Phoebe Sykes knew Torrance when it was mostly just an idea in founder Jared Sydney Torrance’s mind. The Torrance she knew then was mostly dusty fields, broken up by occasional encampments of workers on construction projects in the nascent city.
Sykes was born Phoebe Hartley in Huddersfield, England, on Oct. 25, 1868. She married jeweler Albert E. Sykes, and their son, William was born in 1894.
The family decided to move to America, and they arrived in the South Bay in October 1911, the year before Torrance officially founded his city, and a decade before it officially was incorporated.
The family settled in a house on Chestnut Ave. in the Lomita area, which later became 238th St. when the land became part of the city of Torrance. (Lomita remained unincorporated until 1964.)
The couple worked hard to make a living in the then-desolate Torrance area, shown below in a 1910 photo. In February 1912, before the new city’s streets had been graded and while the foundation was still being laid for the giant Union Tool Co. plant, Albert established a tent store among the worker camps.
The various camps were bases of operation for the grading crews, the street and sidewalk contractors, those working on the Union Tool plant, the engineers, pipefitters and other workers.
The Sykes’ tent store was located at the present-day downtown Torrance “five points” intersection of Carson St. and Cravens Ave.
It provided a variety of essentials for the workers, including newspapers, tobacco, candy, overalls and suspenders, and provided a laundry service for them. Candles were in such demand that Albert and Phoebe had to go to downtown Los Angeles to buy enough to keep the tent store stocked.
The couple also delivered newspapers, which arrived at the Pacific Electric railroad station near the Weston ranch in the southern part of the city. Phoebe and William would walk there from their Lomita home and distribute the papers to the Lomita area, covering some 26 miles on their trek. Albert covered the worker areas in Torrance, and his daily trek covered 10 miles.
In addition, Phoebe became the first person to deliver mail to the Torrance area in those early days before a post office was established there. She would travel by horse and buggy to the post office in Redondo Beach and lug the sacks of mail to the workers’ camps and to Lomita in order to deliver it. (The first Torrance post office was authorized in September 1912.)
Sadly, Albert took ill with tuberculosis in the early summer of 1912, and never recovered. He died on October 18, 1912.
In his absence, Phoebe and William continued the work the family had been doing. This included delivering copies of the first-ever edition of the Torrance Herald on Jan. 1, 1914. They would deliver that paper for several years, until the paper finally hired newsboys to take over the job in 1921.
As the town began to take physical shape, Sykes and her son were no longer required to make daily visits to the worker camps. There were fewer of them as the projects that spawned them began to be completed..
Instead, Phoebe relocated the family business to the Irving Gill-designed Pacific Electric railroad depot on Cabrillo Ave. just south of Torrance Blvd., completed in 1912. (The structure currently houses The Depot restaurant.)
She and William manned a newsstand and tobacco shop located on the exterior of the Red Car depot. It was an ideal spot to catch the growing number of workers commuting to and from the new city to their jobs at the large industries that were now operational there. These included the Union Tool Co., the Llewellyn Iron Works and the railroad’s own large maintenance shops complex, among others.
She opened the store in the mid-1910s, probably around 1915. In 1923, she sold the business to local businessman Paul Beall.
She also sold their Lomita-area house and moved into the house at 1521 Cota Avet. near downtown Torrance that her son William had purchased in 1918 on his 21st birthday. The seller was no less than Jared Sydney Torrance himself, the city’s founder.
She would live there with William and his wife for the rest of her life. William worked for Columbia Steel in Torrance for 42 years before retiring. He died in 1994.
Phoebe spent much of the rest of her days engaged in community activities and traveling the world.
Much like her husband, she was especially active in Masonic activities. She was a charter member of the Torrance chapter of the Eastern Star, Order of the Amaranth. She served as its royal matron, the highest female position in the organization
During her later years, her birthday became something of an annual social event in the city. Mayor Albert Isen attended several of the celebrations, since he had grown up next door to the Sykes house on Cota.
Phoebe Sykes died on Feb. 16, 1969, after being publicly feted for her 100th birthday the previous May.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
Find A Grave website.
Historic Torrance: A Pictorial History of Torrance, California, by Dennis F. Shanahan and Charles Elliott Jr., Legends Press, 1984.
Torrance Press-Herald archives.
