Girls Of The Golden West

The Original Girl of the Golden West, as immortalized dramatically by playwright David Belasco and musically by Giacomo Puccini, was the archetypal mining-camp saloon proprietress with a 24-kt. heart. Puccini's opera premiered at the Met in 1910, five years after the play's hit debut, but the Italian composer might well recognize his heroine's traits in her geographical and spiritual descendants today. In 1971, you're less likely to encounter a Western lass behind a tavern counter than on a college campus, at the beach, on a ski slope or behind an artist's drawing board in an advertising agency; but you'll find that she's generally (text continued on page 170) friendly, warmhearted and disarmingly direct.

Whether or not she known it, the girl who lives along the Pacific Coast or in the neighboring states of Arizona and Nevada is subtly influenced by the free-wheeling past of her region. "Live and let live" has always been a basic tenet of the Westerner's code, although tolerance is likely to take different forms in different sections. In Nevada, the broad-minded approach is evident in the wide-open, 24-hour entertainment and a casual attitude toward marital splicing and splitting. In Oregon, liberalism is more apt to be political; if you don't like a law, you can draw up a petition to get it reconsidered by the voters, which explains why the state has no sales tax. But it is most of all in california--despite the uptight conservatism of the Reagan administration--that the anything-goes life style has reached its fullest flower. This may be partly due to the climate; a nude beach makes more sense south of the Golden Gate than to the north of it, where the Pacific Ocean is frigid nearly year round. More likely, it's a legacy of California's early settlers. First came the Spaniards, who, if they hadn't been so acutely aware of life's physical pleasures, wouldn't have kept all those duennas around--to be hoodwinked whenever possible; then the polyglot mob of forty-niners, who made San Francisco a big, bawdy yet sophisticated boom town whose citizenry has always elevated its eccentrics to a place of special esteem--as long as they don't become too numerous.

Nevada, too, was first populated by bonanza seekers, although most of the wealth of the Comstock lode was shipped out to San Francisco. There it built the mansions on Nob (for nabob) Hill that--in a stroke of divine retribution, some said--went down in the earthquake and fire of 1906, along with the prostitutes' cribs on the naughty Barbary Coast. And it was the gold rush of the Yukon that turned Seattle, founded by Midwesterners as a sleepy lumber town, into a rumbustious seaport, the jumping-off place for Alaska. Mining vied with cattle raising in late-19th Century Arizona, where Apache wars were succeeded by the cowboy vs. gunslinger shoot-'em-ups of Tombstone and other frontier settlements. Not until 1912 was Arizona considered ready for statehood--the last of the 48 contiguous states to be admitted to the Union. Oregon was settled somewhat more quietly, first by English and American fur traders, then by New England missionaries and the farmers they recruited. On their heels came the Scandinavian lumberjacks and fishermen whose descendants are so numerous throughout the Pacific Northwest.

But even more than by her historical background, the Western girl is shaped--beautifully--by a second factor, and of this one she is very much aware: her surroundings. The spectacular scenery of the West is never out of sight; there's always a mountain, a seashore, a woodland, a rock formation or some other eye-pleasing wonder on the horizon. Climatic zones vary from arid desert to misty rain forest, but the countryside is almost unfailingly breeze-swept and salubrious. The girl of the West is a child of nature--and frequently feels the need to communicate with it.

"I can really discover myself in a lonely wilderness," says Celine Lafreniere, a native of Quebec who divides her time between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. For Karen Flagg, a College of Marin coed from Mill Valley, California, happiness is a hiking trip. Recently, she and a group of friends made a 15-mile pilgrimage to the top of Mt. Tamalpais in honor of Buddha's birthday.

Out West, the great outdoors is never far away. From several Oregon and Washington cities, it's possible to salt-water-ski in the morning and snow-ski late that afternoon; and few spots in California are more than an hour's drive from mountain, sea, stream or lake shore. Getting back to nature is something you do every day or every week, not on a once-a-year vacation. A sure-fire way to meet Western girls is to participate in the sports to which they dedicate themselves: swimming (anywhere); skiing (at Crystal Mountain, Snoqualmie or Stevens Pass in Washington, Mt. Hood or Bachelor Butte in Oregon, Slide Mountain or Ski Incline in Nevada, Snow Bowl near Flagstaff in Arizona, Squaw Valley or Mammoth Mountain in California); water-skiing (ubiquitous, on lake, river or ocean); surfing, especially in California; sailing, notably around San Diego, Balboa--Newport Beach, San Francisco or Seattle but also favored at such inland oases as Nevada and Arizona's Lake Mead and Arizona's Lake Powell or Saguaro Lake, near Scottsdale, which is also popular with guys on motorcycles and girls in sports cars; skindiving; riding (on Western saddles, of course); running white-water rapids; fishing in clear mountain streams; beachcombing for agates, driftwood or Japanese fishermen's floats (delicate pale-green glass globes) off the Oregon coast; digging for razor clams in southwestern Washington; hunting; fishing; hiking; camping; or just soaking up the sun--on the beach or in a meadow. En route, you might stock up on some judiciously selected Pacific picnic fare--say a couple of iced Dungeness crabs and a crusty loaf of San Francisco's sour-dough bread, washed down with cold Olympia beer.

