South Bay History

By the time Jared Sydney Torrance publicly announced the founding of the city that bears his name in 1912, he had already arranged for two major industrial employers to establish operations there.

In December 1911, the Pacific Electric Railway Co. agreed to build its maintenance facility there in return for 125 acres of land.

Torrance sat on the board of directors of the other major employer, the Union Tool Co. In July 1911, he persuaded the firm, which was looking for cheaper land on which to build its new factory, to invest in 25 acres of dusty fields in his new settlement.

Union Tool, founded in 1908, had outgrown its Los Angeles location. The company, which specialized in making equipment and machinery for the oil drilling industry, found its business was booming due to the increasingly rapid proliferation of oil wells in the Los Angeles area.

Union Tool’s owners were unfazed by Torrance’s insistence that its new plant needed to be up and running within 18 months of signing the deal, and agreed to the plan. In December 1912, Union Tool’s factory at 1542 Border Ave., just northwest of the intersection of Carson St. and Western Ave., began operations with 280 employees, mostly drawn from its Los Angeles location.

According to the Torrance Herald, most of them had to commute at first, as there were only three houses in the city at the time. That would change rapidly as the new city raced to build houses and businesses to support other companies which began moving operations there.

These included the Hendrie Rubber Co., Pacific Metal Products Co., Fuller Shoe Co., Acme Brass Foundry, Llewellyn Iron Works and many others.

Business continued to boom at Union Tool, and the firm was acquired in 1920 by the National Supply Co., a large industrial machinery firm founded in 1894 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It would become the nation’s largest supplier of equipment to the oil industry, and a pioneer in the development and production of materials for the rotary drilling process.

Its Torrance operation changed its name to the National Supply Co., and its business exploded during the 1920s oil drilling boom. Large swaths of oil derricks soon covered the South Bay and Long Beach areas, from the Inglewood oil field to the north to Signal Hill.

As if that didn’t keep the company busy enough, oil wells soon blanketed the city of Torrance itself during the mid-1920s during its own oil boom. The last oil derrick wasn’t removed from the city until 1961, and oil operations continued long after that.

By the late 1930s, National Supply employed more than 1,000 workers on its payroll. As the nation ramped up for possible entry into World War II, the company began shifting over to manufacturing wartime materials.

In November 1941, just weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack, National Supply announced it would build a $2.3 million plant under a contract from the U.S. Navy. The 74-by-750 foot building would house the largest forging press on the West Coast, and six large lathes, all to be used to produce materials for ship construction.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Torrance police and fire personnel were on alert to help protect National Supply and other defense-related industries in town, and the companies themselves posted extra guards around their plants.

With the end of the war, National’s defense operations subsided. During the 1950s, the company became the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of oil drilling equipment, employing more than 1,500 workers.

In early January 1958, National’s board of directors unanimously voted to merge with MIddletown, Ohio-based Armco Steel Corp., then the seventh largest steel producer and the 43rd largest company in general in the U.S.

After the merger went into effect a few weeks later, the company became known as the National Supply Division of Armco. Together with the U.S. Steel plant and the Bethlehem Steel fabricating operation, National Supply had turned Torrance into one of California’s major steel manufacturing centers during the 1960s.

But the 1970s and 1980s were less kind to the steel industry. Downturns in the production of steel and, more tellingly, an increased reliance on foreign oil and the resulting slump in domestic oil drilling and production took a toll on plant operations.

The National Supply buildings were razed shortly afterward, and were replaced by a large industrial park that currently occupies the site. (The U.S. Steel plant had been converted into an industrial park a decade earlier.)

By 1985, the National Supply Division of Armco Steel had reduced its workforce to 230 employees. That October, Armco announced plans to close it and a sister plant in Houston. Finally, on Feb. 28, 1985, with its employee pool down to just 100 or so people, the Torrance National Supply plant was shuttered for good after more than 70 years of operation.

The redevelopment of the site marked the continuing gradual shift from Torrance’s position as a center for heavy manufacturing to more technology-based industries.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Historic Torrance: A Pictorial History of Torrance, California, by Dennis F. Shanahan and Charles Elliott Jr., Legends Press, 1984.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Torrance Press Herald archives.

