ParadiseThe paradox implausible, the illusion that must be seen to be believed.-Ray Bradbury, Los Angeles Is the Best Place in America In December 1913 Ruth and Marvel Parsons left the ice and snow of the East for what they hoped would be a new future. Woodrow Wilson had recently been declared the twenty-eighth president, and while all Europe watched the increasing tensions in the Balkans, many Americans were turning their backs on the Old World and looking towards the warm promise of their very own West. Ever since gold had been discovered in California in 1848, thousands upon thousands of people had poured towards the Pacific Coast, flooding a state which up until then had had a population of barely 18,000. The alchemical surge of the gold rush brought not just prospectors but their attendants-the thief, the cardsharp, and the minister, the last intent on converting the hordes set free from the laws and moral codes of the East. It was not an easy task. California, declared one Methodist preacher, was "the hardest country in the world in which to get sinners converted"; indeed, "to get a man to look through a lump of gold into eternity" was nigh impossible. By 1913 most of the gold had disappeared, but the transmutative effect of the rush survived. The promise of a golden life was now the prize. Agriculture had surpassed mining as the state's biggest industry, and California was transformed into the Garden of America, creating for itself a reputation as a land of orange groves, vineyards, flowers, and sunshine. A health rush succeeded the gold one, as doctors who regularly prescribed a change of climate to deal with a long list of complaints and disorders now suggested California as the ultimate cure. The state would always retain its symbolic connection with that most persuasive of American myths, the pursuit of happiness.The young couple now traveling by railroad through the freezing winter had married just the previous year in the bride's hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. Ruth Virginia Whiteside, the only child of Walter Hunter Whiteside and Carrie Virginia Kendell Whiteside, was twenty-two years old when she married. Doted on by her parents, she had lived a sheltered life, growing up in a wealthy manufacturing family in Chicago. Her father had been hugely successful as the president of the Allis Chalmers farm equipment company before taking over the reins of the Stevens-Duryea automobile corporation in Springfield. There Ruth met Marvel H. Parsons, a man's man two years her senior, who loved the great outdoors and whose family had founded the town of Springfield in the early seventeenth century. His unusual first name had come from his mother, Addie M. Marvel, but he was known to all by the less awkward name of "Tad" or "Teddy." The marriage had seemed a good match, a consolidation of middle-class fortunes: Marvel's father was a real estate developer who had codeveloped the Colony Hills neighborhood just outside Springfield Excerpted from Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
