Monterey Is Making Peace - And Profit - With Steinbeck

MONTEREY, Calif. - Bruce Ariss unlocked a dank wooden box of a building, releasing the musty scent of fish and stale beer as sunlight washes in off Monterey Bay.

The rays illuminated the scuffed plank floors, splintery walls and beamed ceilings that form "Doc" Ricketts' lab, a rustic hideaway essentially unchanged since being immortalized in "Cannery Row."

For Ariss, 83, crossing the threshold was a journey back to the sardine-canning days when friend John Steinbeck visited Doc's lab to absorb for his novels the lives of locals, whom he then called "whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches."

Steinbeck could have added "grudge holders." Half a century of Steinbeck-snubbing later, Monterey residents are at last forgiving him.

Last Sunday, in tourism-inspired atonement, Monterey celebrated the 92nd anniversary of Steinbeck's birth in Salinas. It was its first public embrace of a man who unintentionally offended locals by portraying them as bumbling drunks in "Tortilla Flat" and heartless landowners in "The Grapes of Wrath."

"Attitudes are definitely changing," said Steinbeck scholar Neal Hotelling.

The Cannery Row Foundation threw a birthday party for the Nobel Prize-winning author who made the Salinas Valley a literary Eden and the "weedy lots and junk heaps" of Cannery Row a tourist attraction. Until now, Feb. 27 has been remembered by only a few friends and scholars who met for spaghetti at Kalisa's restaurant here.

"People around here hated him for the longest time," said Ariss, leaning close to impart an ill-kept secret. " `Grapes of Wrath' especially irritated the local community. The people who ran the orchards and lettuce fields were very unhappy with their portrayal. He made them out to be taking advantage of the poor. He used to say he hated to go home and visit his folks in Salinas because he was afraid he'd be shot at. There are still some old-timers who don't think much of him. But as a whole, he's coming to be thought of as the local boy who made good."

Not too many years ago, Monterey County lacked even a small statue to honor the literary master, but now his name is seen as a way to draw more tourist dollars to the area.

March is John Steinbeck Month, a private museum is reopening in his maternal grandmother's Pacific Grove home, and others such as the Steinbeck Federal Credit Union, Steinbeck Gardens Inn, Steinbeck Jewelers, Steinbeck Lobster Grotto, Steinbeck Lodge, Steinbeck School, Steinbeck Realty, Steinbeck Travel, Steinbeck Country Bail Bonds and even the Rev. Arnold Steinbeck of Monterey are proud to share his name.

"It doesn't get you a free cup of coffee around town," said the Rev. Steinbeck, no relation. "It hasn't always been a popular name to have around here, but it doesn't bother me. I think he had a great deal of insight."

John Steinbeck, born in 1902, spent many years on the Monterey Peninsula and considered it home. With profits from "Tortilla Flat," he added a writing room to his parents' summer cottage at 147 11th St. in Pacific Grove and wrote "Pastures of Heaven," "To a God Unknown" and the first half of "Of Mice and Men" - in longhand. At his sister's house, now on the Asilomar conference-center campus, he had an affair with an actress he eventually married. He bought gas at Red Williams' station at Lighthouse and Fountain avenues in Pacific Grove and shopped at Holman's Department Store.

The more prolific his writing, however, the less popular he became at home. Despite his Pulitzer for "The Grapes of Wrath," Steinbeck couldn't even rent office space in Monterey's only professional building on Franklin Street to work on "The Pearl."

In 1944, after a stint as a war correspondent, he bought the Soto adobe on Pierce Street in downtown Monterey. Six months later, when citizens shunned him because of their portrayal as wanton drunks in "Cannery Row," he left for Mexico.

"He didn't feel like Monterey was home anymore," Hotelling said.

Even when he lived elsewhere, Monterey County provided the backdrop to many of Steinbeck's stories: Doc's tide pools on the point where Monterey Bay meets the Pacific; the twisted cypress on Wave Street where Mack and the boys slept off hangovers; Dora's whorehouse, now Mackerel Jack's souvenir shop; and Wing "Lee" Chong's Market, now the Cannery Row Shell Co.

Steinbeck hasn't been completely ignored in Monterey County all these years. The Steinbeck Festival in Salinas has honored his work every August for 15 years, but his birthday was overlooked until this year.

The Cannery Row party was a fitting tribute to a man who often gave birthdays significance in his writing. A birthday present caused the final brotherly rift in "East of Eden," and a birthday party, Ariss remembers, created one of "Cannery Row's" most memorable. yet not highly accurate, scenes.

Apparently, Steinbeck knew when to embellish.

Maybe he was simply exercising poetic license when he unflatteringly characterized Monterey locals, too.