Sunday’s Bee carried a long story about Mark Arax’s new venture, West of West Center, which will “launch” formally this Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum. Though it’s been a long time coming, the timing seems perfect in my mind.
Arax is one of this valley’s treasures, passionate about our future as well as our history. Those of us who know and admire him like to think of him as fearless in this regard, and that spirit is contagious. His first book, about trying to find his father’s murderer, was just a taste of his courage. When he and co-author Rick Wartzman lifted the lid on the making of the J.G. Boswell empire with The King of California, they liberated the entire valley from the self-imposed gag order we suffered, never saying anything negative about Boswell’s power.
Arax’s third book, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009), gives us a taste of what’s coming with this new Center. The book’s flap explains the title: “Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed ‘When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West.’” Arax lovingly, but unblinkingly, tells us why that is still true.
The idea for West of West Center developed organically, starting with a pile of irreplaceable tape recordings of interviews of both the rich and famous and down and out from his long years as a journalist. The need to digitize these tapes in order to preserve them led to the idea of a website where the public would have access to them. Last year, the opportunity to develop an affiliation with UC Merced to become a centrally-located repository, capped the idea of making it a Center. It’s a Center in the right sense of the word: half museum, half training ground for telling this valley’s stories truthfully.
The venture includes a non-profit publishing house, West of West Books. Not believing that all rich people are greedy, suspicious and hoarding, Arax designed the publishing effort to be supportive of telling the stories of wealthy families in ways that the proceeds and contributions could underwrite the stories of the non-wealthy as well. The first book, which will be featured Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum event, is Beyond Luck: The Improbable Rise of the Berry Fortune Across a Western Century, written by Betsy Lumbye, former executive editor of the Fresno Bee. “You could say he found his luck digging,” wrote Bee writer Donald Munro in Sunday’s story, “- first irrigation ditches in the arid Valley, then a fortune in gold in the remote Yukon, and then a second fortune in oil in the Taft area.” The grand-nephew of Clarence Berry, who inherited some of this family’s wealth, helped bring this story to light. It promises to be very interesting.
One mark of Arax’s courage, however, is that he wants to publish a book of writings on land and water that I have been editing for over 20 years, looking for a publisher. It won’t make money, which a regular publisher requires, and it could make trouble, which is why I’ve been sitting on this project so long. But with the drought and the passage of the water bond - another watershed in this state’s life - the need for its contents is greater than ever before.
As they say, timing is everything.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a hopeful writer and editor who lives in the Lewis Creek
watershed of Tulare County. You can send
her your watershed life stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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