Once he had got used to the idea that he could neither fob her off, flirt with her, or bully her, Larry Lawrence had levelled with Miranda and they had got on just fine. The developer had big plans for the old hotel and was a mine of fascinating information about its past; the same glorious past that was to be bedrock of its future restoration, expansion and rebirth.
Larry Lawrence had actually had the nerve to offer her a job!
If she ever got bored working in the Governor’s Office in Sacramento…
Which was not remotely likely any time soon.
Miranda’s father had once told her that ‘lots of people have imagination’ and that ‘lots of people have crazy ideas’ but that ‘hardly anybody has real vision.” She had not made up her mind whether Larry Lawrence had real vision but she had been genuinely intrigued by his ambitious vision for how he planned to resurrect the Hotel del Coronado.
The history of the Hotel del Coronado could be said to have begun on 19th December 1880 when three ‘magnates’ bought Coronado and North Island — that is, the island and the sandy spit joining it to the mainland — for $110,000. The three men were Hampton L. Story, of the Story and Clark Piano Company of Chicago, Jacob Gruendike, President of the First National Bank of San Diego, and the Indiana born railway man, tycoon and early promoter of the Bell Telephone Company, Elisha Spurr Babcock. At that time southern California was experiencing its first runaway real estate boom and nothing fuelled a local ‘boom’ it seemed, more than the erection of a new grand hotel. Things had looked uniformly rosy for the newly formed Coronado Beach Company, whose prospectus brazenly boasted that it had been launched with capital of ‘One Million Dollars!’
Unfortunately, by the time the hotel actually opened for business in 1888, a great wooden structure — then the largest wooden building in the United States — built in the fashionable Victorian beach style to be the biggest ‘resort hotel’ in the World with three hundred and ninety-nine luxurious rooms constructed on a sandy spit where little over a year before only rabbits and coyotes had roamed, the South California land boom, like countless economic ‘bubbles’ before and since, had violently deflated very nearly overnight. To add insult to injury, it happened that across the bay, San Diego itself had fallen into a vicious spiral of recession and retrenchment, and its population had fast begun to decline as one after another enterprise failed and panicking banks called in their loans.
Miranda had not been surprised to learn that the three original investors in the Coronado Beach Company had faced ruin. Such was the fate of so many of America’s pioneering entrepreneurs. A gang of ‘white knights’ — speculators and chancers who saw an opportunity for a killing rather than men of honour riding to the rescue out of the goodness of their lily white hearts — had quickly stepped in to ‘take the hotel off the hands’ of the desperate former owners of the huge ‘pink elephant’ on the sands. In the way of these things the fittest, the bravest and the richest man invariably comes out on top, and by 1890 only one man was left standing, thirty-seven year old John Dietrich Spreckels. It happened that Spreckels also owned the Arizona and San Diego Railway, possibly the most significant well-spring of the city’s later growth and development in the train age before automotive and air travel took over the North American Continent. It seemed that the Spreckels family had owned the Hotel del Coronado until as recently as 1948.
In the good times the hotel had had an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a Japanese tea garden, tennis courts, its own yacht club and had been the base for fishing expeditions and hunting trips along the coast. During the Prohibition Era it was a famous oasis for the party set. In the twenties and thirties it had been the playground of the Hollywood elite but World War II had put an end to the society high jinks. Half of North Island had been taken over by a naval air station and the resort had become a billet, an over-crowded transit camp, for thousands of airman passing through on the way to America’s foreign wars.
Notwithstanding that the Hotel del Coronado’s story was one of decline in the post-war years Larry Lawrence was determined to do something about it. If the October War had not torpedoed the real estate market he would have already knocked the resort down and started throwing up condominiums. However, like any pragmatic businessman in the face of an untimely setback he had swiftly moved on to Plan B. Equally pragmatically, he had concluded that if Plan B was going to have any prospects of success, he needed it to be publicly endorsed by the people who mattered.
Top of the list of people that mattered was California State Governor Pat Brown, Miranda Sullivan’s boss.
Politics did not really interest Miranda. It would not have mattered if Governor Brown was a Democrat or a Republican. She did not really care. The fact was that she had fallen in love with the Office of the Governor of California. Very nearly from the moment she had walked through the outer door on her first nervous morning in Sacramento, she had felt as if she belonged, that she had arrived in a place where what she did mattered, right at the very living, beating heart of things. It was not that the Governor wielded great power — he did not — simply that the Office of the Governor of California possessed, if it wished to mobilise it, influence and resources which, if used wisely, had an unambiguously direct positive impact on the lives of real people. Governor Brown could not issue diktats that this or that should be done — other than in specific limited circumstances — but he could do a huge number of mainly little things which effected the way in which Californian society lived today and planned for the future. The Office was potentially a power for both good and bad; it so happened that Pat Brown was, she had decided, a profoundly ‘good’ man in exactly the same way she and many millions of Americans now suspected that Jack Kennedy was not.
Listening to the President of the United States of America speaking in far away Houston she recollected that Larry Lawrence had claimed that L. Frank Baum had written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while staying at the Hotel del Coronado. Apparently, he was supposed to have based his description of the Emerald City on the resort. Miranda was not so sure about the veracity of that latter statement. Her degree at Berkeley had been in Sociology, Anthropology and English Literature, and in some half-forgotten alcove of her memory she recalled reading somewhere that Baum had based the Emerald City on sights he had seen at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
The President was almost pleading with his audience in Texas.
She had heard this spiel many times; basically, the wicked Soviets were to blame and that explained everything.
“They said nothing to us and ordered their nuclear forces to attack the United States of America and its European allies on the evening of Saturday 27th October 1962. I prayed that night. For our souls, for all of our souls. I prayed for the souls of friends and foes alike for we are all alike in God’s sight. And then I knew what I must do. My fellow Americans, that was the darkest night of my life because I knew that for all our sakes, I could do no other than to uncover the sword of everything that was right and just in the world in your defence. In your defence and in the defence of the free World. In defence of the inalienable values passed down to us by our founding fathers…”