Berry

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and writer whose work advocated fiercely for working landscapes and working people, died “suddenly and peacefully” on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky., according to his family. He was 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed his death. On Thursday, she told The Times that her father, until about six months ago, was still writing regularly in his cabin on the banks of the Kentucky River, a place he called “camp,” where many of his more than 50 volumes of poetry, short stories, essays and novels were written.

Berry championed sustainable farming and rural community preservation and railed against industrial agriculture and corporate agribusiness.

“He was fierce and he was fearless, and he remained fearless,” she said, explaining that her family taught her the erosion of rural places wasn’t inevitable but “destruction by design,” engineered by corporate interests and political policies.

Berry, whose writings were often fueled by an anger toward the forces that have driven the destruction of the rural land and communities that he dedicated his life to defending, softened in his final years, according to his daughter. “He was always a tender man, and that part of him got stronger. He was rereading a lot of books that he had loved in his life, and he told me he was looking for the tenderness in the books, and that’s a lovely thing.”

Berry’s most influential work began with a list of the problems he’d observed in modern agriculture, scribbled onto a legal pad as he traveled the long stretch of road between Kentucky’s Henry County and Spokane, Wash., where Berry would deliver a speech at the “Agriculture for a Small Planet” symposium in 1974.

“I was asked to talk about labor-intensive microsystems agriculture. That’s not my language, and it’s not the sort of language that I wish to use because it’s the way people speak when they don’t want to be understood by most people,” he began.

Berry spoke of the six generations of farmers who worked his land before him, and the concerns for farming communities and their agricultural economy that he inherited from his father. He decried “the experts and politicians who have prescribed, encouraged, and applauded the disintegration of such farming communities all over this country into our allegedly miraculous modern American agriculture.”

The speech would later become Berry’s 1977 manifesto “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture,” which launched a sustainable-farming movement and cemented Berry’s authority on agrarian issues on the national stage.

Beyond his cultural critiques, Berry wrote notable novels including “The Memory of Old Jack,” “Jayber Crow” and “Hannah Coulter.” He was a prolific poet as well. His verse included his debut collection, “The Broken Ground,” and his celebrated Sabbath Poems series, which explored living in harmony with the land.

Over the course of his career, he was honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among other accolades. In 2010, Berry was awarded the National Humanities Medal by then-President Obama for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.

Wendell Erdman Berry was born on Aug. 5, 1934, in Louisville, Ky., to John Marshall Berry Sr., a lawyer and tobacco farmer, and Virginia Perry Berry. Wendell was the eldest of four children, two boys and two girls. In high school, his parents shipped him off to Millersburg Military Institute, a former military boarding school in Kentucky, where rather than conform to the teachings, he later wrote that his takeaway was, “Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence — and you have a tyrant.”

He went on to study English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky. There he met and wooed Tanya Amyx, who would become his wife and the mother of his two children, Mary and Pryor. He landed a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford in 1958, and in 1961 he was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to pack up the family and live in Tuscany and southern France.

After Berry’s scholarly pursuits took him to the West Coast, then Europe, then the East Coast, where he taught at New York University, he accepted a job at the University of Kentucky, allowing him to return home and back to his roots, on a farm near the river.

“Within a few years, Mom and Dad were raising 85% of the food we were eating,” Mary told The Times. “We had a milk cow, raised hogs for our own use, and by the time I was a teenager, I resented the whole thing pretty seriously, and I remember saying to them more than once, ‘I did not choose to live this way, and I don’t know why we have to do everything the hardest way possible.’ We had no television. … But I was in a heck of a position with my parents because I never really thought they were wrong about anything, and I still don’t.”

When Mary would gripe, she said, her dad would laugh or “just keep working.” But “he talked about what we were doing and why we were doing it,” she said. “He told my brother and me from the time I can remember to look and see that this is good and don’t forget, and I have not forgotten.”

In 2011, when Berry was nearly 80 years old, he joined a high-profile sit-in at the office of Kentucky’s then-Gov. Steve Beshear to protest the destructive mountaintop strip-mining of coal. In an interview with Bill Moyers shared by the Berry Center in 2025, Berry said that he and his compatriots had had enough of the state government ceding control of resources to the coal companies. “In our society,” he said, “people with money are bigger and more powerful and more noticeable and count more as citizens than people without much money. … So we did confront the governor and tell him we weren’t going to leave.”

