The garage-startup story leaves out the tenant that mattered most: by 1959, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company employed nearly 20,000 people in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale building nuclear missiles, and was Santa Clara County's largest employer for decades before personal computers ever took over.

Phylloxera wiped out 85% of Napa's vineyards by 1900. The fix was grafting French vines onto resistant American rootstock, and growers still rebuild the soil every year since. Eighty-six years later, Napa wines beat France's own best in a blind Paris tasting.

The film industry fled to Los Angeles to escape Thomas Edison's East Coast patent monopoly on movie cameras. A decade later, Donald Douglas founded Douglas Aircraft in 1921 by literally renting space in an abandoned movie studio, for nearly identical reasons.

Monterey was the real "Sardine Capital of the World" -- more than 30 canneries at its 1940s peak. It collapsed in the 1950s and, unlike San Diego's deliberate 1965 pivot into new industries, Monterey rebuilt nothing government-planned at all: a single family's $55 million personal gift built an aquarium inside the derelict cannery building instead.

California's Central Valley uses under 1% of US farmland to produce 8% of the nation's agricultural output by value. The federal irrigation system that built it was expanded to cover 750,000 acres -- the same acreage state regulators now project may have to go out of production.