Marilyn Monroe, Artichoke Queen of Castroville

Fifteen miles north of Monterey, where Highway One approaches the flat agricultural margin of the bay, sits Castroville: population small, agricultural output enormous, and briefly, on February twentieth, nineteen forty-eight, the location of one of the more improbable events in pre-Hollywood celebrity history.

A twenty-one-year-old actress named Norma Jean Mortenson came to Castroville that day to help promote a jewelry store diamond sale. She was not yet famous. The name Marilyn Monroe was not yet the name everyone knew. What she was, that February, was a young woman doing promotional work in an artichoke town fifteen miles from the ocean, and representatives of the California Artichoke Association presented her with a sash naming her California Artichoke Queen.

The sash she wore is still on display at Castroville City Hall.

Italian immigrants had been growing artichokes in this particular pocket of coastal fog, mild temperatures, and deep alluvial soil since the nineteen twenties. They found a combination of conditions that artichokes prefer over almost anywhere else on earth, and they stayed. Castroville has been called the Artichoke Capital of the World ever since. The town takes the title seriously.

The arithmetic is worth a moment: the woman who would become the most photographed actress of the twentieth century was first photographed for public purposes in a place whose primary distinction is that it grows an unusually high volume of thistle-adjacent vegetables by the bay. California is full of this kind of thing, if you look.