South Bay History

William T. Klusman won the silk top hat that would become his trademark in an election bet with Torrance Herald editor Grover Whyte in April 1932. He regularly wore it to City Council meetings, where he was a vocal gadfly from the 1920s into the 1940s. 

He was born in Oldendburg, Germany, in 1870, and became an engineer for the National Supply Co. after migrating to the United States in 1884. He moved to Torrance in 1918, where lived with his wife in a house on Carson St.

Klusman had a gift for gab. His 1922 speech before the local Chautauqua group in Torrance that he chaired “was enjoyed by all present,” according to the San Pedro News Pilot. 

Klusman started to become a persistent presence in local Torrance politics during the 1920s, though his strident socialist/populist persepective on the issues of the day didn’t always endear him to city fathers.

Herald publisher Whyte in particular had been outraged by Klusman’s views by July 1928, when he wrote a lengthy front-page editorial detailing Klusman’s character deficiencies in his newspaper headlined, “Klusmanisnm: The Menace.” Klusman printed his own newspaper from time to time, the Torrance Independent, to espouse his views.

By my calculation, Klusman ran for city council 6 times between 1928 and 1940. He mostly suffered resounding defeats, with one exception: a landslide victory in 1932. During that campaign, his views, and his vow to bring reform and change to local government, caught the imagination of Torrance voters.

He vigorously opposed the proposal that Torrance charter its own school district, maintaining that its schools remain part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which they ultimately did until the formation of the Torrance Unified School District in 1947.

He defended that position before hundreds of Torrance residents in a debate with Judge C.T. Rippy in April 1932. The packed house enjoyed Klusman’s oratory. He proved to be “a showman who from his first speech had the audience with him, his wit and logic being punctuated by gales of laughter and rounds of applause,” according to the News Pilot.

Klusman would go on to win election to the council by a decisive margin along with three other newcomers, and on April 19, 1932, the new council voted to make him the city’s next mayor.

A post-election meeting promised a peaceful transition of power to the new administration. Boy, were they wrong.

Six days after being named mayor, Klusman demanded the resignations of the chief of police, the city engineer and the head of the streets department in a cost-cutting move that took the city – and the department heads – by surprise.

Klusman’s first salvo as mayor proved unsuccessful at the following special council session on the matter when his motion to fire the employees was met with stony silence by his colleagues. G.A.R. Steiner, soon to become a bitter enemy of Klusman’s, declared the motion defeated due to the lack of a seconding vote for it. 

For the next meeting, Klusman dug up a conditional resignation letter Steiner had written two years earlier and demanded that the council enforce it. Councilman J. Manter Wright proposed returning the letter to Steiner, which the council, minus Klusman, voted to do. So far, two meetings, two angry controversies, and two defeats for Klusman.

Next, he demanded Steiner’s resignation as public works director over his alleged misuse of funds. It turned out Steiner’s actions had been lawful, and Klusman had to retract the demand.

After that, he got into an old-school “cussing match” with Assistant Fire Chief Allen Stevenson, who hurled epithets at Klusman after claiming Klusman had verbally attacked him in public meetings.

His council colleagues grew increasingly fed up with Klusman’s antics. Councilman Wright began the first of several attempts to recall the mayor in July 1932. Klusman beat back each attempt, and his outbursts and attacks continued into 1933.

Councilman Wright started another recall petition against him in March 1933. According to the Los Angeles Times, Klusman was charged with “lack of dignity, secretiveness, untruthfulness, harboring destructive policies, creating class prejudice and undermining the morale of city employees and conducting himself in such a manner that he is unable to render proper and efficient service to the city.” 

Wright’s recall faltered also, in part due to his own health problems. Finally, the council reached its breaking point on Sept. 26, 1933, when it voted 4-1 to remove Klusman from the mayor’s office and replace him with C. Earl Conner. Klusman verbally assailed his colleagues after the vote, but members of the public in attendance cheered the move.

City parks custodian, disabled war veteran and Klusman critic Tommy Bowker was among those Klusman lambasted in his farewell remarks as mayor. Two days later, Bowker and Klusman’s verbal sparring match outside of the county welfare office on Cabrillo Ave. ended with Bowker sending Klusman to the pavement with a right hand that knocked him out cold. Fortunately, Klusman was not seriously hurt. 

Though he’d been removed as mayor, Klusman remained on the council for the rest of his term, which ended in 1936. He ran again for the council in 1938 and 1940, but garnered very few votes.

His death by suicide at his chicken ranch on 253rd St. in Lomita on Nov. 17, 1944, ends his chaotic tale with a tragic twist. After struggling with illness for several months, the 74-year-old Klusman first tried running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his automobile. When that failed, he shot himself with a revolver. He was buried at Pacific Crest Cemetery in Redondo Beach.

Sources:

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

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Mayor Klusman – ‘Forgotten Man’”, by Michael George, LINK logs, Torrance Public Library, July 11, 2009.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

The Feb. 4, 2022, death of Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein at 95 brought an end to a life devoted to battling those who sought to deny or minimalize Hitler’s attempts to exterminate the Jewish race during his regime.

Mermelstein made news during the 1980s for his legal battles with Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a far right group advocating a revisionist view of the Holocaust. 

Carto spent most of his life propagating his side of the story. Born in Indiana in 1926, he received a Purple Heart during World War II after being injured by a sniper’s bullet.

In the 1950s, he embraced conservative Republican politics. After a brief affiliation with the hard-line John Birch Society, he formed his own group, Liberty Lobby, in 1958.

In 1978, Carto, who lived in a condominium in Rancho Palos Verdes at the time, established offices for the IHR at 2539 W. 237th St. in Torrance. The building also housed the Institute’s journal and book publishing arm, Noontide Press.

