From Riverside we made a loop back to Los Angeles and drove to San Diego along the edge of the ocean all the way. The coast was one long succession of big ocean resort hotels on a boulevard that seemed too smooth and perfect to be true. We had forgotten that such road smoothness existed for our poor long-tortured engine to glide over.
The Fair at San Diego was a little Exposition Beautiful! The composite impression was of a garden of dense, shiny green. Great masses and profusions of orange-trees and vines against low one-storied buildings of gray-white. Across a long viaduct under an archway and down a long avenue, there was no other color except gray-white and green until you came into the central plaza filled with pigeons as in St. Mark’s in Venice, and saw over one portico of the quadrangle of white buildings a single blaze of orange and blue striped awnings—stripes nearly a foot wide of blue the color of laundry blue, and orange the color of the most vivid fruit of that name that you can find! Against the unrelieved green and gray this one barbaric splash of color actually thrilled.
In a California Garden
Down the next avenue hanging behind the balustrade of another building was the same vivid sweep of blue. Over a building around the corner was a climbing amber rose, and just beyond it some pinkish-purple bougainvillea, that beautiful but most difficult vine to put anywhere. There were gardens and gardens of flowers but each so separated and grouped that there was not a note of discord.
And how things did grow! Some of the buildings were already covered to their roofs with vines, and benches shaded by shrubs, that we treasure at home in little pots!
The San Diego Exposition was a pure delight. Its simplicity and faultless harmony of color brought out all its values startlingly.
A farmer—ought he be called a rancher?—said he thought it a “homey” exposition. I doubt if the sentiment could be better expressed. It was first and foremost designed to show by actual demonstration what could be accomplished in our own land of the West. The citrus groves were full sized; the fields of grain were big and real; instead of putting reapers and harvesters in a large machinery hall, they demonstrated them on a model ranch, so that anyone likely to be interested could see how they were used.
The Indian exhibits were very complete—especially those of the Hopis. There was a life-size model of the pueblo of Taos and miniature models of the other more famous pueblos, and examples of their arts and crafts.
Otherwise the general impressions of the exhibits were much alike; bottles of fruit in alcohol, sheaves of grain, arches of oranges, and school children’s efforts in art.