His attempt at civil disobedience was turned on its head when the governor invited Berry and the Kentucky Rising activists to stay.

“We did stay,” he said. “The whole weekend.”

“We were beautifully treated by the security staff and people who sent us food and bedding and good wishes and even came in and gave us massages. And it was altogether one of the loveliest weekends I’ve ever spent in my life.”

Berry continued writing into his old age.

Next month, Counterpoint Press will posthumously release “Dispatches From Rural America,” a collection of 15 essays. In one, “The Problem Is Industrialism,” Berry wrote about a 2021 conversation he had with a friend of more than 40 years, author Wes Jackson.

“To the extent that we were talking in earnest, our subject was the set of calamities that the media and the commentators frequently take up, typically dealing with each one in isolation from the others and representing each as an emergency more or less apocalyptic, and in tones recalling a number of vernacular alarms, from ‘Last chance for beer’ to ‘Prepare to meet God.’”

He continued later that the two discussed how industrialism “grows only by consuming, once and for all, the living world.”

Mary said she wanted people to know that, yes, her father was worried and wouldn’t have written so much if he weren’t terribly concerned about the future of rural America, but she wants people to understand that he was a man of great hope.

“Hope he felt was a duty, and I learned that from him,” she said. “As he said in one of his many poems, hope is what we owe people younger than ourselves.”

Mary said she was continuing her father’s work through the Berry Center, a nonprofit that aims to put Berry’s writings to work and advocates for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies.

Berry is survived by his wife of nearly 70 years, Tanya, his daughter Mary, son Pryor, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

This is the people pleaser. Phoenix Bakery’s now-iconic strawberry-and-whipped-cream cake has been called “L.A.’s most popular cake” for good reason. It’s light, not too sweet, packed with fresh berries and surrounded by a cloud of airy whipped-cream frosting with a border of sliced almonds for crunch. For generations of L.A. kids, including my own, this is the birthday cake. Dreamed up by the late Lun F. Chan as an extravagant expansion of strawberry shortcake, it has a double-layer base of chiffon cake (another L.A. invention). You can order tres leches and other types of cakes at the bakery, founded in 1938 by Chan’s brother, Fung Chow Chan, but nearly everyone comes in for the strawberry cake, which except for holidays is almost always available for walk-ins. And with prices starting at $29.95 for a 6-inch cake that serves five to six people, it’s also one of this city’s most affordable ways to make a birthday special.

My theme park day begins with gunfire. A jailbreak! But shortly after, I‘m attending a wedding. Next I’m on a mission, helping the local postmaster justify his uncontrollable desire to open everyone’s packages, and trying to find a way to do so without telling a lie.

This is just another Sunday morning at Knott’s Berry Farm’s “Ghost Town Alive!,” a now-10-year-old interactive show — live-action role-playing game is more accurate — that has become the best summer offering at any theme park, and not just in SoCal but in America. There’s a daily story, including three editions of a single-page newsletter that are updated every day. There’s also lots of improv. Over the years, I’ve found myself on the prowl for mysterious elixirs, playing matchmaker, collaborating on group stories in a schoolhouse, doing police work, participating in a mustache contest or flashing a press badge.

“Ghost Town Alive!” ultimately is the promise of theme parks fulfilled, that is that we can enter a fantasy world and play as cartoonish, or maybe even idealized, versions of ourselves.

It’s a rarity, an event with 46 actors — about 30 of whom appear each afternoon — who lead guests through scavenger hunts, puzzles or just conversations about life in Calico, the fictional town of Knott’s Berry Farm’s Ghost Town area. The cast ranges from those just out of college to those in their mid-70s, and no character is ever played by more than one actor. This gives Calico a sense of life, an illusion that it’s actually populated, but also allows actors to fully develop a personality and let their characters evolve.

