California Today: The Stories That Moved Us in 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/us/california-today-most-shared-stories-2016.html

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What news stories enthralled Californians in 2016?

By one measure, they were the ones that explored themes of personal triumph and good will toward others.

Crowdtangle, a social analytics company, provided a ranking of the year’s most popular pieces about California on Facebook posted by California news organizations.

Here are the top 10, all videos, ordered according to cumulative likes, shares and comments.

1. The transformation of Eric O’Grey. — SFGate.com

Mr. O’Grey’s life was a mess: He was depressed. He weighed 330 pounds. He hadn’t been on a date in 15 years.

At his nutritionist’s suggestion, he went to a shelter and got a dog, Peety, and everything changed. (Watch the video to see how.)

Reached by phone on Thursday, Mr. O’Grey, 57, said the attention to his story (the SFGate video got 34 million views) had been overwhelming.

Thousands of people contacted him. One of them was a high school sweetheart he hadn’t heard from in about 40 years. “And here is the grand finale to the entire thing,” Mr. O’Grey said.

They were married on Dec. 7.

Peety died. Mr. O’Grey keeps a framed print of his paw on his bedroom wall. He adopted another dog, a Labrador retriever mix named Jake. They run 40 miles a week together.

2. Jamie Foxx rescued a man in a car crash. — ABC 7

Brett Kyle, 32, was speeding when his Toyota Tacoma left the road and rolled several times in front of Mr. Foxx’s home in the Thousand Oaks area, reports said.

Responding, the Oscar-winning actor and another man, an off-duty paramedic who was driving by, reached into the burning vehicle, cut Mr. Kyle’s seatbelt and pulled him to safety.

“As we pull him out, within five seconds later, the truck goes up,” Mr. Foxx told reporters.

3. A Sacramento girl spread good will. — Fox 40

This summer, Leah Nelson, 10, decided to make the world a better place. So she made a bunch of bracelets, then gave them to strangers and asked that they pay forward the gesture however they saw fit.

Tens of millions of people watched a Fox 40 video that showed Leah spreading the word about her project, known as “Becuz I Care,” outside a grocery store.

On Thursday, Leah’s father, Charles Nelson, said people had contacted the family from as far as Britain, France and Portugal to ask about replicating it in their cities.

He described a letter they got from a woman in Montreal: “What she said is that what Leah’s story restored in her is a sense of hope for the future.”

4. An abandoned Chihuahua without front legs got prosthetic wheels. — SFGate.com

5. Snoop Dogg and The Game led a unity march to the Los Angeles Police Headquarters after the killings of Dallas police officers. — Los Angeles Times

6. A look at the grueling life of Gaspar Marcos, a Los Angeles high schooler who migrated from Guatemala. — Los Angeles Times

7. Three bears were captured on video frolicking in Lake Tahoe. — KCRA 3

8. Demonstrators shut down Interstate 880 in Oakland to protest police shootings of black men. — KRON 4

9. An aerial view of gridlock on the 405 Freeway in West Los Angeles. — ABC 7

10. Los Angeles firefighters comforted a dog rescued from a burning home. — NBC LA

(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have metered paywalls.)

• The majority in two panels agreed a student was raped by a Stanford football player. That wasn’t enough to expel him. [The New York Times]

• A boy, his father and his grandfather were killed over three years in the same Oakland neighborhood. [East Bay Times]

• Sales of semiautomatic rifles in California more than doubled this year. [San Francisco Chronicle]

• A professor rented the home of a U.C. Berkeley professor, then refused to leave. [Mother Jones]

• If a stroke was the primary cause of Debbie Reynolds’ death, a heart squeezed by the loss of a beloved daughter might have contributed. [The New York Times]

• In China, a hidden bounty of subsidies has supported the production of Apple’s best-selling product: the iPhone. [The New York Times]

• Venture capitalists are poised to invest big in start-ups and I.P.O.s in the new year. [The New York Times]

• When the seemingly invincible Ronda Rousey lost her U.F.C. title, it was a shock. Now’s her chance for a comeback. [The New York Times]

• California newspapers’ best photos of 2016 [Orange County Register | San Diego Union-Tribune | Los Angeles Times]

• Video: Humboldt County has begun an experiment to bring marijuana growers out of the shadows and regulate cannabis farming. [PBS NewsHour]

• Los Angeles will get a new museum in 2017 with the opening of the Marciano Art Foundation. [Los Angeles Times]

“And this, fellow citizens, is the first freeway in the West.”

So declared Gov. Culbert L. Olson of California on this day in 1940, when the Arroyo Seco Parkway was officially opened, connecting Los Angeles and Pasadena with a roadway unencumbered by traffic lights, streetcars or pedestrians.

Mr. Olson continued, presciently: “It is only the first. And that is its great promise to the future – the promise of many more freeways to come.”

Los Angeles’s love affair with the automobile was in full swing in the Depression-era 1930s when the construction of the six-lane, six-mile Arroyo Seco Parkway put thousands of people to work.

The freeway promised to cut travel times by at least half to about 12 minutes between Pasadena, a well-to-do city with high per capita car ownership, and downtown Los Angeles, where most of the jobs were.

Envisioned as a scenic route, it did not cut a straight line but rather traced the contours of the Arroyo Seco riverbed.

Today, the freeway remains largely as it was in the 1940s.

Transportation historians recognize the Arroyo Seco Parkway as a precursor to the modern high-speed freeways that now form a vast web across the Los Angeles region.

But even as the city continues to add freeway lanes in an intractable war against congestion, Angelenos are increasingly embracing new ideas in transportation.

While the car is bound to remain central, large investments in public transit — subways, light rail, buses — could begin to reshape how Los Angeles gets around.

California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.

The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.