Noontide printed the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review as well as controversial titles by authors such as Francis Yockey, David Hoggan and David Irving that viewed the Nazi regime in a favorable light. Some of the books claimed that Hitler knew nothing about plans to eliminate the Jews.

The Torrance IHR operation kept a relatively low profile at first. That all changed at the group’s 1979 Revisionist Convention, when its leaders offered a $50,000 reward to anyone offering definitive proof that Jews were gassed to death by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Claiming that no one had met their challenge, the group closed the offer in 1980. But when Mel Mermelstein heard about the group’s offer and had a letter challenging it published in the Jerusalem Post, the group responded by sending him a letter reopening the award offer.

Mermelstein, an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor living in Huntington Beach, sued Carto and the institute in 1981, claiming they reneged on their reward offer after he offered evidence, including from his own incarceration at Auschwitz.

He won a partial victory on Oct. 9, 1981, when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas T. Johnson recognized as fact that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.

Carto and his lawyers countersued for damages in 1983, and continued to fight Mermelstein’s original suit in the courts. The legal battle made headlines nationwide, publicizing the existence of the IHR’s Torrance office in the process. 

On July 4, 1984, the 237th St. building was firebombed, probably with a Molotov-cocktail type of device. The fire was reported shortly after midnight, and firefighters battled it for an hour before getting it under control.

Unlike earlier arson attempts in 1981 and 1982 that only caused minor damage, the 1984 blaze resulted in an estimated $400,000 in damage to the IHR and two neighboring businesses. Thousands of its publications were destroyed. 

The next day, Jewish Defense League activist Irv Rubin staged a demonstration at the site during which he supported the firebombing, though he disavowed any knowledge of its perpetrators. No one ever was arrested for the blaze.

After the fire, the IHR quietly opened a smaller office on Cabrillo Ave. in Torrance. Rubin countered by opening a JDL office, also on Cabrillo Ave., in an attempt to contest the IHR’s presence there. He would be named national leader of the JDL in 1985.

In July 1985, after nearly five years of legal wrangling, Mermelstein’s suit was settled out of court two weeks before its trial date. Mermelstein’s attorney, Gloria Allred, announced that the IHR and its corporate parent, the Washington-based Legion for the Survival of Freedom, had agreed to settle the $17 million civil suit by paying Mermelstein  $100,000 and issuing him a formal apology.

In February 1986, the IHR abandoned its Torrance presence, closing the Cabrillo Ave. office. The JDL closed its office nearby shortly afterward. The IHR relocated to Orange County, eventually settling in Fountain Valley.

“People were uncomfortable having a group like that identified with the city, if only through their location,” Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert told the Daily Breeze at the time, referring to the IHR. “Their absence is refreshing.”

In 1991, Leonard Nimoy played Mermelstein in the made-for-TV movie, “Never Forget,” based on the Holocaust survivor’s life story. Mermelstein’s antagonist Willis Carto died in Virginia of cardiac arrest in 2015.

Mermelstein continued working to educate others about the Holocaust and its importance up until his 2022 death through his group, the Auschwitz Study Foundation. 

After his death, it was announced that the collection of Holocaust-era photos and memorabilia that he’d kept for years in a homemade museum at his Huntington Beach lumber yard would be put on display at the Chabad Center for Jewish Life in Newport Beach.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Institute for Historical Review website.

Internet Movie Database website.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Network of Concerned Historians website.

Southern Poverty Law Center website.

Wikipedia.

For a while during the late 1960s and early 1970s, two-time lightweight boxing champion Mando Ramos had the world at his feet. The hard-hitting fighter became a sensation in Los Angeles, celebrated by its sports media and entertainment celebrities alike, until it all came crashing down.

He was born Armando Ramos in Long Beach on Nov. 15, 1948. His father Raymond had dreams of becoming a professional boxer that never came to fruition, and he channeled his frustrations onto his sons, Emmanuel, Mando and Andrew.

His older brother, Emmanuel, became a Golden Gloves champion and won 11 straight bouts before his promising career was derailed by alcoholism and heroin addiction. Alcoholism ran in the family; both Mando’s father and his mother, Maggie, were alcoholics, as were both of their parents. 

Ramos learned how to box at a very young age, training at youth centers in Wilmington and, later, at the 78th Street Gym in South Los Angeles. At the urgings of his father and fight manager Jackie McCoy of Torrance, he began to train seriously for the Golden Gloves at age 16. He won the tournament and turned pro at 17, thanks to a forged birth certificate.

He outpointed Berlin Roberts to win his first pro fight at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles on Nov. 18, 1965, and he was on his way. Ramos had a flashy style, but also possessed a powerful knockout punch. He won his first 17 bouts in a row, 11 of them by knockout or TKO. All but one of them were at the Olympic.

The fast-rising boxing star had only two losses when he got his first shot at the lightweight title against champion Carlos Teo Cruz in September 1968. He lost the highly publicized match at the Coliseum, but defeated Cruz in a rematch to win the title on Feb. 18, 1969. He was 20 years old when he became the youngest boxer ever to win the lightweight crown.

As a result, he became the toast of the town. Los Angeles Times boxing writer Sid Ziff called him “the Elvis Presley of the boxing ring.” Crowds chanted “Mando! Mando! Mando!” when he entered the arena, and soon he began indulging in the fast-lane lifestyle that came along with the success and adulation.

Ramos already had a drinking problem, which began at the age of 12. Now he began taking marijuana to his training camp and dabbling with cocaine and other drugs. His training regimen suffered. His fights often had to be postponed and rescheduled due to “health reasons.”