Given her outdoor heritage, it's not surprising that the typical Western girl is very much into ecology. If you're looking for a reliable icebreaker, strike up a conversation on conservation. Westerners have been avid crusaders in this cause, fighting high dams, offshore oil rigs, nuclear-power plants and cut-and-run logging operators for decades. Despite relatively low population densities, they've recently begun to worry about the possibility of overcrowding. There's still plenty of open space, but California has become the most populous state of the Union, gaining more than 4,000,000 people in the past decade, while Nevada's population increased a whopping 71.3 percent in the same period.

Some of those who are going West to live are seeking alternative life styles in agrarian communes that have sprung up throughout the area. But the girls of the golden West are principally urban--although the cities in which they live are medium-sized. The sole exception is Los Angeles, with nearly 3,000,000 inhabitants--at least 500,000 of whom seem to be beautiful women. You see them on the street; working or playing at Disneyland, Marineland and Knott's Berry Farm; in popular shops such as Jeans West or London Britches, as both salesgirls and customers; at rock concerts in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and the Anaheim Convention Center; in such singles' hangouts as Donkin's in Marina del Rey or The Oar House in Venice; in the bar at the Luau in Beverly Hills or at the private discothéues (Bumbles on Robertson Boulevard or the celebrities' late-late hangout, The Candy Store in Beverly Hills; get to know a member and wangle an invitation). Most of all, in overwhelming numbers, they're to be found on the beach. Southern California girls, even more than their counterparts in Arizona and Nevada, are naturally sun worshipers.

In San Francisco, the girl-watching pastures include such dating bars--irreverently dubbed body shops--as Harpoon Louie's on Commercial Street, Perry's Bar, the Cooperage and the Coalyard on Union Street, Stinson Beach across the Golden Gate in Marin County and the splendidly renewed factory-and-warehouse areas of Ghirardelli Square and The Cannery. And don't--repeat, don't--overlook Golden Gate Park.

Both tourists and locals tend to congregate around the casinos in Reno and Las Vegas, where shows, drinks and meals, though costlier than in days past, are still a good buy. Farther north and west, in Portland, young people gather around the Forecourt Fountain on Southwest Third Avenue and the Portland Center Fountain nearby on Fourth, toss darts and quaff beer in the Elephant and Castle on Washington and feast on spaghetti, burgers and brew at Jerry's Gable, a durable collegiate/med-school/ (concluded on page 221)Golden West(continued from page 170) student-nurse mecca where Broadway and Sixth Avenue come together. Across the Willamette River on the city's East Side, eye the micromicrominis on the open-air ice-skating rink at the Lloyd Center. Seattle activity revolves around Pike Place Market, the Seattle Center--scene of the 1962 World's Fair--and the university district, home of the University of Washington. College campuses, in fact, are top-notch starting points for action throughout the West. Take particular note of USC, Los Angeles City College, the sprawling Claremont College complex, Cal at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and Stanford in Palo Alto; Arizona State at Tempe; Portland State, the University of Oregon (Eugene) and Southern Oregon College (Ashland); and the University of Nevada campus in Reno.

Westerners are understandably proud of their female pulchritude and this pride is often manifested in the local beauty contest--sometimes part of a colorful civic festival presided over by the fairest of the municipal fair. Pasadena's Tournament of Roses on January first is perhaps the best-known example. Others include Prescott, Arizona's Frontier Days rodeo every Fourth of July; Seattle's Seafair--culminating in full-throttle hydroplane races beginning in late July, enthusiastically cheered in a watery area where 70,000 private pleasure boats, almost enough to float the city's entire population, are docked; Portland's Rose Festival in June; the Puyallup Valley, Washington, Daffodil Festival in April; the wild-West pageantry of Las Vegas' Helldorado Days in May; Washington's Ellensburg Rodeo and Oregon's Pendleton Round-Up, both in September. The last boasts, in addition to a court of fresh-faced cowgirls, a pageant called Happy Canyon, with its own royalty of American Indian maidens in beaded leather robes.

Indian is but one of the ancestral strains manifest in the girls of the golden West. You'll see flower-faced Orientals; sensuous Latins; dashiki-garbed black beauties, most of them second-generation Westerners whose parents manned the shipyards of World War Two and the aerospace plants that succeeded them; and a spectrum of southern and northern European nationalities, most of them thoroughly commingled.

When you arrive in the far West, you may discover a certain amount of native suspicion of visitors from the East--which can start, for someone from the Pacific Coast, in the neighborhood of Chicago. The local girls' objection to Easterners, however, is mainly that they're too formal--too hard to get to know--so a low-key approach may stand you in good stead. If you want to sound like a native, avoid the most common place-name boners: In California, La Jolla is pronounced La-hoy-a and San Rafael is San Ruf-fell; Yakima, Washington, is Yack-i-mah; and the city of Portland is situated on the Wil-lam-ette River in the state of Or-y-gun--never Ore-gone. You can also direly offend numbers of the resident citizenry by calling San Francisco--horrors!--Frisco.

Most important of all: When wooing a Western girl, don't come on too strong. You'll be taken for a phony. Janet Boyd, a native of Everett, Washington, who is now a featured dancer in a Las Vegas revue, expressed a common sentiment when she said, "Those manicured men from the East--I resent their always trying to impress people. You know, they're the kind of guys who carry a book on existential philosophy under one arm--but never read it. They're the worst lovers ever."

Whether or not Janet's right on that score, we can't be certain. But it's a sure thing that the high-spirited, independent girls of the West are uncompromising in their demand for sincerity. Like the heroine in Puccini's opera, they'll deal, straight with you; but they expect nothing less in return.