We Californians are assumed to be wilder than those more traditional relatives we left behind in the south, the Midwest, and especially perhaps in New England. Different things bother us, or make us happy. We have widely varying concerns and different expectations from life.

Way back after World War II, when I decided to settle (not in my native North Carolina, but in California), it was a minor breach of family expectations. My father explained to his wide circles of friends with some embarrassment that I had gone west and stayed west. My move, and that of several million young Americans leaving the military, was not in the historically acceptable way that my grandfather had emigrated from Wales. His family in Wales was hungry! My move was seen in my North Carolina hometown as another abandonment, even an abdication of family honor. But my grandfather had been loyally trying to feed his family.

In the migratory sense, we in California are more tolerant that those we left behind in small towns and on farms that were passed down by generations. We still choose to believe that we came west with open minds, ready to accept whatever we found, and anything we chose to believe, and to set aside all the rest.

My father was a minister and my move alarmed him. But he never chided me. He flew out to California on visits; they were his first by jet. His glimpses of our carefree wild west, the homeland of secular Hollywood, brought forth both frowns of concern and smiles of astonishment.

He approved of some of my friends but not of others. In California, he warned, we seem prepared to believe in any God or in any cult that appeals.

Fathers wisdom still guides me. When a university research team announced its recent conclusions that one million Californians are now compulsive gamblers, I imagined the furrows of alarm that such news would have carved in his wise and patient face.

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