These days, we earn Starbucks bonus stars, Target Circle rewards and a host of other loyalty programs directly from individual retailers. Though they existed then, such programs were less commonplace during the mid-1900s, when trading stamp businesses were in their heyday.

Retailers signed up with various trading stamp companies and gave out stamps to their customers based on the amount of money they spent in their stores. Consumers collected the physical stamps and pasted them in savings books that could then be exchanged for merchandise at redemption centers operated by the stamp companies.

Retail trading stamps were introduced in the early 1890s originally to reward shoppers who made their purchases using cash instead of credit. In 1896, the Sperry & Hutchinson Co. became the first independent trading stamp company, signing up a wide range of retailers to offer its S&H Green Stamps to their customers.

Green Stamps, issued mostly by grocery stores and gas stations, proved popular among consumers. Other companies, including Gold Bond Stamps (founded in 1938), began entering the business. Under the Gold Bond plan, a complete stamp book could be turned in at participating Torrance merchants in order to receive a $3.00 reduction off store purchases.

Interest in the trading stamp programs soared following the end of World War II and the rise of the suburbs. Middle class families viewed the stamps as a way to get “free” household goods and other products from trading stamp redemption stores.

Family members would be enlisted to aid in the licking and pasting of stamps in books. The stamp companies widely distributed free catalogs, which were pored over intently, and the stamp books also were free and widely available.

Competition among grocery stores and other retailers became fierce, with some offering double and triple trading stamps in order to lure customers.

During the 1950s, S&H Green Stamps, which still dominated the market,  announced that it was printing more stamps annually than the U.S. Post Office. According to a 1957 Gallup Poll, 33 million American households, two out of every three, were saving trading stamps.

Blue Chip was headquartered in Los Angeles, and began by opening five redemption centers, including one in Westchester and another in Long Beach. It promised to have at least 50 redemption centers open by the end of that year.

In Southern California, Green Stamps began to face serious competition starting on Jan. 4, 1960, when a coalition of chain grocers, drug stores and other retailers announced the formation of the Blue Chip Stamp Company cooperative venture and began distributing its stamps.

By June 1960, a Torrance Blue Chip redemption center had opened at 2153 Torrance Blvd. in a building which now houses a carpet store. Down the street, at Torrance and Hawthorne boulevards, an S&H redemption center had opened in the shopping center near the northeast corner of the two major boulevards.

The 1950s and 1960s proved to be the boom years for trading stamp companies. Some merchants objected to them, claiming they were too costly and cumbersome to administer. A group of independent Torrance gas station owners stopped offering the stamps for a while in July 1960, but they were swimming against the tide. Everyone seemed to be handing out the stamps.

Families weren’t the only ones who used trading stamps. They became popular fundraising tools for churches, social clubs, schools and charities. Admission into South Bay and Harbor Area community benefits and galas at times required contributing a completed book of trading stamps along with or instead of the usual entry fee.

Several factors contributed to the precipitous decline of trading stamps beginning in the 1970s. Most service stations stopped offering them after the 1973 gas shortage. With long lines of cars waiting for hours for fuel, station owners no longer needed to pay for inducements such as trading stamps to attract customers.

Supermarkets also turned to other customer strategies. Some preferred to undercut competitors through lower prices and coupons rather than pay for trading stamp programs. As supermarket checkout systems became more automated, the markets began offering price discounts through membership programs instead.

Consumer ardor for amassing the pesky little stamps and pasting them in books had cooled considerably as well. By the late 1990s, most traditional merchant trading stamp programs had ceased operations.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Los Angeles Daily News archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

Torrance Press Herald archives.

“The Trading Stamp Story,” by Jeff R. Lonto, Studio Z-7 Publishing website, 2000/2013.

Wikipedia.

Comments:

Sept. 30, 2024

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Carl Norloff, S&H Green Stamps CEO

The sight of middle-class South Bay suburbanites donning blackface makeup in order to play roles in minstrel shows at the local high school auditorium benefit show seems wildly inappropriate by modern standards.