Before creative director Andy Crocker was working on “Ghost Town Alive!,” she was visiting it as a fan. Crocker, an experiential designer who has worked on projects for companies as wide-ranging as the Los Angeles Public Library and Walt Disney Imagineering, specializes in particular on guest-to-actor interactions.

“I will never forget the first time I saw it as a guest,” Crocker tells me. “I came with my husband, and we did not bring our kid. We walked in, and I saw a little girl in a pink cowboy hat with a painted-on mustache following an outlaw off to jail. That outlaw was giving a gritty HBO performance. Wasn’t patronizing. Wasn’t talking down. He was giving her a hero moment, and I burst into tears. I didn’t know this was possible to do on this scale with such an institution. The empowerment that performer gave to that guest, I will never forget.”

To make a theme park feel personal is no easy feat. In fact, designers have long been trying to solve this problem, whether by creating interactive attractions that feel responsive to the guest, or short-lived experiments such as the late but great Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, colloquially known as the Star Wars hotel.

Crocker says others have asked for the “secret sauce” to “Ghost Town Alive!” They’ve tried — and are trying — but she’s not so sure the magic can be replicated. One, Knott’s is blessed with a real, 100-year-old Ghost Town. That allowed for the investment to be solely in the cast and performance rather than infrastructure. And yet actors, of course, aren’t cheap.

“The amount of people that we have, that’s tough for a lot of places,” Crocker says. “They try to do it with less, and it doesn’t quite work.”

Speaking on a panel hosted by trade group the Themed Entertainment Assn., Jeff Tucker, Knott’s Berry Farm’s show writer, says one early mistake Knott’s made was thinking everyone who works in Ghost Town could partake. That meant, for instance, taping dialogue cues to cash registers in the saloon in the hopes that bartenders could become a character. The concept failed. “It’s a logistical nightmare,” he says. The lesson: Hire actors to perform. Let bartenders be bartenders and retail staff be retail staff.

Another reason Crocker tells me “Ghost Town Alive!” is so rare, and will remain so: It doesn’t rely on intellectual property, or a known franchise, which has become the lifeblood of modern theme parks. “With things that are heavy IP, it’s very tricky to control your IP and to allow for real play, guest agency, and, honestly, artist agency,” she says.

That’s important, as “Ghost Town Alive!” can shift with the whims of the guest. There’s a core storyline this year. A rich, Beverly Hills-like family is revealed to be the true owners of Calico, and how the residents respond is the key narrative of the day. But there are multiple tales to uncover, including hidden factions (check out the Calico Historical Society) and who is taking who to the 4 p.m. hoedown, which ends each daily game of “Ghost Town Alive!”

But Crocker has also seen it get rather heartwarming.

“My mom came to see it,” she says. “She has some health concerns. There was a character who was in a crazy mix-’em-up and said he would not make it to the hoedown and that this would be his last day on Earth. This character and my mom ended up having this conversation about how if you know you don’t have a lot of time left, what would you do with your time? I was surprised by that pivot.”

It helps, Crocker says, that she’s noticed one commonality among the “Ghost Town Alive!” staff. They play — or were weaned on — tabletop role-playing games such as “Dungeons & Dragons,” which at their best allow for an anything-goes approach designed to follow the direction of the players rather than a strict script.

Tucker on the panel said there was one rule the crew lives by that defines the success of “Ghost Town Alive!”: “It’s not real,” he said. “We can do whatever we want.”

