The Bells of Santa Lechuga
An investigation into a mysterious city lost to the ravages of a faulty imagination
It’s been said that Santa Lechuga was once a bustling little city, but no one alive today can verify the claim.
All anyone knows for certain is that Santa Lechuga was in a perpetual state of grotesque decline since the day Rube Furrow was elected mayor back in the late 1970s. In addition to his long-term municipal master plan, which seems to have been the work of six-dozen drunken monkeys, Furrow spent his political career steeped in a whirlwind of scandals, mostly involving corrupt side-yard setback deals, redevelopment crimes, money under the table, money over the table, and questionable relationships with certain barnyard animals.
And yet Mayor Furrow maintained an iron grip on City Hall.
As I’m sure you know, Santa Lechuga was located somewhere in South Monterey County, near towns with fictional names like “Parkfield” and “Jolon” and “San Ardo.” Santa Lechuga’s exact location remains a mystery, inasmuch as teams of surveyors, civil engineers and cartographers constantly failed to establish geographic coordinates for the city, despite repeated attempts.
Santa Lechuga developed around La Misión Nuestra Senora de la Lechuga, one of Fra. Junipero Serra’s forgotten missions. Serra did a decent job of colonizing California and destroying native cultures when he established his better-known missions in places like San Diego and Soledad. But we tend to forget that Serra also left a string of abysmal failures in places like Santa Lechuga, Chualar and Santa Nella. Each of them were shoddy missions built on miserable land and administered by incompetent priests.
Yet some crude semblance of civilization remained in Santa Lechuga. The downtown was originally designed around what city planners might call a “Rough-and-Tumble” motif inspired by Kandinsky and drawn up by the drunken monkeys. After years of neglect, it later boasted a more “Benign Abandonment” motif inspired by Bukowski.
The fate of Santa Lechuga went from bad to worse after Furrow used a generous state urban renewal grant to implement a Redevelopment Project in the mid 1980s. That groundbreaking bit of ineptitude resulted in the bulldozing of all the existing housing in town and replacing it with hundreds of single-wides and teardrop trailers that Furrow himself purchased at a mobile-home distress auction in Bakersfield and sold “at cost” to the Santa Lechuga Redevelopment Agency.
Two years after the redevelopment fiasco, the citizens of Santa Lechuga voted to abolish taxes. They also dismantled the city budget, the public works department, and police and fire.
In order to keep the place somewhat operational, responsibility for the traditional functions of a city — street repairs, public safety, parks and recreation, library services — was handled by the Santa Lechuga Lions Club. During its final year of operation, the Lions Club boasted a membership of six Lechugans (average age: 82).
The important thing to remember about that era, of course, was that the citizens of Santa Lechuga were spared the tyranny of Big Government. Better yet, as the city flag declared, nobody tread on them.
The last big civic project conducted by the Lions Club was launched in 1987, after rumor spread that Clint Eastwood was coming to town.
Clint Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel at the time, and the Era of Eastwood sparked a clamber of civic exuberance among municipal leaders unlike anything ever seen before or since in Monterey County. The fact that the famous movie star — Clint Freaking Eastwood! — had plunged himself headlong into the nuts-and-bolts of municipal affairs suddenly made it cool to be a local politician. Entertainment journalists from all over the globe descended on Monterey County to catch live-action shots of Clint Eastwood banging a gavel or presenting a resolution. It was sensational and the local yokels basked in the shared spotlight.
All of which proved the old adage that all politics is loco.
Every two-bit public official between Pajaro and Santa Lechuga wanted to get their picture taken with Clint Eastwood whenever they’d spot him dragging his celebrity into some boring-ass solid waste management district board meeting. Clint was one of them, after all. He’d even married the local anchorwoman. If the local politicians were lucky, Clint might even cast them in one of his award-winning movies.
He seemed so real when he was just walking around like that.
Suffice to say, the level of grovel in Monterey County was at an all-time high when Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel. Even the Pope showed up one day to shake his hand.
And Rube Furrow got caught up in the hoo-ha along with everybody else.
So it came to pass that in 1987, Clint Eastwood was purportedly attending a summit in Santa Lechuga City Hall with Rube Furrow and a couple of other South County power brokers.
As I recall with my faulty memory, Eastwood himself called the meeting to promote the economic benefits of a massive golf resort development proposal on 6,500 acres of dead weeds east of town that a crony of his wanted to build. As I also remember, this particular project promised to turn sleepy little Santa Lechuga into the next Palm Springs.