But it wasn’t considered unusual until the early 1950s, when a groundswell of disapproval arose from civil rights groups calling attention to the racial caricatures present in minstrel shows.

First, some background. Minstrel shows originated in the northeast states in the early 1800s. They usually featured mostly white actors comically portraying black stereotyped characters in jokes, songs and skits staged in the revue format.

Uniquely American, the shows became the most popular theatrical art form in the country during the 1840s. Troupes of professional minstrel performers criss-crossed the country in shows that presaged the vaudeville era of the early 1900s, whose popularity eventually outstripped minstrelsy.

The “Amos ‘n Andy” characters were created in the mid-1920s by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who were very familiar with the minstrel show tradition. The show became one of the radio era’s most popular programs, airing between 1928 and 1960 in various forms.

The minstrel show format also became a popular one for local theater productions, and was often used by service clubs and other community organizations staging fundraisers and benefit shows. Librettos and songbooks from popular minstrel shows were readily available from theater publishers at the time.

A front-page Feb. 8, 1924 Torrance Herald story noted that members of the Torrance Business Men’s association had voted unanimously to stage their own minstrel show to benefit the local Boy Scouts organization. 

It was planned to be one of the first public productions to be staged in the then-new Torrance High School auditorium, which would later have to be replaced after being severely damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.

The Torrance Women’s Club announced its own minstrel show production, “comprised entirely of home talent” according to the Herald, at its clubhouse in April 1926.

The practice of staging amateur minstrel shows continued to be commonplace in the years after the end of World War II. After all, many movie stars, most notably Al Jolson in the late 1920s, had performed in blackface.

In addition to Jolson, there was Fred Astaire in “Swing Time” (1936), Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in “Babes on Broadway” (1941), and, famously, Bing Crosby’s blackface minstrel segment in “Holiday Inn” (1942). The latter is often excised from television screenings of the film, though the TCM channel still includes it, with an explanation.

By the late 1940s, the amateur community minstrel shows still drew good-sized crowds, and many groups staged them annually.

In 1951, the Junior and Senior Women’s Clubs in Torrance came up with their own minstrel show, “The Three Nights of Torrance,” which they planned to stage at the Torrance High School auditorium on Oct. 25. It included a blackface minstrel segment.

A few days before the scheduled performance, Mrs. Emma Roberts, president of the senior Woman’s Club, reported to the Herald that she’d received a phone call demanding that the performance be canceled because “it made buffoonery of a minority group,” according to the newspaper.

A handbill decrying the show also had been distributed in downtown Torrance, signed by Cora Johnson, president of the Southeast Interracial Council. It stated, in part, that minstrel shows “are carry-overs from a part of our national history and national shame which all thinking Americans are now trying to rectify.”

The show went on as planned, but so did a small picket line of 15 protesters carrying signs decrying it beforehand. The Herald and the Torrance Press complained that the whole protest was the work of pro-Communist groups, echoing the then-prevalent anti-Red sentiments being hammered home by groups such as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the U.S. Congress.

The YWCA, the Los Angeles County Joint Commission on Human Relations and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sided with the protesters, also denouncing the minstrel shows.

As for Senior Women’s Club president Roberts, she told the Torrance Press: “I think the picketing was disgraceful, particularly when there are no Negroes living in Torrance.”

1951 also was the year that the “Amos ‘n Andy” show began airing on national television. It only lasted until 1953, when its sponsors withdrew due to pressure over its perceived racist content and it was canceled.

It wasn’t the end for such shows, but societal pressures and the growing civil rights movement made them far less common. Professional minstrel show companies had pretty much died out, with only a few independent tent shows still operating by the late 1950s

During my research, the latest article I came across regarding a local minstrel show production was promoting an April 1962 Redondo Beach charity show sponsored by a Torrance signing troupe, the Mello-D-Belles:

Sources:

The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film and Television, by Tim Brooks, McFarland & Co., 2020.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

Wikipedia.

Wilmington Press Journal archives.

Imagine an educator who meant so much to her students and their community that they renamed the school in her honor just five years after her death.

Meet Mildred Walizer, who taught and later became principal at East San Pedro School on Terminal Island in the years before World War II.

