Kevin Starr, California state librarian emeritus, historian and professor, has completed another volume – this one featuring Downtown’s struggles with reinvention — in his epic series on California, titled “Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance,” which chronicles California from 1950 to 1963.  Donning a pink and black striped bowtie, Starr spoke about his book at the Museum of San Diego History, Balboa Park, on Wednesday, Aug. 26. Attending a lecture by Starr is worth the effort; he glides through the eras with such gusto and confidence (he could hang each sentence on its date if called upon) that he also brings humor and clarity to his talks and inspires the audience to read on. Starr taps into San Diego’s love-hate relationship with its big-city status. “In the decade to come, San Diego would replay this ambivalent drama of growth versus stasis, smokestacks versus geraniums,” Starr writes. He runs through the lives of the movers and shakers that launched San Diego into big-city status in the 1950s despite its dwellers’ reluctance. C. Arnholt Smith was a real estate baron, bank owner and shipbuilder who helped fishermen ditch their bamboo poles for nets to compete with the Japanese fishing industry. Roger Revelle built a top-down research university, and spurned a biotech kingdom, on the pueblo lands above La Jolla. “Navy officer, scientist, power player, social lion: Roger Revelle emerged in the 1950s as the embodiment of San Diego value, La Jolla style, just as C. Arnholt Smith epitomized the downtown establishment. San Diego was expressed in each of these men,” he writes.   In this era, Downtown struggled to reinvent itself from an intimate harborside city to a corporate, high-rise city core. Voters rejected plans to accept or acknowledge growth. They said no to a proposal for a city-county administration building near San Diego Harbor in 1947. They rejected a sewer bond for $16 million to curb pollution in the bay in 1954. In 1956, they rejected plans to build a convention-civic center Downtown. Alas, Starr’s portrayal of San Diego in the 1950s strikes a cord today: “It could be said, through the 1950s, that San Diego was a privileged provincial place: a city, enjoying the cultural amenities of urbanism — an impressive central park with a restored Spanish Revival complex of museums at its center, a world-class zoo, an internationally ranked oceanographic research center, a state college, a private Catholic university, an orchestra, a civic light opera company, a flourishing tradition of little theater, while at the same time remaining (so it told itself frequently) a laid-back kind of a place, blessed with the best climate in the nation.”