This week in SoCal theme parks

• Montezooma is not yet zooming. Knott’s Berry Farm initially intended to launch its reimagined Montezooma’s Revenge, now known as Montezooma: The Forbidden Fortress, this week. Late Thursday, the park delayed its public unveiling, with a spokesperson citing additional fine-tuning that surfaced during its final days of testing. The delay is not expected to be a prolonged one. “We appreciate everyone’s understanding and look forward to welcoming media and guests in the coming days when we can showcase the attraction exactly as intended,” read a statement from the park.
• A monthlong Lego celebration. Carlsbad’s Legoland likes to describe its Lego Festival, which started Monday and runs through Aug. 30, as a child’s first fest. Expect lots of characters and an assortment of play-focused areas. One is dedicated to music, another is a free-run creative zone and a third is a Lego garden designed to soothe. New this year is a game-heavy center dedicated to the Pokémon franchise, as well as a challenge-filled F1 installation.
• It’s now more expensive to eat at Disneyland. Price hikes, unfortunately, are a yearly-occurrence at the Disneyland Resort, and this summer, like every summer, hundreds of food items have ever-so-slightly increased in cost. Most are in the range of a dollar or so — give or take a quarter or two — but expect to pay $7, up from $6.50, for a scoop of popcorn. I admittedly do not keep a database of Disneyland food prices, but sites like Mickey Visit or Theme Park IQ have tracked the most egregious price bumps. Looking at their data, you may want to think twice about dining at Disneyland’s Rancho del Zocalo Restaurante, where prices have been increasing even as portions over the years have been declining.
• Where is Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift? We’re now in midsummer, and Universal Studios Hollywood’s Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift still does not have an official opening date. While sources familiar with the coaster’s operations point to routine mechanical issues that have arisen during its test and adjustment phase, one thing is certain: It’s not delayed due to noise complaints from neighbors, as rumors suggested last week. A Universal spokesperson pushed back on the notion that the coaster is delayed, stating it would still open this summer, which lasts into late September.

The best thing I ate at the parks

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the opening of Gordon Ramsay at the Carnaby at the Disneyland Resort’s Downtown Disney, the latest concept in which the celebrity chef has agreed to lend his name. This one is an upscale gastropub, and while I’ll leave the full cuisine analysis to the professional food writers, as a parkgoer I do believe it fills a void in Disneyland’s shopping and entertainment district, bringing the area an adult-focused space with upscale (read: expensive) twists on old favorites like fish and chips ($33) and cottage pie ($38). And after reading breathless press release-like articles and posts from my theme park peers (“utter perfection,” proclaimed one) I couldn’t have been more excited to dine there this weekend.

Let’s start with the vibe, which I found to be rather confused. I was seated in the tiny, uncomfortable indoor bar, a place that felt like an afterthought and leaned airport terminal drinking hole, as it’s situated at the top of a stairwell and serves primarily as a thoroughfare into the dining hall. That a pub, especially one with an extensive cocktail menu (I did love my $22 cotton candy-infused Old Fashioned) would treat its introductory bar as a throwaway rather than a centerpiece of the experience was disappointing (an outdoor bar is significantly more enticing). The core dining space leans contemporary more than a traditional, wood-infused pub, feeling cafe-like with its ‘60s rock posters and framed portraits of those in mod outfits. More theme-ing would have been welcome, as I read it as slightly cold and corporate rather than homey and intimate. Instead of, say Pasadena’s Lucky Baldwins, this felt like a nice break room at a major record label.

But my dish was delightful. I had my heart set on the cottage pie, this one infused with a hearty portion of short rib. I probably should have taken leftovers, because it’s heavy, but in the best way possible. The potato-rich top felt creamy and buttery, while the meat was equally soft. The whole thing felt invitingly plush. I walked away mixed. No complaints on my entrée, and I’m eager to come back and try the fish and chips, and yes, that viral sticky toffee pudding dessert, but longing for a more welcoming atmosphere, especially at this price point.

Tell us your stories. Ask us your questions.

Have a theme park tale to share? Whether it was a good day or less-than-perfect day, I would love to hear about it. Have a question? A tip? A fun photo from the parks to share? Email me at todd.martens@latimes.com. I may feature your note in an upcoming newsletter.

Ride on,

Todd Martens

P.S.

There’s a show running Saturday and Sunday in Los Angeles that I believe theme park fans should make time for. “The Shoebox Museum,” at North Hollywood’s After Hours theater, is a walk-through immersive experience at its most thoughtful. It’s short, at around 30 minutes, but it stayed with me for hours after it concluded.

“The Shoebox Museum,” from Drowned Out Productions’ Jackson Mancuso, who does theme park design by day, is a mediation on heartbreak, asking what we want to leave behind, and take with us, as we explore our grief. It’s meticulously designed, as we follow light cues through byzantine rooms filled with everyday ephemera — the type of stuff that only holds meaning to those who were in love. It’s a show about how an once broken heart, even mended, still finds ways to haunt us.