California: The Golden State(Charles E.J. Moulton) California: “The Golden State”
By Herbert Eyre Moulton (1927 – 2005)
Written on a 1925 Underwood Typewriter
in Vienna, Austria in the year 1981


Posthumous Foreword by his son
Charles E.J. Moulton

Nine years after my father’s death I still remember his smile, his unique voice, his knowledgeable personality, his amazing wisdom and his ability to inspire people by his mere presence. He was a gracious host at festive family gatherings, who formed a unique team with my equally amazing mother Gun Kronzell.
When I was born in 1969, my parents already had amazing careers to look back upon and were very much active professionals with astounding skills at the ready. Now having reached the age that they were when I was a little boy I realize how amazing their experience was and how wonderful it was to have them as parents. The benefits of having parents that were directors, authors, singers, actors and teachers cannot be overstressed. Languages, places, nationalities were all open to me. I was raised to become an open minded artist. With openness and interest and love, I was taught to view the world and its art forms as beautiful.
I would be happy if you took some time to explore the countless documents that are available throughout the web about my parents and their life and work. My mother Gun Kronzell, my father Herbert Eyre Moulton, my grandmother Anna Julia Sofia Kronzell, they all have stories and articles dedicated to them, as do my maternal grandfather Knut Kronzell and my paternal grandparents Nell and Herb Moulton.
The fact that I had to give up a lot of the treasures that we had collected over the years when my mom grew sick was hard enough. The upside to that calamity was that my mom spent a great last year here in Germany, got to see me sing roles in quite a few operas and actually spent time with me every day that last year of her life, 2010. I have since then made it my mission to spread the legacy of my parents and make the most of my own talents. That includes passing on the intellectual torch to my daughter, who is proud to be a Moulton, and a descendant of Betsy Ross, a Kronzell, and the great-great-granddaughter of Baron Giles Eyre of Eyre Court in Eyreville, who lived on the West of Ireland.
My dad travelled a lot.
He loved travelling. He loved Sweden, Austria, England, Ireland, Denmark. Oh, those great trips we had together, me and my father. Just two guys in Copenhagen, going to the opera, eating Italian food, seeing Bond movies, eating delicious breakfasts in big hotels. Me and my mom had our favorite trips to London in 1979 and to New York City in 1996, Our journeys through time and space were constantly relived during our good night stories about the trolls Uggel-Guggel and Klampe-Lampe, who live on in the good night stories I tell my daughter even today.
So, you see that the Moulton Family has a love affair with travelling.

Accordingly, I have chosen a piece for you here that my dad wrote about a state he knew well from his countless trips around there as a young actor in Hollywood and a singer for the MCA Dinner Show Scene.

He wrote this piece,

California: “The Golden State”, while he worked at the International Theatre in Vienna back in 1981, and dedicated it to a state he liked a lot in a country he loved: the United States of America.

Now, sit back and enjoy the article.

Greetings from Charles

(Now over to Herb!)