He held the title for just over a year before losing it on a TKO to Ismael Laguna. He went to Spain in 1971, where he defeated Pedro Carrasco to regain the title, only to be disqualified when amphetamines were discovered in his system.

He beat Carrasco for the title in a rematch at the old Los Angeles Sports Arena in February 1972. This time, he only held the belt for seven months. That September, journeyman Chango Carmona delivered a brutal beat-down that left Ramos battered. Ramos lost the title, and would never be the same boxer again.

The man who once commanded $100,000 a fight found himself broke and living on the streets by 1974.

He continued boxing until 1975, winning a couple of fights as a light middleweight, but finally retired after losing to lightly regarded Wayne Beale in Las Vegas. 

Fast living, substance abuse, hard knocks in the ring and alcoholism had taken their toll, and a new demon – heroin addiction – became part of Ramos’ life by the late 1970s. His brother Emmanuel died of a heroin overdose in 1978.

With the help of his wife, Sylvia Van Hecke, Ramos managed to recover from his addiction and turn his life around. In 1981, she got him into a recovery program run by the longshoreman’s union in San Pedro. Ramos worked sporadically at the Port of Los Angeles between bouts with drugs and alcohol.

“I got clean of alcohol,” he told Daily Breeze sports reporter Jerry Reigel in 1986, “but I still was using everything else: cocaine, speed, pills, weed. I got busted in Wilmington for cocaine on my birthday and then I got popped again in December, and that’s finally when I surrendered.”

Ramos stopped using drugs and alcohol for good on June 12, 1983. Determined to help others avoid his mistakes, he started the nonprofit group BAAD, Boxers Against Alcohol and Drugs. He would spend hours at the Wilmington Teen Center working with young children and teenagers, teaching them boxing skills and relating some of the hard life lessons he had learned during his career.

He was inducted into the San Pedro Sportswalk in 1989, his plaque installed along with those of Roy Campanella, Jerry West and Jackie Robinson. “This is a great honor for me,” he said at the ceremony, according to the Daily Breeze. “I grew up in Long Beach, but I lived in San Pedro and Wilmington and I fought in Wilmington. This means a lot.”

Ramos continued working tirelessly with youths through his BAAD program, mostly at the Wilmington Teen Center and at Mahar House in east Wilmington, using boxing and athletics as a way to steer them away from gangs and drugs.

He died of respiratory arrest at home in San Pedro on July 6, 2008, just two weeks after being inducted into the California Boxing Hall of Fame.

“He was the complete fighter,” former welterweight champion Carlos Palomino told the Associated Press at the induction ceremony. “He could box, he could brawl, he could do it all.”

Sources:

“Boxer Mando Ramos dies at 59,” Associated Press, July 7, 2008.

Daily Breeze archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Mando Ramos,” BoxRec website.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

Wikipedia.

Bakeries have been a part of Torrance’s retail business culture since at least the early 1920s, when the first Torrance Bakery – no relation to the current one –  opened at 1925 Carson St., just west of Cabrillo Ave.

Meinzer’s Pie Shop near the intersection of Post and Sartori avenues offered pies and other baked goods beginning later in the decade, but the local battle for baked goods sales really heated up in the 1930s.

Meinzer’s eventually was replaced by Whitney’s Bakery, which opened at 1323 Sartori in July 1934. Then, when the new Quality Market opened next door at 1325 Sartori in June 1935, it included a branch of the Van de Kamp’s bakery chain inside, in directly adjacent competition to Whitney’s.

The Torrance Bakery on Carson also still was in operation at the same time. In 1936, it changed owners and became the Clara Lewis Kitchen Bakery. Alma’s Pastry Shop replaced that business in the early 1940s and operated there into the 1950s.

The 1940s also saw the opening of the predecessors to the modern-day Torrance Bakery, in the same building built in 1924 at 1341 El Prado in downtown Torrance in which the current bakery operates.

Before bakeries occupied it, the building had housed its first tenant, the Torrance Bicycle & Sporting Good Co., from 1924 through the early 1940s. (The embryonic Torrance Rotary Club held its first meeting in an upstairs room in the building in 1924.) After the bike shop closed, a succession of businesses followed, including Sealtite Roofs and M&H Home Appliance Co.

After M&H closed in 1946, the first restaurant/bakery opened on the site, the Beverly Anne Malt & Donut Shop. After five years of operation, the Beverly Anne moved directly across the street, to 1340 El Prado in July 1951, as part of an expanded full restaurant, George’s Meat’N Place.

On Oct. 20, 1951, a new competitor entered the fray with the grand opening of Hafner’s Bakery in the old Beverly Anne location. Hafner’s would sell its baked goods there for the next ten years, until at least May 1961.

Some two decades later, Kirk Rossberg, then 27, decided to take a chance on the future of then-sleepy and somewhat shabby Old Torrance. The son of respected former Torrance City Councilman Mark Rossberg opened the all-new Torrance Bakery at 1341 El Prado on Oct. 18, 1984.

When his bakery first opened, Rossberg had 1200 square feet of space and six employees to work with. A few months after opening, he had to replace the decades-old original oven, an expense which nearly sunk the new bakery. Rossberg told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that the low rent he initially was paying in the dilapidated downtown area helped save the business.

Positive word of mouth about the business quickly spread, however, helped by the introduction of a popular lunchtime sandwich business and such baking innovations as birthday cakes adorned with edible photographic images. Rossberg’s business ledgers also included an increasing amount of sales from corporate catering.

By the 1990s, Torrance Bakery had become a paradigm for the growing revitalization of the city’s downtown area. Progress on Old Torrance’s renewal came in incremental steps, but improvements had begun to make a positive impact in part due to success stories such as Rossberg’s.

