Mike Davis was lauded and hated as a chronicler of Los Angeles’ darker side, a burster of civic bubbles, a proponent of letting Malibu burn. To me he was always a native son of Fontana.
He described himself that way too. He never ran from or obscured his Inland Empire roots. He was proud of them. To hail from working-class Fontana, after all, cemented his outsider status.
Davis is known best for 1990’s “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.” It’s dense, ambitious and unsparing in its takedown of a century of boosterism, false promises, corporate superblocks, NIMBYism and the marginalization of people of color and the poor. An unlikely success, it remains among the touchstone books about the city.
Davis died Tuesday at age 76 of esophageal cancer at home in San Diego. Obituaries and tributes have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, NPR and many other outlets. Let me offer the proverbial local angle.
Born on March 10, 1946 in Fontana, Michael Ryan Davis was the son of Mary and Dwight Davis, a meat cutter who had hitchhiked to California from Ohio during the Depression. The family left Fontana in 1952.
But Davis held Fontana dear.
When I interviewed him in his Pasadena home in 1998, a wall of his study held a framed newspaper advertisement from 1942 in which Fontana Farms offered “most sincere felicitations” to Henry J. Kaiser on the start of production at Kaiser Steel.
The ad reflected a touching optimism about Fontana’s industrial future. The mill defined the city for four decades before closing in 1983.
“The steel mill is gone but the grit remains,” Davis told me. “Grit is the defining quality of San Bernardino, Fontana and Rialto.”
“Junkyard of Dreams,” the long, concluding chapter of “City of Quartz,” examines Fontana’s history, blemishes and all. Davis traced the city’s start as an agricultural community, its highs and lows as a quintessential mill town and how 1980s leaders were attempting to “scrub the city clean of its blue-collar, ‘felony flats’ image.”
That was going to be tough to do. In one pithy line, Davis cracked: “‘Designer Living’ here means a Peterbilt with a custom sleeper or a full-chrome Harley hog.”
Comments like that didn’t endear him to local readers. Some critics, he told me, “thought I was putting Fontana down and making fun of Fontana. My intentions couldn’t have been more opposite. It was written out of anger by what had happened to Fontana.”
In his boyhood on Montgomery Street, he recalled in our talk, the orchards seemed to stretch into infinity, the skies were blue and the howling Santa Ana winds filled him with awe.
“Fontana above all shaped my sensibility about nature and the environment. There’s something inherently exhilarating about the dynamic landscape and the winds,” Davis said.
After his family relocated near El Cajon, Davis returned a few times with his father to visit friends or go rock hounding. In the 1980s, a stint as a long-haul trucker meant he frequently used the Cherry Avenue truck stop.
He had “deep affection” for Fontana, he told me, saying he hoped to produce a post-“Quartz” update on the city. That apparently didn’t happen, but he did write a sharp, funny piece, “The Inland Empire,” for The Nation in 2003.
“It may not have beaches,” he wrote of the IE, “but it has the most democratic and racially mixed neighborhoods in the state. If you blended the 2000 California census in a Cuisinart, the result would resemble the multi-ethnic student bodies of Fontana or Perris high schools…the blue-collar interior is a true rainbow.”
As I recall, I met Davis like this. He was promoting his then-new book, “Ecology of Fear.” Knowing Davis’ Fontana heritage, I approached his publicist, who said Davis wasn’t giving interviews. As an end run, I attended a reading and talk by Davis at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, hoping to get enough information for a feature.
During the book signing afterward, Skylight owner Kerry Slattery cut me to the front of the long line to introduce me to Davis.
Learning that I wrote for an Inland Empire audience, Davis readily gave me his phone number and said he’d be happy to talk. But your publicist said you weren’t doing interviews, I said in surprise. “I’m at war with my publicist,” he explained.
He was generous with his time in his Pasadena home a few days later. His landline rang almost constantly, with a steady stream of voices leaving messages, but he ignored them all. Photographer Justine Frazier got a great portrait of him on his front porch, arms crossed, looking relaxed, smiling slightly, his garden behind him.
So much for his angry image.
He signed my copy of “Ecology of Fear”: “To David, a comrade in arms, best, Mike Davis.” The self-described Marxist-environmentalist author looked up from the page and said in evident earnestness: “When I say ‘comrade,’ I mean in journalism, not communism.”
Before we parted, he suggested a question: Why did he consider Fontana his hometown when he left at age 6 and spent the majority of his childhood in San Diego County?
It was a good question. He offered an excellent answer: “That’s a deliberate choice. I like Fontana better.”
brIEfly
“American Dreams/Asian Nightmares” chronicles Asian American experiences starting with the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in L.A. through the pandemic present via movement, music and spoken narrative. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the one-time, free performance takes place at 4 p.m. Saturday, preceded by a 3 p.m. reception, at Garrison Theater, 241 E. 10th St. in Claremont. Organizers call the event “a sonic exploration of the Asian American experience and its many beautiful contradictions.”
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, three subsonic explorations. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