She was born Mildred J. Obarr on July 14, 1874, in the small town of Booneville, near Ukiah in northern California. Her parents arrived in the frontier town in 1850 after making the cross-country trek in an oxcart.

She trained as a kindergarten teacher in San Francisco, getting her first job in Sacramento. She moved to San Pedro in 1918 with her husband, Charles, an insurance agent. She then landed a job with East San Pedro School, then a one-room Los Angeles City elementary school serving the rapidly growing Japanese population on Terminal Island.

Walizer previously had trained in what was then called the “Americanization” of foreign students, helping them to adjust to their new surroundings and culture.

The small school’s setting, Terminal Island, was transitioning at the time from a fading attempt at being a tourist resort to becoming home for a thriving new community of Japanese fishermen. (The island got its name from the Los Angeles Terminal Railway, which completed a rail line there in 1900.)

Albert Halfhill’s California Fish Co. had introduced tuna into mainstream food stores in 1908. The company soon discovered that local Japanese fishermen were expert at hauling in large albacore catches. It built a settlement of simple wooden houses for them near its plant at what would come to be known as Fish Harbor.

The Japanese fishermen and their families who lived in those houses soon made the area into a self-sufficient cultural enclave. Their word for it: Furusato, which translates roughly into “old village.” Its residents included “Issei,” first-generation immigrants, and “Nissei,” their American-born children.

Tuna Street was its main commercial area, with restaurants, stores and other businesses. The village also included a Shinto shrine, Buddhist and Baptist churches, a bank, an assembly hall, a lush garden and an iconic red footbridge.

Walizer fully committed herself to the small community. She went beyond being a mere teacher, devoting hours of extra time to her students. She often visited the homes of students to get to know their families and help them with learning to cope with life in America.

She organized fairs and special events involving community and students, including a very popular annual doll festival that attracted hundreds of visitors. When particularly busy, she would spend the night at the school instead of returning to her home in San Pedro.

After just a few years, she was named as the first principal of East San Pedro in 1922, a post she held for roughly ten years. During her tenure, many improvements were made to the school, including the addition of several new buildings.The staff grew to 14 teachers.

Walizer was so revered by the community that its appreciative residents decided to take up a collection for the purpose of financing a months-long trip to the Far East for her. They raised about $4,000, a small fortune, in order to give her a chance to experience Japanese culture first-hand.

Walizer was given time off from her school duties, and left on March 26, 1930, for what would be a three-and-a-half month trip. (She traveled by herself, as her husband Charles had died in 1928.) Hundreds of people saw her off as she boarded the then-new ocean liner the Asama Maru at its Terminal Island berth.

The experience turned out to be life-changing for Walizer. She visited rural areas as well as cities, and spent a full three weeks in the city of Wakayama, where many of the Terminal Island families had come from originally. There, she met with the families of  former students.

Upon her return in July, Walizer immediately began describing her overseas  experiences at civic functions, service club meetings, and community gatherings of all types. Her presentations  stressed the beauty and unique features of the country and its people, illustrated by photographs she’d taken there.

Sadly, she took ill a few months after returning from her trip, and never recovered. After a yearlong illness during which she had to give up her job as principal, she died from cancer at her San Pedro home on Jan. 19, 1933.

The San Pedro News Pilot estimated that more than 1,000 people attended Walizer’s funeral in East San Pedro, including some 500 of her former students.

In March 1938, as part of the annual doll festival begun by Walizer, a ceremony was held during which East San Pedro was renamed the Mildred O. Walizer Grammar School.

The ever-popular doll festival continued to draw large crowds even as late as the March 1941 event. It would be the last one ever held.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that December changed everything. For security reasons, authorities began rounding up many of the 3,000-plus Japanese residents living on Terminal Island immediately. 

Then, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It required that all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast be sent to relocation camps. The island village’s residents all were rounded up and moved out.

By then, the school had been closed and would soon be bulldozed along with the rest of the fishermen’s village. The entire settlement was razed to the ground following its evacuation.

Sources:

“Japanese-American History at Terminal Island,” Los Angeles Conservancy website.

Los Angeles Times archives.

San Pedro News PIlot archives.