In February 1997, Rossberg opened a second Torrance Bakery location at the Rolling HIlls Plaza shopping center in Torrance, which has since closed. But another satellite location, at 15934 S. Western Ave. in Gardena, would become a key part of the operation.

Opened in 2006, it became the bakery’s main production site, as well as a retail outlet. The El Prado store’s ovens could no longer handle the increased business, and most of its products now are made in Gardena.

The increasingly successful bakery began to receive many business and civic honors. These include regular wins as best bakery in the Daily Breeze’s annual “Best of the South Bay” reader poll since 1993, Modern Baking magazine’s 2007 National Retail Bakery of the Year, the California Small Business Award and the Torrance Chamber of Commerce’s Best Place to Work award. 

In addition, the Torrance Chamber also  named Rossberg as its Distinguished Citizen of the Year in 2016, an honor his father, Dick, received in 1988. 

More than 75 employees now work at the bakery’s two locations, which encompass 14,000 square feet of space. This includes the two stores, the production area in Gardena and the Wedding Cake Showroom.

Rossberg told the Daily Breeze in 2003, “Hard work is important, but if you have a passion for something, it won’t be so hard. I couldn’t imagine working 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week if I didn’t have a passion for it. I can’t wait to get in. The key is the love for your work.”

That passion has helped to keep Torrance Bakery thriving for nearly 40 years.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Our Story,” Torrance Bakery website.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

The Masao W. Satow branch of the Los Angeles County Library stands on the same  unincorporated parcel of county land that includes El Camino Village.

The building occupies a narrow triangle at the northern end of the parcel, on Crenshaw Blvd. between the Hawthorne and Gardena city limits, though it’s most often associated with Gardena.

When the new library was announced in 1976, the vibrant Japanese-American community in the area petitioned County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn to name it after Masao William Satow, who had died in March of that year.

Calling Satow “one of America’s most distinguished civic leaders,” Hahn agreed with them, and presided over the dedication of the new library on March 26, 1977.

Satow didn’t live in the South Bay – as we’ll see, his work often took him away from the area – but he had many connections here. His wife’s parents eventually settled in Torrance, and he spent a lot of time working with the South Bay’s sizable Japanese-American population.

He was born Masao William Satow in San Mateo, California, on Feb. 14, 1908 to Japanese immigrant parents Shuzo and Kiyose Satow. His family moved south to Los Angeles when he was young, and there he attended Los Angeles Polytechnic High School.

From there, he attended UCLA, graduating in the last class at the school’s old campus on Vermont Ave. in 1929, before it moved to Westwood. He then considered becoming a minister, spending three years at Princeton Theological Seminary before returning to Los Angeles.

He began working for the YMCA, where he was named general secretary of the organization’s Japanese division, a position he would hold for several years. He was based mostly at the Southwest YMCA, a small but thriving branch located at 84th St. and Normandie Ave.

While at the Y, he began what would be a lifelong effort to fight prejudice against Japanese Americans, speaking often at community meetings as an advocate for their peaceful assimilation into American society. He expressed special concerns for the fate of the growing Nisei (second generation) Japanese-American population.

This task became increasingly more difficult with the approach of World War II, and heightened tensions in Asia resulting from Japan’s ruthless empire building in the years leading up to the war.

Speaking at a Fern Ave. Elementary School meeting in Torrance on “Japanese Night” in January 1940, Satow told the assembly the following, as reported in the Torrance Herald:

“We are not spies trying to make California a part of Japan. Nor are we trying to combine the social customs of the Orient with those of the Occident. All we want is a chance to let you know how we think and feel, and to give America some of the best elements of Japan and America that are blended in our personalities and are our only heritage.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, only made Satow’s task more difficult. In the weeks following it, he worked tirelessly to differentiate Japanese-American citizens from the imperialist Japanese that had attacked and declared war on the U.S.

He had become affiliated with the Japanese American Citizens League in 1932, an advocacy group formed three years earlier. The JACL’s goals matched Satow’s. The group went so far as to open a storefront office in the Little Tokyo area of Los Angeles in December 1941 that proclaimed its opposition to the actions of “Axis Japan.”

Unfortunately, Satow and his new wife, Chizuko Uyeda, were swept up in the tide of anti-Japanese sentiment and ordered to report to the Santa Anita assembly center in 1942. From there, they were sent to the War Relocation Authority Camp in Amache, Colorado.

That didn’t keep Satow from continuing his advocacy work. He organized YMCA groups at ten relocation centers throughout the west while in the camp.

After being freed from custody, the Satows settled first in Utah, then Milwaukee, before he got an offer in 1946 to become president of the JACL, headquartered in San Francisco. He would stay in that job for the next 27 years.

Under his leadership, the JACL redoubled its battle against discrimination and racism, which only  had been exacerbated by the loss of thousands of American lives in the fight against the Japanese in the Pacific theater.

Satow supported the mid-20th century civil rights movement, considered a controversial stand at the time. He also raised funds for the JACL to build a new headquarters in San Francisco during the 1960s.

He retired from the job in 1973, after accepting a position as a senior adviser at Sumitomo Bank. He died peacefully at 68 on March 3, 1976.

In addition to the Los Angeles County Library branch being named for him, the JACL headquarters building which Satow had helped establish was renamed in his honor at a rededication ceremony on March 5, 1976, two days after his death.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Japanese Americans Citizens League website.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Masao Satow,” by Brian Niiya, Densho Encyclopedia database.

Pacific Citizen archives.

Rafu Shimpo archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

The short-lived Ocean Aquarium at the foot of the Hermosa Beach pier arose in part from a building housing a nightclub that might have been somewhat less family friendly.

The night spot, located just south of the old pier entrance building, later was refitted into part of the aquatic attraction. But it did a brisk business before then under the management of one Victoria Zucca, aka Madame Zucca.

