(There are well over 100 cities in metro LA though a few of them are quite small)

15 of the largest cities in the country are in California. If we made Los Angeles County a state it would be the 11th largest state, and even without it California would still be the 2nd largest state. LA and California are out of scale to the rest of the country.

World war 2 shook everything loose and they all rolled West until they couldn't go any further

dust bowl. They don’t really talk about where all those people ended up, but the answer was more often than not the SoCal aircraft factories.

Good point about the earlier dust bowl immigrants. My own grandfather and great-uncle moved from Michigan car factories to work on aircraft in S. Cal after the war, and later my wife's mom and two uncles did the same after graduating from MI Tech. When I was a kid it was a common story

The cowtowns in California have six digit populations :)

Fresno has more than a half million people.

I was referring to Stockton and Vacaville

There's a bunch of them - Modesto. The king of cow towns - Bakersfield - is the 47th largest city in the country.

Vaca ville => cow town Stock ton => cow town