As a youngster, I spent a lot of time on the cannery tenders and fell in love with the islands.
It also shook the confidence of the town's citizens that their situation in the upper Breede River Valley — isolated by a ring of mountains, dependent on a cannery and a shoe factory and the vicissitudes of agriculture — was secure.
She said, 'No, you are going to write on the cannery workers in Southern California.'".
This little-cherished 1955 show, based on John Steinbeck novels and set among the bottom feeders of Cannery Row in Monterey, Calif., had a troubled gestation — Richard Rodgers underwent surgery for cancer just as it went into rehearsals — and it played just seven months on Broadway after a cool reception from the critics.
As Delta producers, who previously had focused on sales to canneries, shipped more fresh Bartletts, Lake County growers were squeezed by competition from this early fruit and the later Northwest crop, and were forced to pull out more than half their pear orchards.
It was built on the 3.3-acre site of the old Hovden Cannery on Monterey's Cannery Row and was dramatically expanded in 1996, then renovated again in 2005.
"Life on Cannery Row was curious and dear and outrageous," Steinbeck wrote in the essay "About Ed Ricketts," in a reference to the former fish-packing district and present-day tourist destination.
There is a tuna cannery on Minicoy, where the traditional process of drying bonito also is practiced.
Next we headed out of town to the North Pacific Historic Fishing Village (portedward.ca), a national historic site and the oldest intact salmon cannery on North America's west coast.
Banned in Vietnam in the 1950's, "The Quiet American " is now sold at kiosks in Ho Chi Minh City as a symbol of local color, like "Moby Dick" on Nantucket or "Cannery Row" in Monterey.