California, the land of contrasts.
The Pacific Coast … with one of the most beautiful cities in America: San Francisco.
Gigantic vegetable- or truck-farms in the fertile San Fernando Valley.
The Mojave Desert, almost uninhabited and without vegetation.
Ghost towns, long since abandoned. Once upon a time in the so-called Wild West, people by the thousands lived in small wooden houses like these. Then, when the gold and silver mines nearby were all worked out, they had to move on to the next settlement in search of luck. Throughout the American continent, settlements can still spring up practically overnight.
A motel on Main Street … a restaurant open 24 hours around the clock, a bank, a shopping mall – these are the basic landmarks of American small towns, most of them so alike as to be almost interchangeable. Many of them stayed what we call One-Horse-Towns, but some grew into world cities – like Los Angeles with the current population of over 10 million (this was in 1981, mind you. Greater Los Angeles now in 2014 has 12.8 million inhabitants, Charles).
Large American cities are traversed and sometimes broken up by State and Federal Highways. With hardly any public transport available any more, Americans are much more dependent on their automobiles than Europeans.
A century and half ago this was still Mexican territory and Los Angeles still a village – no, not even that: a mission settlement. Nowadays in the section known as Olvera Street, old ways and customs are still very much alive (now, 33 years later, that is still the case, for instance in the “Blessing of the Animals”-ritual that is held every Saturday before Easter since 1930). Only a generation ago, Los Angeles was known as “a dozen towns in search of a city center”. All that has changed in the past few years. Clustered around the city center are sections almost exclusively inhabited by certain minorities, country groups or people of a certain social stature, rich or poor. Well to do inhabitants live outside the city in residential areas known as suburbs.
Two centuries of almost unlimited exploitation of nature’s resources have made the U.S.A. the greatest commercial power on Earth. Steadily increasing energy demands call for ever increasing oil imports. Exports and imports move constantly through the great harbors of the West Coast.
More and more goods nowadays are transported in container ships, which embark here on their overseas journeys.
The ocean liner Queen Mary wasn’t quite a quarter century in service between Europe and America when she was converted into a luxury hotel permanently anchored off Los Angeles. This is now the age of the airplane. At any given moment across America, dozens of commercial aircraft take off land. Flying has become the most common and convenient way of travelling.
To the north of Los Angeles, between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, is the great vegetable produce center, which, thanks to modern irrigation is one of California’s major industries. Temperatures and sunny periods compare favorably to those of the Mediterranean.
Fully 80 % of America’s salad crop is grown here in the so-called truck-farms of California. Such a one-crop industry demands specialized work methods. It is more like a factory assembly-line than a farm, and the workers more like machines than human beings.
For long distance shipment, the produce is artificially cooled so as to keep fresh longer. Oranges and other citrus fruits are shipped out into the entire world from California’s gigantic groves.
Just at the eastern edge of these rich farmlands, on the State lines of neighboring Nevada and Arizona, the desert starts – hot, dry and practically empty.
California first became one of the United States in 1848. Before that it had belonged to Mexico, as many of the place names and older buildings testify. Among these are the famed Missions, founded during the Christianizing of the West Coast by Franciscan Fathers.
The Golden Eagle, symbol of the U.S.A., the decoration on this door, recalls the ancient calendar of the Aztecs.
Among San Francisco’s proudest landmarks is the Golden Gate Bridge, spanning the entrance to the Bay. Among the city’s special attractions are its famous cable cars, which, thanks to the citizens themselves, have been preserved as a delightful bit of clanging nostalgia. At the end of the line, passengers hop out and help turn the cars around on their turntables. San Francisco, like Rome, is built on seven hills, and many of the cable car lines at times seen almost vertical.
World-famous Disneyland, south of Los Angeles, is entered through the portals of a fairytale castle. Here America’s history comes to life as most Americans like to imagine it. Walt Disney’s beloved cartoon characters seemed to have stepped down from the silver screen and into real life.
A Mississippi River steamboat is a reminder of Mark Twain’s time (see my anthology “Mark Twain’s America” for a future reference). They even call it the Mark Twain, after America’s greatest humorist and creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
The Golden State is also the home of Hollywood, also baptized “The Dream Factory”. This astounding motion picture machinery has revolutionized film history and created some of the most flabbergasting films in 20th century cinema. The silent movie era alone gave many newcomers the possibility to launch amazing careers. One Hollywood Mega-Mogul, for instance, started out as the CEO of a company that built trams.
California is a land rich in wildlife and nature preserves, which attract an ever-growing stream of visitors: Redwood trees, found nowhere else on Earth and protected by law, can grow to a height of 100 meters or more, and are the world’s oldest living things. Some of them were already a thousand years old when Christ was born.
Today’s Americans are more and more concerned with nature’s growth and conservation, perhaps because nature’s purity, still so abundant in the United States, gives them a feeling of freedom found nowhere else.
Our nature’s legacy is something we must take care of.
We are a part of its glory.
And, yes, California certainly is the Golden State.

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