. SF, Oakland and Berkeley in my opinion are the most interesting places in the Bay Area, and all historically significant. Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement after all, among other things. Thanks to what happened at UC Berkeley, all college campuses in the US have areas where you can set up tables and hand out pamphlets and literature that you might not necessarily agree with (and can downright make you angry), but it's all about the freedom of speech. I also like reading about the Black Panthers and the whole Patty Hearst kidnapping, so Berkeley and Oakland play huge roles.
I also felt the same way as you about San Diego as a kid; to me it wasn't even a real city; as a kid, I just went down there with my family to go to Sea World. Thinking about it now, as a kid I probably only went to Sea World 2 or 3 times at the most. I went once as an adult when my sister's kids were little and we went there.
We differ on Las Vegas, though; as a kid, I also thought of it as not being a real city. Growing up, we would go to Vegas like once every 2 months, because my parents liked to gamble (they still do hehe), and they didn't have the Native American reservations with casinos back then. Back in the 1970s, my parents would drop my sis and me off at Circus Circus with rolls and rolls of quarters while they gambled. We thought it was fun, playing the arcade and carnival-type games, and watching the free trapeze shows. But back then, we never left the Strip, which was a lot less developed back then. We never went into downtown or the actual city of Las Vegas, so to me, Vegas was just casino/hotels on a very wide highway. I remember thinking as a child, 'where do the people here actually live??'