Opinion: How Southern California became the land of swimming pools
Here we are, living 25 miles, five miles, even a scant hundred feet from that splendid dunk known as the Pacific Ocean, and what are we known for the world over? Swimming pools. By one calculation from five years ago, there are a quarter-million private swimming pools in Los Angeles County. … Our stories wouldn’t be our stories without swimming pools as image and metaphor. In “The Graduate,” Benjamin Braddock bastes in his parents’ pool in Pasadena, worrying about his future. … The crowded, chlorinated deep-end water in “Boogie Nights” memorializes porn, pools, and the 1970s San Fernando Valley, the suburban birthplace of a pool paradise …
-Written by Patt Morrison, a Los Angeles Times columnist.