Joseph Widney - Booster

Booster

Widney was a prominent booster of Southern California. Jaher identifies Dr Widney as among those successful Los Angeles entrepreneurs who were the "most avid civic boosters... made sanguine by their triumphs, they expect urban growth to bring further gains... predicted that the city would become a great metropolis". Widney envisioned Los Angeles "developing into the health capital of the world, a heliopolis of holistic health culture".

Widney was an active member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce since October 1888, and served as its chairman or secretary. Widney's first two books were written to promote (or "boost") California. In California of the South (1888), described by David Fine as "one of the earliest booster tracts" Widney and Walter Lindley wrote: "The health-seeker who, after suffering in both mind and body, after vainly trying the cold climate of Minnesota and the warm climate of Florida, after visiting Mentone, Cannes, and Nice, after traveling to Cuba and Algiers, and noticing that he is losing ounce upon ounce of flesh, and his cheeks have grown more sunken, his appetite more capricious, his breath more hurried, that his temperature is no longer normal,... turns with a gleam of hope toward the Occident"—by which they meant Southern California. Many people followed that gleam and found it something more than hope".