The Lingering Intimacy of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row

Written and photographed by David Mutti Clark

Net Menders by Melissa Lotton. “How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise—the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream—be set down alive?”

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. . .

Some writers grab you. And then they swallow you whole. They create characters who become your friends, absorbing and nourishing you the rest of your life. And they give you an intoxicating place that quenches a thirst for intimacy. For me, John Steinbeck was that writer. And Cannery Row was the novel.

The Cutters by Susan Long. “The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned. . .”

. . . Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, laboratories and flop houses. . .

Today, the flop houses, honky-tonks, and whorehouses are long gone. The canneries have been converted to shops and restaurants casting their nets for tourists instead of sardines. But the characters of Cannery Row live on somehow, peeking out from behind the affluence brought by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, art galleries, and boutique hotels.

Palace Flop House by Melissa Lotton. “Frogs by the pound, by the fifty pounds. They weren’t counted, but there must have been over six or seven hundred.”

The characters in Cannery Row— Doc Ricketts, Mack and the boys, and Dora and her girls— were outrageous but real, acquaintances of Steinbeck. People he watched and liked.

. . . Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

Between the Canneries by Myron Oliver. “. . . the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles.”

Ed “Doc” Ricketts was Steinbeck’s confidant. Ricketts died in 1948. His character debuted in Cannery Row in 1945. And in 2020, Doc still draws a crowd. Until the pandemic, thousands still came to Monterey, walked along the Row and searched for his spirit.

Some lifelong residents say Doc was a teacher, and people came to learn how to dream. But how can a personage in the pages of a novel who has been dead for 75 years teach anything?

Sardine Packers by N.J. Taylor. “Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work.”

“Everyone near him was influenced by him, deeply and permanently,” said Steinbeck of Doc. “Some he taught how to think, others how to see or hear. Children on the beach he taught how to look for find beautiful animals in worlds they never had suspected were there at all. He taught everyone without seeming to.”

Alicia Harby DeNoon raucously remembered her lessons from Doc and John. (Alicia lived on the Row from World War II until her death in 2000. I was fortunate to interview her in 1998.) As a young girl, Alicia worked in the canneries cutting and packing sardines, waded in the tide pools where Doc collected his marine specimens and fished off Wharf Number Two with Steinbeck.

Alicia Harby DeNoon of Cannery Row in 1998. A friend of John Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts. She sold antiques, jewelry and nostalgia.

I talked with Alicia in her antique shop across the street from Doc’s former lab. She was a flaming redhead that afternoon. She greeted me with a warm smile and told me stories with the melodious mien of a queen while sitting behind a cluttered desk, watching and waiting on customers, not missing a beat.

Alicia, in fact, had been a queen. In 1963, she was crowned the first out-of-state queen of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras. She pulled out a newspaper from her desk and proved it with a photo showing King Phillip Fillabert taking her hand to lead the grand march.

Alicia paused, then recalled the day Doc died— when his clankity old car was hit by The Del Monte Express, the evening train from San Francisco. Doc was on his way to a steak dinner, but as he turned his sputtering sedan up the hill where the road crossed the Southern Pacific Railroad track, the train slipped around a warehouse and crashed into him. The news spread quickly along the Row, and Alicia rushed to the collision site.

A statue of Edward “Doc” Ricketts stands at the site where he was killed by a train.

“He will not die,” Steinbeck said later. “He haunts the people who knew him. He is always present even in the moments when we feel his loss the most.”

Alicia kept a “Remembrance Room,” a private collection of manuscripts and memorabilia. She showed me a copy of Doc’s last will and testament and a claim on his estate for the value of 300 leopard frogs that Doc wasn’t able to deliver.

As more browsers walked through her shop, Alicia continued telling an anecdote about Doc and John and had everyone laughing. And for a second, we were all inside the covers of Cannery Row. And no one wanted the story to end.

Postscript about the paintings—

For over ten years— from 1989 to 2000— smack dab in the middle of Cannery Row, there existed an unsightly construction site. Unsightly because nothing was being built. Lawsuits had stopped all activity. So local artists transformed this blighted end of the Row into a 400-foot-long mural. Bruce Ariss, a close friend of Steinbeck and Ricketts, provided his original sketches of life on Cannery Row during the sardine canning days. Each artist created their own interpretation of the theme.

The Cannery Row mural attempted to capture the spirit of the Row during its heyday while hiding the mess of a comatose construction site.