Why Eastwood was interested in a golf resort in South Monterey County was never really explained. And no one thought to ask. That’s just the way things were back then.
Anyway, in anticipation of Eastwood’s arrival, Rube Furrow convinced the Lions Club to help clean up the town. He told club members he wanted Santa Lechuga to “shimmer and shine” so that “Mister Eastwood” would come away with a positive impression of the place.
So the Lions Club spent a full Saturday afternoon picking up beer cans, dragging away discarded tractor tires and disposing of dead critters from Main Street. A team of eager Lions climbed up the chapel tower to polish the mission bells. The Lions Auxiliary was in charge of wiping ancient smudges from City Hall windows. Some inspired soul even painted a sign on a piece of cardboard in red letters that read:
Unfortunately, the FBI arrested the chief operating officer of the golf resort development firm three days before the Santa Lechuga summit. Convicted of crimes against humanity, he is currently serving a life sentence in some penitentiary in Oklahoma.
Clint Eastwood never did come to Santa Lechuga.
And the Lions Club learned a valuable lesson about the allocation of its energy and resources into city improvement projects.
There were plenty of other stories to tell about Santa Lechuga …
But then one day Santa Lechuga went away. It simply disappeared, pffft, just like that. Rube Furrow was never heard from again. It was as though Santa Lechuga never existed. And I suppose it never did.
The primary reason it disappeared is that I stopped writing stories about Santa Lechuga for the Monterey County Herald. Santa Lechuga had been a figment of my idiotic imagination, and it ceased to exist after “certain people” encouraged me to stop writing about it.
Allow me to explain:
In real life, the inspiration for “Santa Lechuga” was a high school coach I knew who harbored a profanity habit so vulgar that he feared he might get excommunicated from public education and maybe even charged with public indecency.
The coach resolved the problem by substituting the term “Santa Lechuga” whenever inspired to spew proper profanity around children and their parents. Which was often. For instance, when one of his players kicked a routine ground ball into the next hemisphere, the coach would yowl a sonic string of “Santa Lechugas" in a bark so loud and so expressive that “Santa Lechugas” echoed slanderously across the playing fields and into adjoining neighborhoods.
The intensity and the timbre of the coach’s “Santa Lechugas” were such that there was no mistaking what he actually meant to say. Prudes clutched their pearls. Rectors were seen to cross themselves whenever the coach let loose a fat and juicy “Santa Lechuga.” Mothers covered their children’s ears and petitioned the school board for his removal.
I found the coach’s behavior quite hilarious, of course, because, as you might have guessed by now I am a sophomoric dipstick with an unrefined sense of civility.
So when I was invited to write a stupid weekly column for the stupid Monterey County Herald back in the days when the Herald published stupid columns, I created a stupid fictional city and called it Santa Lechuga. I did this to honor my hero, the coach.
The mistake I made, in retrospect, was thinking that the savvy and intelligent readers of the Herald would immediately recognize my sophomoric idiocy as pure fiction. The idea of Santa Lechuga seemed so ridiculous to me that I thought that slapping a “satire” label on my column was redundant, so I didn’t.
But I was wrong. It turns out that some Monterey County Herald readers didn’t see the humor in anything about Santa Lechuga. And they especially weren’t amused when after they actually drove down to the southern reaches of Monterey County in hopes of visiting La Misión Nuestra Señora de la Lechuga and maybe even meeting Mayor Rube Furrow himself, only to learn that there is no such place and no such person.
The aggrieved complainants tied up the Herald’s phone lines and other customers paced angrily about the newspaper office lobby until the publisher agreed to listen to their demands that I be escorted out of Monterey County forever, once and for all.
Thus I was advised by my editor — as well as by a grim battery of liability lawyers and the Holy See — to cease and desist with the Santa Lechuga nonsense.
So I pulled the plug on Santa Lechuga.
Even today, I wonder whatever happened to Rube Furrow.
The author wishes to express his deep appreciation to Fred Hernandez for his gift of the statue of Nuestra Señora de la Lechuga, depicted in the illustration above. In a previous life, Mr. Hernandez was assistant chief of the Santa Lechuga Bucket Brigade before it was abolished by a vote of citizens.
Timely political comment in Jan 2024 when talking about Santa Lechuga doing away with government and all. But they can be proud no one tread on them. Thanks again for an enjoyable piece!
Lettuce prey.