CACalifornia Famous People

Richard Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, in a small house his father built in Yorba Linda, and he is buried a short walk from it. The house was never moved; the presidential library was built around it. Nixon is the only person born in California to reach the White House, and the only president to resign, which he did on August 9, 1974.

The presidents, and the ones California only borrowed

Nixon went from Whittier College and Duke law school to the House in 1947, the Senate in 1950 and eight years as Eisenhower's vice president, lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy by roughly 100,000 votes nationally, lost the California governor's race in 1962, then won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972.

Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, and came west in 1937 as a radio announcer who stayed for a screen test. He led the Screen Actors Guild through the blacklist years, governed California from 1967 to 1975 and was president from 1981 to 1989. Herbert Hoover was an Iowan who graduated in Stanford's first class in 1895 and made a mining fortune before entering politics. Kamala Harris was born in Oakland in 1964 to two Berkeley graduate students, and moved from district attorney of San Francisco to state attorney general to the Senate to the vice presidency in 2021.

Earl Warren, born in Los Angeles in 1891, is the only person elected governor of California three times, and as chief justice he wrote the unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Dolores Huerta, raised in Stockton, co-founded the farm workers union in 1962 and coined "Sí, se puede" a decade later.

Writers who built the state on paper

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902 and set nearly all his best work within forty miles of that house. The Grapes of Wrath took the Pulitzer in 1940 and he took the Nobel in 1962. Joan Didion, born in Sacramento in 1934, came from a family whose wagon party had peeled away from the Donner group before it attempted the fatal shortcut, a fact she returned to for the rest of her life. Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876, worked the bay as a teenage oyster pirate, and died at 40 on his ranch at Glen Ellen. Ray Bradbury, an Illinois boy who arrived in Los Angeles as a teenager, wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a coin-operated typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library at ten cents a half hour.

Two garages in Santa Clara County

In 1939 Bill Hewlett and David Packard began building audio oscillators in a rented garage behind 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, a shed the state later declared the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Gordon Moore, born in San Francisco in 1929 and raised in Pescadero where his father was a deputy sheriff, published the observation about doubling components in 1965 and co-founded Intel three years later. Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955, given up for adoption and raised in Mountain View and Los Altos, where the first Apple machines were assembled in a garage on Crist Drive. Steve Wozniak was born in San Jose in 1950 and designed the circuits.

Athletes out of the Southland

Ted Williams grew up in the North Park district of San Diego and hit .406 in 1941, a mark nobody has matched. Joe DiMaggio was born in Martinez in 1914, the eighth of nine children of a Sicilian fisherman, and grew up in San Francisco's North Beach. Jackie Robinson was born in Georgia but raised in Pasadena and became the first UCLA athlete to letter in four sports in a single year. Billie Jean King learned tennis on Long Beach public courts and won the Battle of the Sexes in 1973. Tiger Woods, born in Cypress in 1975, won three straight US Amateur titles before turning professional in 1996. Venus Williams was born in Lynwood and Serena in Michigan, but both learned the game on public courts in Compton. Tony Hawk landed the 900 at the 1999 X Games in San Francisco.

Birthplaces that surprise people

• Bruce Lee was born at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco in November 1940 while his father toured with a Cantonese opera company, which is how he held US citizenship.
• Julia Child was born in Pasadena in 1912 and did not learn to cook until she was in her thirties, living in France.
• Sally Ride, a nationally ranked junior tennis player from Los Angeles, became the first American woman in space in June 1983.
• Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1926 and spent much of her childhood in foster homes and a Hollywood orphanage.
• Shirley Temple of Santa Monica was the top box office draw in America four years running, then served as ambassador to Ghana and to Czechoslovakia.
• Clint Eastwood, born in San Francisco in 1930, was elected mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1986.

California people, frequent questions

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