Zucca and her family members had been operating nightclubs and restaurants in the Los Angeles area since at least 1919, when she owned two Paris Inn locations. Police raided Madame Zucca’s Inn at 610 N. Spring St. downtown frequently during the Prohibition years to arrest patrons for illegal drinking of alcoholic beverages.

She ran several other establishments in Los Angeles, Venice and Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s, some of which were rumored to feature backroom gambling dens and other quasi-legal operations.

In 1933, Zucca became the first person in Hermosa Beach to take out a liquor license following the Dec. 5, 1933, repeal of Prohibition. The first mentions of the nightclub/restaurant she opened subsequently in the city, Madame Zucca’s Cafe, occur in 1935. 

The large club occupied a mostly windowless rectangular building located just south of the Hermosa Beach Pier entrance at the western terminus of Pier Ave. and the Strand. It was known variously as Zucca’s Cafe, Joe Zucca’s Terrace Cafe and even just plain Zucca’s over the years.

Madame Zucca’s son, Joseph and his wife, former actress Dorothy Ledford, often operated the establishments, including a Zucca’s Cafe in the Palm Springs area. 

It was Dorothy who was sued over an altercation resulting in an injury from flying bottles between two patrons at the Hermosa Beach cafe in May 1939. She lost, and had to pay damages. It was considered unusual at the time for an innkeeper to be held liable for the actions of customers.

During its ten-year run, the club attracted some name entertainers. Alto sax jazz great Benny Carter played a gig there in July 1943, and Western swing bandleader Jimmy Wakely also played dates there during 1943.

The Hermosa Zucca’s closed in 1944. Former Hermosa Beach resident William Buffett, who suggested this topic, recalled exploring the abandoned nightclub during a family outing to the beach that summer in a recent email:

“It (Zucca’s) had been a bar and dancehall and had gone out of business suddenly and violently. At one end was the bar and next to it was a broken grand piano with only two complete legs,the keyboard at a steep angle with the floor. The middle of the room was cleared and at the other end scores of chairs and tables were piled high against the wall with what I interpreted as haste and rage. 

In the corner next to the bar was a narrow stairway and though I was anxious to get out before I was missed, I had to take a quick look at what was upstairs. There were two small rooms, each with a bed and crude figures painted on the wall. The murals were lurid but not pornographic, as for example the brothel in Pompéii. Oh, and there was a skylight- the only natural light in the whole place.”

The building remained empty until 1947, when some local businessmen began to implement  their idea to open an aquarium on the site that would include remodeling the former Zucca’s building.

Ground was broken for the new $250,000 Ocean Aquarium on Nov. 19, 1947, with five-year-old Beverly Aadland cutting the ceremonial ribbon. Aadland would later become involved with movie star Errol Flynn, and star in his final film, “Cuban Rebel Girls” (1959).

As planned, the Zucca building was gutted and repurposed into one part of the new aquarium complex. For a time, the attraction was referred to as “Marineland of the Pacific,” though its outdoor signage read “Ocean Aquarium.” The “official” Marineland of the Pacific would open on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in August 1954.

The Aquarium’s tenure in Hermosa Beach would last less than ten years, though more than two million visitors passed through its doors while it was open. In January 1956, its operator, A.D. McBride, found himself embroiled in a dispute with the city, which held a long-term lease on the site for redevelopment of the then-dilapidated pier.

The Aquarium closed shortly thereafter, and the land was sold to the city. The remaining fish and other sea animals were shipped out to other zoos and aquariums, and the property sat vacant for several years.

Finally, the wrecking crews began tearing down the Aquarium’s various buildings on March 19, 1962. The old pier had been torn down in 1961, and was replaced by a new one in 1965.

The former Zucca’s/Ocean Aquarium site ultimately became the parking lot for The Mermaid, a tavern at the end of Pier Ave. that closed in 2017 after more than 60 years in operation.

Note: Thanks to William Buffett for suggesting the idea and to Douglas Thompson of the Redondo Beach Public Library for additional research.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Footnotes on the Sand, by Pat Gazin, Published by Martin Gazin, 1991.

Long Beach Sun archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Redondo Reflex archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

More: Check out this short film on animals at the Ocean Aquarium in Hermosa Beach at the Oddball Films website.

Despite its 1880s origin, Fifth Street School doesn’t qualify as the first school in San Pedro. Early settler Mary Sanford Lindskow was in charge of educating 19 students in her home at Fifth St. and Harbor Blvd. in the early 1880s. She was effectively the community’s first school principal as well as teacher.

For a 1938 special section of the San Pedro News Pilot, Lindskow’s son, George, presented a certificate of merit that he earned in 1883 from the school’s teacher, one “A. Wheeler,” after the school had moved to a larger one-room building at Timms Landing.

The San Pedro community grew quickly during the 1880s, and its residents knew that larger school facilities were a must. The then-local board of education (it would later merge with LAUSD) purchased a parcel of land at the corner of Fifth and Centre streets in the heart of the new town in September 1882 for the express purpose of building a new school.

A one-room school building was erected there in 1883. This “little red schoolhouse” structure became the first to be built specifically for use as a school in San Pedro. (Unfortunately, no pictures of the original one-room school seem to have survived.)

But the number of students continued to rise, so that building was moved to the rear of the lot, and work on a larger, more complete four-room building to replace it began in 1884. It opened to students in 1885. Its first four graduates: Ina Barton, George Simmie, May Culley and Harold MacDonald.

Fifth Street School would be enlarged over the years, and, by 1916, was accommodating about 280 students, according to Jessie Wickersham, who had been appointed its principal in 1907.

