Promoter Fred Swanton opened the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in 1904, rebuilding his dance hall by the mile-long beach in 1907 after the 1906 earthquake and fire as a West Coast Coney Island to entice people to ride his trolley, which ended at West Cliff Drive. The first Miss America Pageant was held there in 1920. The Depression and World War II slowed business but the boardwalk hung on. With Whitney's Playland in San Francisco and the Pike in Long Beach long since closed, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk still has millions of visitors. Visitors who came as children now bring their children. Sadly, video games replace antique arcade games. National Historic Landmarks:
1911 carousel with 73 of Charles I D Looff's hand-carved horses and an 1894 342-pipe Ruth and Sohn organ, and brass rings for free rides.
1924 Giant Dipper Roller Coaster Looff's son built, with tall wood-frame arches. America's 7th oldest roller coaster, among the top 10 in rideability.
Monterey Bay, designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1992, including Moss Landing and Ano Nuevo State Park as well as its aquarium and offshore kelp forests, is larger than Yosemite. 90 miles south of San Francisco's airport, Santa Cruz also hosts the red brick Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse and Surfing Museum. Hawaiian princes attending California's private schools brought surfing around 1900. A local surfers' culture quickly evolved in Santa Cruz, where surfing is strongest perhaps due to colder water and higher waves. Inland, second-growth trees of 2 state parks replace coast redwoods, world's tallest trees, extensively logged in the 1880s.
Hearing The Desert's Call
MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE - With only lazy Joshua trees and hovering buzzards bearing witness, this isolated expanse of high-desert plain is one of Earth's quietest places. Daytime heat hammers hard, whistling wind the only discernible noise, night's eerie silence pierced by a wandering burro's woeful bleat. Wait. There's another sound. Along a line of wooden power poles running to the horizon in both directions, 14 miles from the nearest paved road a pay phone beckons with the shrill sound of impatient civilization. It rings again. And again. And yet again, dozens of times a day. A bored New Zealand housewife. A German high school student. A Seattle stockbroker. A trucker on the road. A San Bernardino pizza deliveryman. A Denver bill collector given a bum steer while tracing a debt. At all hours of day and night they call this forlorn desert outpost, the Mojave Phone Booth, near the California-Nevada border, along a winding treacherous dirt road accessible only by 4-wheel-drive vehicles.
"Hello? Hello? Mojave Phone Booth?" asks an unemployed South Carolina computer worker. Told by a reporter answering the line he's indeed reached the world's loneliest phone booth he exclaims "I can't believe it! Somebody answered! Somebody's there!" Out here with summer temperatures of 115 degrees, cattle wander by toward a nearby watering hole. There's rarely anyone around to answer calls. Persistent callers don't care. If someone picks up, so much the better. Some answerers are previous callers who, for reasons sensible only to them, feel compelled to visit the booth.
Internet craze
We drive to nowhere for no reason, meeting fellow Netizens at a phone booth in the middle of nowhere. The phone, installed in the 1960s and once operated with a hand crank by volcanic-cinder miners and other desert denizens, is popularized on the Internet. The craze began when a desert wanderer noticed a phone icon on a Mojave road map. Curious he drove from Los Angeles to investigate. Writing to a counterculture magazine about his exploits he included the phone number. A computer entrepreneur created the first of several Web sites dedicated to the battered booth, beaming word to computers everywhere. Web sites multiplied when creators saw the phone on other sites and after calling numerous times documented their own pilgrimages. Phone booth callers, Web site owners and Internet intellectuals try to figure out why this far-flung phone grips the imagination of those coming across it. New York City concert pianist Mark Thomas' website lists thousands of pay phone numbers worldwide, including the Mojave Desert phone.
Listening post
The phone booth's windows were long ago blasted out, its coin box deactivated so only incoming calls and outgoing credit card calls are possible. Fans take the neglected old booth under their wing. Signs read "If you call it they will come." It evolved into a worldwide Rod Serling listening post, captivating countless callers. A San Bernardino man's wife reluctantly let him take a long-distance shot at reaching someone at the phone to see what happens. An Atlantan heard of the phone by e-mail. The Holy Spirit instructed a spiritual wanderer to visit the desert and answer the phone. The Texas native camped 32 days at the booth, fielding over 500 calls from people like Bubba in Phoenix and Ian in Newfoundland and Sgt Zeno at the Pentagon. The phone keeps ringing. Not providing statistics, Pacific Bell said the phone has low outgoing use. Locals sometimes use the booth for business or messages. Calling the booth creates community in a disconnected world, a phone fetish, long-distance voyeurism, reaching out and touching anonymous strangers in sheer get-a-life boredom. What interesting things happen calling a pay phone? Someone you have absolutely no connection with answers. You exchange names and the weather. One calling from work to wake up the coyotes was shocked anyone was there to answer.
Phone booth removed
Time's up: The phone booth was removed. Pacific Bell and the National Park Service removed it because it attracted too many curiosity-seekers. "Increased traffic negatively impacts the desert environment in the nation's newest national park," they said.