South Bay History

William Jennings Bryan, one of the most well-known political figures of the early 20th Century, loved to go fishing in Hermosa Beach.

Born in Illinois 1860, Bryan was regarded as the pre-eminent public orator of his era. He was a central figure in the Progressive Era, and ran as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President against William McKinley in 1896 and 1900, and William Howard Taft in 1908, losing all three times.

He also served as Secretary of State for President Woodrow Wilson from 1913-1915, and was part of the victorious prosecution team that won out over Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial in 1925.

William Jennings Bryan in mid-speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colo. in 1908. Photo credit: Library of Congress.

Because of his espousal of populist ideas such as the value of the everyday man, Bryan became known as “The Great Commoner.”

His public speaking career led to travels all over the world, including many visits to Hermosa Beach. Sources say he first visitied the seaside community in 1910, and became enchanted with its low key charm, becoming a regular visitor during his travels.

Bryan was an ardent fisherman, end enjoyed few things more than donning his informal clothes, including fishing boots, a straw hat and suspenders, and angling from the Hermosa Beach pier.

Bryan’s son, attorney William Jennings Bryan Jr., settled with his wife and family in the 200 block of 10th Street in Hermosa Beach. He was on hand when his famous father came to visit in July 1915 shortly after his resignation as President Wilson’s secretary of state after a disagreement over  Wilson’s handling of the sinking of the Lusitania.

On July 12, 1915, the elder Bryan, his son and some friends went out on a fishing boat from Redondo Beach headed toward Rocky Point. During the trip, Bryan Sr. caught 11 rock bass weighing 25 pounds. He was described as “jovial” when he returned, saying that it was one of the best fishing outings he’d ever been on in his life.

William Jennings Bryan proudly displays his catch in this undated photo. Photo credit: Hermosa Beach Historical Society. 

Bryan returned for a six-week stay at the Berth Hotel in Hermosa Beach in 1918. The city welcomed him warmly, even holding a well-attended William Jennings Bryan Day in his honor.

Built in 1907, the Berth Hotel became The Breakers in 1920, and currently does business as the Sea Sprite Motel and Apartments on The Strand. Bryan was also known to have stayed at the Hermosa Biltmore during his trips to the city.

In his later years, the deeply religious Bryan advocated prohibition and women’s suffrage, and became an outspoken critic of the teaching of evolution. He had long been the most popular speaker on the Chautauqua circuit, an adult education movement that began in upstate New York and spread in a loose coalition throughout the country.

A Chautauqua assembly was established in Redondo Beach in 1890 on the current site of Redondo Union High School.  Its operation later consolidated with the larger Chautauqua in Long Beach. Bryan was a regular on the Chautauqua circuit, and was paid $500 per speech.

Bryan’s anti-evolution beliefs led to his role in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution. Bryan’s side won the high-profile case against Scopes, who was defended by Clarence Darrow.

The verdict was later overturned on a technicality and Scopes was never brought back to trial. Bryan died in his sleep in Tennessee on July 26, 1925, five days after the Scopes verdict.

A dapper William Jennings Bryan poses for a portrait, ca. 1915. Photo credit: Library of Congress.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

Footnotes on the Sand, by Patricia Gazin, self-published, 1991.

“Local Correspondence: Patriotic to Avoid Involving Country,” The Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1915, Part II, Page 7.

Images of America: Hermosa Beach, By Chris Miller and Jerry Roberts, Arcadia Publishing Co., 2005.

“The Early History of Hermosa Beach,” by Fern Rhein, self-published, 1933.

Wilson Park in Torrance. Feb. 2011 Daily Breeze photo.

Wilson Park is so central to the lives of many Torrance residents that it may be surprising to learn that the multipurpose facility has been in existence only since 1979.

The Crenshaw Boulevard park has a little bit of everything: a gymnasium, a treehouse, barbecue pits, a heavily used walking course, a fish pond, a roller hockey rink, batting cages, a bustling farmers market, train rides for the kids, softball fields, the Torrance High cross country team’s home course and even a place to catch buses for the Hollywood Bowl.

But until the city of Torrance agreed to purchase the land from the government for $250,000 on Sept. 27, 1974, the 46 acres had only about 23 abandoned buildings, including 15 warehouses left from its previous incarnation as the United States Naval Annex.

Daily Breeze staff photo, July 21, 1978.