The time again had come for a larger school. A unique three-story structure was planned, to be built around a hill on the property. The brick building would be one story high on Fifth St., two stories along Centre St., and three stories on Sixth St.

The much larger school had more than sixty rooms, including an auditorium and a gymnasium in addition to many more classrooms. It cost $105,000 to construct. Architect Joseph Bell de Remer of Los Angeles designed it, with Howard E. Slack of the Cresmer Manufacturing Company in charge of construction.

The distinctive school was hailed as one of the area’s most modern and innovative, right down to the then-newfangled motion picture projector installed in its auditorium. The 500-seat room quickly became an important community meeting place.

Rapid growth in San Pedro’s downtown commercial area during the 1920s boom years would spell the demise of Fifth Street School after only a decade. Parents and education officials expressed concern that the rise in traffic in the community’s retail sector where the school was located posed a danger to its students, and street noise made teaching difficult.

The decision was made in 1927 to close the school, and transfer its students to the new Cabrillo Avenue School, which had just been built almost a mile away in a quieter residential neighborhood.

Principal Wickersham was named principal of the new school, and a possibly apocryphal story was recounted in the News Pilot about her leading some of her 644 students on a walk from the old Fifth Street School to the Cabrillo classrooms in the spring of 1927.

In any case, the one-time educational showplace had been declared obsolete. After more than a year of attempting to sell the empty building, the decision was made to raze it, and sell the land after dividing it into parcels. Demolition took place in September 1928.

The land passed through many hands over the ensuing decades, but, as far as we can tell, it remained vacant for the next 40 years. 

During World War II, it was proposed as a military site but never used as such. In 1945, it was leased for the possible construction of a two-story military maritime office building, which never was built. In August 1945, after the war ended, a syndicate of businessmen purchased the property for $54,000 “for commercial development” according to the News Pilot. It never happened.

Finally, the County Board of Supervisors gave the go-ahead in 1964 for the construction of a county courts building on the site. Ground was broken for the two-story structure in July 1967, and it was dedicated on Feb. 28, 1969.

It operated for 45 years, until county budget cuts resulted in the closing of the courts building in June 2014. The building has sat vacant ever since.

In January 2021, the supervisors approved a proposal by development firm Genton Cockrum Partners to build an eight-story mixed housing-retail development on the parcel at 505 S. Centre St., where Fifth Street School had stood 100 years earlier.

The groundbreaking for San Pedro’s long-awaited plan to replace its shuttered courthouse with a 300-unit apartment building atop a ground-floor retail space is expected to take place early in 2022.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

San Pedro: A Pictorial History, by Henry P. Silka, San Pedro Bay Historical Society, 1993.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

DeVere Baker was already 30 when the idea for his life’s work came to him. He decided to consolidate all his assets and put the money toward proving a basic tenet of his Mormon faith: that ancient peoples had migrated to North America from the Middle East.

Born in Tremonton, Utah, on Dec. 14, 1915, Baker later moved to Petaluma, Ca., where he had prospered during World War II as the owner of two shipyards in Sausalito that built and maintained military landing vessels.

He used this money to begin financing a series of expeditions using custom-built rafts, all of them named Lehi followed by the trip number, I, II, III, etc. The voyages were meant to prove that the Lehites, a lost tribe of Israel led by the prophet Lehi in 600 BC, had migrated across the Atlantic to the New World to start a new civilization, as described in the Book of Mormon.

“It was almost a joke, almost a whim,” Baker’s wife, Nola, told the Daily Breeze at the time of Baker’s death in 1990. “He’d done almost everything else. He wanted to see what it felt like. He loved it because he got to meet so many people and got to spread his theories on religion.”

Baker would conduct five raft trips between 1952 and 1979, some of them successful, others less so, most from his home base at King Harbor in Redondo Beach. He lived in Redondo at a home on the Esplanade for much of this time, later moving to San Pedro.

He ultimately would write seven books on his experiences, become celebrated in the media and even appear as a guest on “You Bet Your Life” with Groucho Marx on an episode that aired on Feb. 11, 1960.

But that all came later. First came his disastrous initial voyage on the Lehi I. Baker built his first raft for $25,000, and launched it from San Francisco Bay in July 1954. Six days later, the Hawaii-bound craft had managed only to drift 62 miles offshore and 200 miles south of San Francisco before its five-member crew had to be rescued by a banana boat, the Metapan.

Baker pulled it together for the next voyage, the Lehi II, less than a year later. The rebuilt raft, still aiming at Hawaii 2400 miles away in an attempt to prove that Mormon settlers traveled to Polynesia after relocating in America, launched from Jack London Square in Oakland on April 29, 1955.

This voyage also came to an early end three days later, when a severe storm hit and the crew had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. An empty Lehi II drifted due southward, ending up in a Mexican lagoon.

These initial ventures were dispiriting, but Baker managed to get together enough financing for a Lehi III trip in March 1957. This time, he set his sights lower. The makeshift raft would travel from Bodega Bay south to Santa Monica with just one additional crew member and Baker’s dog, Tangaroa, on board, for what was termed a test voyage for a longer trip.

The trip was separated into shorter segments, and was completed successfully on May 4, 1957. Its completion marked an upward turn in Baker’s fortunes, and he quickly began raising funds for Lehi IV. It would become the high-water mark of his rafting exploits.

Lehi IV’s journey to Hawaii began on July 5, 1958, when the retooled 18-by-24-foot raft and its crew of four (plus Tangaroa) set out from King Harbor in Redondo Beach. The city had agreed to provide partial financing for the undertaking. Baker and his crew would encounter storms, high winds and sharks during the course of their 2,000+ mile voyage, but ended up landing safely on the shores of Maui on Sept. 5, 69 days later.

