For forty-six years, Charles Hillinger journeyed around the world writing human-interest stories for the Los Angeles Times. He also helped to create and produce special features for the popular NBC television show Real People.

From this work comes California Characters, a collection of stories of intriguing, eccentric, or simply amazing individuals profiled by Hillinger. Many of these people have strange occupations, live solitary lives in remote locations, or collect, build, or design an assortment of odd things. Characters like Down the Road Dugan, Sweetwater Clyde, Dr. Tinkerpaw, Spaceship Ruthie, and Warmly Ormly will delight, amuse, and perhaps inspire the listener with their tales and reasons why they’ve chosen to live the lives they do.

This collection is the fruit of Hillinger’s nearly forty-six years of a dream job spent traveling the United States as a feature writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. The result was 6,000 human and general interest stories. He traveled, came home to write, and hit the road again.

In Charles Hillinger’s America, you will learn about Thomas Edison’s first motion picture studio, built in New Jersey; about the only surviving wooden whaling ship, in Connecticut; about the place in West Virginia where someone actually built a mountain out of a molehill; about the hauntingly mysterious mural in Utah known as the Great Gallery; about why Minnesota is the looniest state in the lower 48, and why firemen from America beat a steady path to Ponce, Puerto Rico.

The California that Charles Hillinger writes about is not the stereotypical land of movie stars, sensational trials, or tourist snapshots. Instead, he reveals a patchwork of incredible variety and uniqueness in the out-of-the-way places and everyday people found throughout this remarkable state. As a Los Angeles Times columnist who wrote thousands of human-interest stories during forty-six years of traveling the world, Charles Hillinger hones in on what makes each of California’s counties different from the others. Listeners learn about the man who flew an airplane long before the Wright Brothers did, the church with stained-glass windows commemorating preachers who were murdered or accidentally killed, and the museum with the largest collection of mummies on the West Coast. The stories are down-to-earth without excessive sentiment or philosophy.