“Terminal Education: A Junior High School Yearbook and a Lost Community,” by Nicholas Beyelia, LAPL Blog, Los Angeles Public Library, Jan. 10, 2019. 

Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor, by Naomi Hirahara and Geraldine Knatz, Angel City Press, 2015.

Terminal Island – San Pedro, CA. website.

Torrance Municipal Airport has become a fixture in the city over the years, though it has its detractors who complain mostly about noise pollution.

It began humbly in 1941 with construction of the bare-bones Lomita Flight Strip by the U.S. government with the aim of encouraging the development of civil aviation. Just months later, it   transformed into a military facility after the outbreak of World War II, serving as a training field for Army Air Forces pilots.

After the war, the government ceded the land back to Torrance for civilian use, but kept operational control of the airport until 1956, when Torrance regained control. The city then officially renamed the facility Torrance Municipal Airport.

But, for about four years during the late 1940s, a second general aviation airport also operated in the city.

On Nov. 8, 1945, a newly incorporated firm, Community Airports Inc., announced plans to build the first of a planned series of community airports in the Los Angeles area. They chose a 40-acre site in northwest Torrance for their initial project.

The facility was situated on open land south of Redondo Beach Blvd. to 174th St.,and between Hawthorne Blvd. and Prairie Ave. The airport was to be named Torrance Community Airport.

The top two men behind the operation had military backgrounds. Company president Col. William J. Fox was still in the Marines at the time of the announcement. He had been recognized for building the makeshift airport at Guadalcanal while under fire during the famous battle.

Company VP Major Joseph J. Foss was a skilled pilot who was the first to equal World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker’s record of enemy planes shot down.

Features planned for the Torrance airport included an administration building, a restaurant and lounge, showers and locker rooms, and a daycare playground where children could be taken care of while their parents went flying. “The private flier has been operating off of a back-alley field much too long,” Fox told the Torrance Herald while promoting the airport’s modern features.

All of this, according to the company, would be offered to customers “at a price which they will be able to afford.” It set an opening date of June 1, 1946 for the new airport, which cost an estimated $500,000 to build.

The Herald described the new airport as “the most modern on the West Coast.” Col. Fox said no military planes or noisy trainers would be allowed in order to keep noise down. 

The airport’s 2,700-foot paved runway was ready to go for the June 1st grand opening, which went off without a hitch. Even the expected noise complaints failed to materialize, at least during its first few days of operation.

Meanwhile, proponents of transforming the Lomita Flight Strip into Torrance’s main airport presented a glowing picture of its prospects to civic leaders and Chamber of Commerce members in late February 1946. Civil Aeronautics Administration airports superintendent R.W.F. Schmidt assured the assembled that they would get their airport,  and soon.

Names for the two airports caused confusion. Fox’s project was known in its early stages as Torrance Community Airport. After it opened, it was called Torrance Field for a time, to distinguish it from Torrance Airport under development to the south. (Torrance Airport didn’t add the “Municipal” to its name right away.) Finally, the north Torrance facility was renamed Bay Cities Airport in 1948.

Instructors such as Cliff Bantel of B & G Air Service and those at the Cleveland & Wade firm offered free lessons to those purchasing small aircraft such as Taylorcraft, Luscombe and others offered for sale.

For a while, the airport continued to operate as usual, but it was becoming more and more apparent that Torrance Municipal Airport soon would become the city’s choice for its local airfield. No official closure date for Bay Cities could be located, but by late 1950, it was being described as “abandoned” in the Herald.

On Nov. 12, 1950, 19-year-old Paul Galla was killed during an illegal motorcycle race being held on the abandoned airport’s runway. As a result, the city moved to shut down racing there.

Later that month, the Herald announced that building permits valued at $519,506 were issued to Community Airports Inc. for the purpose of building 79 new family homes on the site. 

Construction was well underway in 1951 and, by 1952, houses covered the site, leaving no traces of the former airport. Except, that is, for nearby businesses such as Airport Lumber, whose aviation-themed name would puzzle future area residents, as there was no corresponding airport in the area after 1950.

Sources:

“Airport Matters,” City of Torrance website.

 Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields” website.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

Torrance Press Herald archives.