The successful trip brought Baker international fame and publicity, landing him on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. In addition to “You Bet Your Life,” he became the subject of an episode of the  BBC documentary series, “Danger Is My Business.” He felt vindicated by  having shown that the Mormon theories about ancient ocean crossings were indeed a possibility.

He pointed that out at his frequent personal appearances locally as well as nationally, hoping to gain financing for additional sea adventures by sharing details and showing films of his voyages. Lehi V would be a longer trip, a months-long odyssey starting in Israel and ending in Guatemala.

After stopping and restarting several times, Baker never fully pulled this last trip off, mostly due to struggles with his health. He suffered three heart attacks and one stroke during the 1960s, even as his vision for the journey expanded to an ambitious six-year time frame.

After sponsoring him for at least $15,000 over the years, the city of Redondo Beach, and especially then-mayor William Czuleger, grew wary of giving Baker more money for exploits that seemed to never come to fruition. After lengthy debate, the council agreed to give him his  last grant, $3,000 in financing, in November 1969. But the trip and the planned Lehi VI  never became a reality.

Baker’s next public exploit was a brief, quixotic Democratic presidential run in 1980. He dropped out after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.

According to reporter Chris Richard of the Daily Breeze, “Toward the end of his life, Baker championed establishing a series of orbiting ‘peace stations’ manned by scientists from around the world and armed with lasers to destroy nuclear missiles before they could detonate.”

He died on Dec. 5, 1990, in Provo, Utah, after a lengthy illness.

Note: Thanks to Douglas Thompson of the Redondo Beach Public Library for suggesting the topic and for providing additional research.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

“DeVere Baker and a Raft Called Lehi,” by Bill Soberanes, Petaluma Post, February 2003, Page 22.

“DeVere Baker and his Ocean Rafts,” by Warren Aston, Meridian Magazine, Jan. 31, 2011.

Internet Movie Database.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Redondo Reflex archives.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

Wikipedia.

Additional reading: Only one of Baker’s Lehi books remains in print, The Raft Lehi IV: 69 Days Adrift on the Pacific Ocean. 

The San Pedro nightclub Dancing Waters took its name from an indoor waterfall that was installed by its owner when he converted the former bowling alley into a night spot in 1969.

The Streamline Moderne structure designed by architect William Durr at 1331 S. Pacific Ave. first opened in 1940 as the Pacific Bowling Center. The lot’s owner, Nick Pericich, took out a permit that August to erect a $19,000 building on the site. (A Nov. 1 story in the San Pedro News Pilot set the cost for the new facility at $60,000.)

The eight-lane bowling alley was owned and operated by Louis Pesce and Joe Ivelia, who were also the proprietors of the 20th Century lanes at 476 W. Fifth St. In fact, Pesce’s five-year-old son Richard rolled the first ball down the new alleys at the Pacific Bowling Center’s grand opening, held on Nov. 2, 1940.

According to the News Pilot, more than 2,000 people jammed the building for the opening day, which featured a match between a local bowling team and a visiting team sponsored by cowboy movie star Roy Rogers. (The locals won.)

The bowling alley operated until 1969, when new owner Al Cordiero took over, converting the building into a dance club. His plans included a 16-foot-high, 22-foot-long wall over which an indoor waterfall would cascade down onto artificial rocks, often highlighted by colored lights. He named his new club Dancing Waters.

From the beginning, the club featured live music, most often popular Mexican acts such as Los Freddy’s and Los Yonic’s playing banda music, though mainstream big bands also appeared.

Cordiero tried several different formats, even converting the club into a roller disco at some point in the late 1970s. The scenes from Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film involving Jake LaMotta’s nightclub were filmed at Dancing Waters.

According to Craig Ibarra’s essential A Wailing of a Town: An Oral History of Early San Pedro Punk and More 1977-1985 (End Fwy Press, 2015), music promoter Dennis McBride approached Cordiero in 1981 with the idea of producing “new music” shows at his club.

Cordiero took him up on the idea, and the first such show took place on June 12, 1981, headlined by San Pedro’s own The Minutemen, with Salvation Army and the Slivers also on the bill.

Regular punk concerts didn’t start to be scheduled at the club until early 1982. The Minutemen returned in February, followed by Wasted Youth and Social Distortion. 

When the Cramps, Legal Weapon and the Meat Puppets played Dancing Waters on May 7, 1982, Cordiero began to realize that this “new music” was drawing large and often unruly crowds. Hundreds of people began to descend upon his club, and he had to increase security.

As spring turned into summer, the roster of bands playing at the club began to read like a who’s who of early 1980s punk rock: TSOL, the Vandals, Fear, Suicidal Tendencies, the Descendents, the Last, 45 Grave and heavyweights Bad Religion, Black Flag and Minor Threat all performed there during that time. 

But neighbors weren’t happy with the attendant problems brought by some of the music’s fans. Local homeowners complained about the out-of-hand crowds, graffiti, underage drinking and general chaos that surrounded the wild and woolly shows.

A benefit for the Harbor Free Clinic featuring the Blasters, Salvation Army and the Minutemen on Aug. 21, 1982, seems to have been the last show of its ilk to be held at Dancing Waters. Cordiero had grown weary of the troubles associated with the bands and their fans, and announced plans to change Dancing Waters into a country-western bar called Country Falls.

That never happened, but the club did stop booking punk-rock acts after 1982, though they continued to book pop and metal bands and host special events. Guns N’ Roses, Megadeth, Stryper, Blue Oyster Cult and Armored Saint all played there. 

