The Press: California, Me Voil

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Frenchmen who still pictured the South as a Scarlett O'Hara land of cotton plantations and Negro mammies were put wise: "To tell the truth, we did not see much cotton in the South. What we saw was oil, natural gas, helium, steel, magnesium, atomic energy and chemical plants." The Gossets were impressed with the advance of Negro education; they called all-Negro Howard University (in Washington, D.C.) "more modern than the average European university." To the French reporters, the Vieux Carre of French New Orleans was a fake—with its "pretentious airs of romanticism," its "tourist traps." In Paris, Tenn., the Gossets felt a twinge of outraged national pride at the "made in Paris" perfumes. But their spirits revived when they saw a horseman ride up to a parking meter, throw the bridle across the meter, dismount and deposit a coin.

Paradise Found. Hollywood, the Gossets found, "does not exist"; it has been entirely sublet to charlatans and parasites, "small people with small ideas." But San Francisco—"the most civilized, the most refined, the most cultivated and the most Mediterranean city of the U.S." captured the Gossets' hearts at first sight made them ready to sing "California, Me Voilà!" (California, Here I Come). Last week, the memory still a warm glow, the roving Gossets were getting ready to move their home from Tangier to San Francisco.