Category Archives: Uncategorized

The grand opening of the Rolling Hills Theatre in Torrance on the night of Oct. 2, 1963 was a gala event for the city. The new single-screen movie theater was a showplace, drawing customers to the Rolling Hills Plaza shopping center at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, which had opened twoContinue reading “The Rolling Hills Theatre had mostly good days, except for one very bad one”

Clarence Saunders, the innovative founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain, never really explained the inspiration for his chain’s name. When asked why he chose it, he answered, “So people will ask that very question.” These days, the company with the silly name is known mostly for its role in Southern popular life andContinue reading “Piggly Wiggly grocery chain had South Bay locations”

Contemporary accounts describe the first Factory Frolic held in Torrance in 1938 as the most successful community event staged in the city up until that time, with the largest parade and biggest crowds in city history. With major industries now well-established in the city – Union Tool and Die, Columbia Steel, the Pacific Electric maintenanceContinue reading “Torrance’s Factory Frolic celebrated the city’s industrial base”

San Pedro’s main street may be named after him, but, for some reason, John Tracy Gaffey’s life story isn’t nearly as well known as that of Jared Sidney Torrance or Phineas Banning. It deserves to be. He was an industrious man with a wide variety of business, political and civic interests whose rise to localContinue reading “The man behind San Pedro’s Gaffey Street”

As the Los Angeles area grew in the early decades of the 20th Century, it became apparent that its water system would never be able to handle the pressure on its pipes necessary to deliver water to all the new areas being developed. A series of regional reservoirs would be needed to serve as collectionContinue reading “Getting to the bottom of the Palos Verdes Reservoir”

In the early days of the harbor at San Pedro, the channels weren’t deep enough to allow ocean steamships to navigate right up to the two docks in the area, Timms Landing in San Pedro and Banning’s Landing in Wilmington. The latter was owned by prominent Harbor Area shipping and mercantile magnate Phineas Banning, whoContinue reading “The wreck of the Ada Hancock”

The facts of the case seemed simple at first. Lumber dealer August Lindstrom, a Lomita resident who lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, died on Feb, 9, 1931, ostensibly from a heart attack. In fact, he already had been buried for several days in a Williams, Ariz., grave when one of his three sons, Chicago meat packerContinue reading “Who really killed August Lindstrom?”

Redondo Beach’s Seaside Lagoon, an enclosed swimming area on the southwest corner of Harbor Drive and Portofino Way in King Harbor, has its origins in the development of the King Harbor area in the early 1960s. Basing the idea on the city’s immensely popular enclosed salt-water plunge that opened in 1908 and drew thousands ofContinue reading “Seaside Lagoon in Redondo Beach”

The post-World War II Atomic Age spawned one of the more frenzied fads of the fad-crazy 1950s: prospecting for uranium. The scarce, naturally occurring metal was discovered by German chemist Martin Klaproth in 1789, and Henri Becquerel identified uranium’s radioactive nature in Paris in 1896. The Enrico Fermi-led team of scientists working in the U.S.Continue reading “The 1950s uranium boom”

Big Joe Turner’s original 1954 version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” endures as one of early rock ‘n’ roll’s most primal moments. But it’s only part of his story, which begins with his birth as Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. in Kansas City, Mo., on May 3, 1911, and ends in a cemetery in Harbor Gateway.Continue reading “Big Joe Turner’s final resting place”