In more recent years, the club, which changed its name to The Waters Club, returned its emphasis to banda, norteno and other popular forms of Mexican dance music. The Cordiero family sold the club, renamed La Zona Rosa, in 2000. On Jan. 29, 2020, a tribute to Al Cordiero was held at Godmother’s Saloon in San Pedro.

In June 2021, the Los Angeles City Council granted approval to the development firm of Burns and Bouchard to move forward to build a four-story, 102-unit apartment building on the block where the now-vacant club building has stood since 1940.

Neighborhood groups complained to the Council that the proposed development went against the character of the neighborhood and that its scale would increase traffic and parking woes in the area. The council unanimously denied the appeal, setting the developer’s plan into motion.

The firm hasn’t set a timetable for the demolition yet, but the wrecking ball is most definitely on its way.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Dancing Waters Facebook page.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Pacific Bowling Center/Dancing Waters Club, 1331 S. Pacific Ave.,” by Nathan Marsak, RIP Los Angeles website, Sept. 4, 2019.

Random Lengths archives.

San Pedro News Pilot archives.

A Wailing of a Town: An Oral History of Early San Pedro Punk and More 1977-1985, by Craig Ibarra, End Fwy Press, 2015.

“Waters Club San Pedro Concert Setlists,” Setlist.fm website.

Grasshoppers, strippers, horsehead pumps, nodding donkeys, rocking horse pumps, dinosaur pumps, thirsty birds. Everyone seems to have a different pet nickname for the oil pumping devices still strewn about the Southern California landscape. The oil industry calls them pumpjacks.

Pumpjacks help extract oil from below ground when the pressure in the well isn’t high enough to bring the liquid to the surface. They’re commonly used to extract oil, generally a few barrels a day,  from low-producing wells and are powered mostly by electric motors, though some use internal combustion engines.

One can still find them scattered about the southwest Los Angeles County landscape, reminders that the area once sported hundreds of oil wells. Major oil strikes were big news during the 1920s, from the massive Inglewood oil field to the Del Amo field in Torrance, and west to Signal Hill in the Long Beach area.

The oil boom continued through the 1930s before dying out. At its peak, Torrance had more than 2,000 wells. Many of the boom-or-bust companies abandoned their operations, leaving the unsightly wooden and metal derricks to pockmark the landscape.

The housing boom following the end of World War II magnified the problems posed by the abandoned wells. In addition to their unsightliness, they were dangerous, causing ground pollution, trash and litter accumulation and serious safety issues, especially involving children. But mostly they were just in the way, standing on land needed for development.

Those that remained active posed dangers. Four men were injured in two separate oil well explosions in Torrance on Jan. 4, 1949, one at 190th and Beryl streets, the other near 229th St. and Crenshaw Blvd.

Hundreds of wells were still standing at the time, many of them inactive, and many of those were inadequately protected from unwanted explorers. The Torrance Press and Torrance Herald newspapers reported several different instances of children being injured, some seriously, while climbing around and into the unfenced structures during the 1950s.

In 1953, the city’s civil defense director, George Powell, issued a stern warning to 31 well operators in Torrance to fence their equipment off from the public or face prosecution under the city’s public safety laws. Powell had drafted an ordinance covering the issue in 1951, but it didn’t begin to be enforced until 1959.

Cleanup efforts and protective fencing improved after the new law went into effect. By 1960, most of the city’s more than 500 wells had been made compliant with the city’s safety standards.

But Torrance wasn’t done. Mayor Albert Isen was determined to eliminate the unsightly wells that hadn’t either been closed or replaced by pumpjacks. By July 1, 1961, all wooden oil derricks had been taken down, and the final steel derrick was removed on Sept. 11, 1963.

That still left dozens of pumpjacks, many producing less than five barrels a day. They were everywhere, in parks, behind houses, and in shopping center parking lots. Torrance had attempted to ban oil drilling altogether, but the effort failed to pass in July 1964 after a lengthy battle.

The city continued to attempt to police oil well operators in the city over the next few decades. 

An ordinance enacted by the city council in May 1978 gave the city the power to shutter and remove  wells not meeting certain standards of production. By 1995, Kelt Energy, one of the more active companies working the area, had only seven pumpjack wells remaining in Torrance.

Of course, surrounding areas still had plenty of oil activity. The oil wells in Los Angeles County — both on- and offshore — produced 11.7 million barrels of oil in 2019, making L.A. the second-largest oil-producing county in the state. Kern County produced more than 110 million barrels, according to the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), which regulates the oil and gas industry.

The 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field, situated in the south end of Baldwin Hills, remained a bustling oil producing site for decades. Drivers along La Cienega Blvd. through the hills could see dozens of pumpjacks along the route, with many more working out of view from the road.

In September 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to begin phasing out oil drilling operations in all unincorporated county areas. The wells affected would include about 870  operated by Sentinel Peak Resources in the Inglewood Oil Field. The county is now working to set a timetable for the phaseout.

In December 2021, Los Angeles officials joined U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to discuss opportunities through the Biden administration’s  infrastructure bill to fund the remediation of Los Angeles’ roughly 1,400 idle oil wells. Available funds will be used to close and cap wells, as well as cleaning up any environmental damage left behind.

In the meantime, the last remaining pumpjacks continue to operate here and there throughout the county, including in the South Bay and Harbor Area, reminders of a distant time when the area’s rich oil reserves played a key role in its economy – and its appearance.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

“Los Angeles County votes to phase out oil and gas drilling,” by Drew Costley, The Associated Press, Sept. 15, 2021.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Mapping the Long History of Oil Drilling in L.A.,” by Elijah Chiland, Curbed Los Angeles website, Nov. 4, 2019.

“The Oil Fields of the Los Angeles Basin Coast and the South Bay,” The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) website.

Torrance Press-Herald archives.

Wikipedia.