The California I Imagined: Beach Boys, Baywatch, and a PR Career

From a Walkman in Spokane to beach walks with my kids, California was part of my story long before it was home.

Before I ever lived in California, I knew what it sounded like.

I was a kid in Spokane, Washington, tucked into the bottom bunk of my bed with my mom’s old cassette tapes and a Walkman. The Beach Boys were singing about California, and the whole place seemed to arrive through my headphones: sunshine, beaches, palm trees, and a life that looked a little more colorful than the one outside my window.

Listen to “California Girls” by the Beach Boys

I didn’t know California yet. I knew the version of it that music and television gave me. The Beach Boys made it sound like a place that was always summer. And then there was Baywatch: the red swimsuits, the slow-motion beach runs, the ocean stretching out behind everybody. Even from Washington, California seemed to be waiting just over the horizon.

Watch the Baywatch opening titles

California was a place people went

Around that same age, my family went to a concert at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington. The Beach Boys were playing. I remember being there with my family and hearing those songs in a huge outdoor setting, with the scenery all around us.

It was still Washington. But the music carried that California feeling with it. By then, California was becoming more than a place I’d seen on TV. It was somewhere I could imagine going.

My mom’s Subaru station wagon supplied another part of the soundtrack. Driving to soccer practice, we listened to the radio. I remember Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do”, with its Santa Monica reference, and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”. The songs got folded together in my memory with California itself: Santa Monica, the coast, the idea of a city where people could live a whole life, not just take a vacation.

That distinction stuck with me. California wasn’t only a postcard or a spring-break destination. It was somewhere people went to school, found jobs, made friends, and figured out what they wanted to do.

I started asking my mom questions about it. What was it actually like to live there? Were the beaches really that close? Was it always warm? I was a kid, so my research method was mostly music, television, and asking questions from the back seat.

The leap from Spokane to Cal Lutheran

I grew up ELCA Lutheran and was active in Lutheran youth leadership through junior high and high school. California Lutheran University made sense to me for more than one reason. It was a Lutheran school, and I already knew a couple of people from the Spokane area who were there.

Still, applying was one thing. Going was another.

I applied to the usual schools in the Pacific Northwest, the same places my friends were applying. Then I had to decide whether I could really travel about 2,000 miles from home and start over somewhere new.

When I visited Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks, it was November. The campus was gorgeous. I had friends there. And the California I’d been imagining for years suddenly had a campus, a schedule, a mailbox, and an address.

Getting accepted made the decision feel easy. Actually going was the leap.

I went.

The beach was no longer a TV set

Cal Lutheran was close enough to the coast that a beach trip could become an ordinary plan. I remember driving over Kanan Pass in Ventura County to get to the beaches. That drive was part of the California experience for me: leaving campus, climbing through the hills, and then heading down toward the ocean.

It was a different kind of California than the one I’d made from songs and TV. The weather, the views, the passes, the coastline: it was all right there, woven into regular life. You could go to class, meet up with friends, and decide to drive to the beach.

The California of Baywatch and Beach Boys tapes had turned into real roads and real weekends.

I’ve since lived in Venice and Santa Monica. Now I get to experience those places with my kids. There’s something surreal and lovely about showing them a coastline that lived in my imagination when I was their age. They don’t need a cassette tape to picture California. It’s where we go for a walk, spend a day at the beach, or drive along the coast.

Sometimes I think about that kid on the bottom bunk listening to the Beach Boys and how big and far away California must have seemed. He couldn’t have known that one day he’d be raising his own kids near the places he used to picture.

A California education in entertainment

College also gave me a front-row seat to the entertainment world I’d been curious about. I got free tickets to Jimmy Kimmel Live! and saw comedians at the Laugh Factory, including Dane Cook during the years when he was one of the biggest names in stand-up.

Los Angeles felt full of things happening just around the corner. A television taping, a comedy show, a person whose face you recognized from somewhere. It was exciting, a little ridiculous, and a very real version of the California I’d imagined from a distance.

It also taught me something about stories. The best ones don’t stay in one place. They move from a song to a car ride, from a TV screen to a live show, from a campus to a beach day with friends. The same story can feel different depending on who’s hearing it and where they are in their own life.

I didn’t know it yet, but that instinct would become a big part of my work.

My first job in PR came with a negotiation

My first college internship was at a PR agency. That was where I learned what public relations actually involved: finding the story, understanding who might care about it, and helping make the connection.

I also learned to negotiate.

At the interview, I told them I already had a paid job. I was going to make $20 an hour, so I asked if they could match it. Then I pointed out that the interview itself had taken an hour. They agreed to pay me for that hour, too.

My first paycheck included an extra $20 for the interview.

It was a small moment, but it has stayed with me. I was learning the work while also testing what I could ask for, how I could make a case, and how to bring my own personality into a professional conversation.

By the time I graduated, I knew PR was work I could do. I also knew that working for myself might give me more room to be creative and build something on my own terms. That idea stayed with me as I started my career and eventually built my own firm.

From imagining California to helping companies tell their stories

The path from a Beach Boys cassette to PR wasn’t a straight line. It ran through Spokane, a family concert at the Gorge, a Lutheran campus in Thousand Oaks, drives over Kanan Pass, comedy clubs, TV tapings, and that first internship interview.

But there’s a common thread: stories shape how we see what’s possible.

A song can make a faraway place feel close. A story about a customer can help a product feel real. A thoughtful introduction can put two people in a room and lead to something neither one would have created alone.

That’s a lot of what I do now with HR and talent acquisition technology companies. I help teams find the story that matters to their audience, then bring it to the right people through media, podcasts, analysts, events, and relationships. I’ve written more about that work in my overview of talent tech PR for HR and TA companies and my post on building market memory.

California started as a soundtrack and a picture in my head. Eventually, it became home. And somewhere along the way, stories became my work.