Other facilities had earlier been built on smaller parcels of the surplus Torrance Naval Annex land, including Torrance High’s Zamperini Field athletic facility in 1962 and the Southern California Regional Occupational Center (now known as SoCalROC) and the continuation school Shery High, both in 1967.

The Naval Annex was used as an auxiliary storage facility to the Long Beach Naval Station. When the Navy announced plans to close that base as of June 1974, the city of Torrance began its active pursuit of the property. It had long had its eye on the parcel as an ideal spot for a large park; at the time, the biggest park in the city was only seven acres.

Before the deal could be made, though, a roadblock appeared. On March 26, 1974, the county Board of Supervisors put in a bid for the property on behalf of Harbor General Hospital (now County-Harbor UCLA Medical Center), which wanted to use some of the old buildings for medical storage.

Rep. Charles Wilson, shown at left in a 1972 file photo, stepped in and threw his support behind the city’s bid, and on Aug. 6, 1974, the county withdrew its offer.

Torrance had originally thought the government would grant the city the land free of charge, but the General Services Administration informed the city that it couldn’t transfer title to the buildings on the land without charge, so a price of $250,000 was agreed upon. Final transfer of the title to the city occurred at a ceremony at the park site on Nov. 7, 1974.

For his role in making the park a reality, Rep. Wilson had the honor of having it named after him, with its official name being the Charles H. Wilson Community Park.

“I’m embarassed about the fact that this park is being named for me,” Wilson said at the time, “but I think it’s quite an honor to have something named after a Democrat in Torrance.”

It took the city almost five more years to make the park a reality. Early plans included such features as lagoons and swimming and diving pools (see below).
 

Daily Breeze, Jan. 6, 1974.

The park was finally dedicated on Saturday, Sept. 29, 1979, with Rep. Wilson on hand for the festivities.

A few months later in June 1980, Wilson was censured by Congress for financial misconduct a week after losing his re-election bid for a 10th term. As a result of the publicized charges against him, he received only 15.2% of the vote and finished third. He died on July 21, 1984.

Major upgrades to the park included the addition of the the roller hockey rink in 1993, the gymnasium in 2000, the skate park and batting cages in 2002 and the treehouse in 2006.

The Wilson Park treehouse shortly after it opened in April 2006. Daily Breeze file photo. 

Sources:

Daily Breeze files. 

The city of Torrance doesn’t have a reputation as a hotbed of radical leftists, but it was the site of an early protest against the Vietnam War.

The reason? Dow Chemical Company.

The chemical giant opened its Torrance plant at 305 Crenshaw Boulevard in 1953. It mostly
manufactured plastics products such as Styrofoam, but it was the contract to begin producing napalm for the Department of Defense early in 1966 that put the company on the radar of the anti-war movement.

Napalm is a jelly-like mixture of gasoline and polystyrene particles encased in a bomb that
explodes into fire when detonated. Its use against civilians was considered inhumane, though
the Army insisted it only was used against enemy military forces.

From The Daily Breeze, Sunday, May 8, 1966.

On May 7, 1966, Daily Breeze reporter Bob Rawitch sat in on a regional meeting in Los Angeles of a relatively new left-wing group, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the next day’s Breeze, he reported on the group’s tentative plans to picket the Dow plant in Torrance and to distribute 5,000 leaflets protesting the use of napalm in the vietnam War.

The demonstration was scheduled for Saturday, May 28, during the Memorial Day weekend. Two pro-war groups announced plans to counter the SDS protest: the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and the Victory in Viet Nam Association (VIVA), whose South Bay branch was headed by future congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Dow plant manager vowed to conduct “business as usual” at the plant during the protest, and Torrance Police Chief Walter Koenig assured residents that the department was equipped to handle “any demonstration disturbance thqat might arise.”

From The Daily Breeze, Sunday, May 29, 1966.

An estimated 150 persons participated in the peaceful protest, including members of the SDS  and the Freedom Now Committee. Thirty Torrance police officers were on hand to keep the peace, but there were no incidents from the protesters or the counter-demonstrators.

A potentially disastrous unrelated accident occurred on July 10, 1967, when more than five tons of napalm bombs being transported from the Torrance Dow plant to Long Beach Harbor for shipment to Vietnam fell from a tractor-trailer hauling them when it overturned while turning from Pacific Coast Highway onto the Terminal Island Freeway. Though crates carrying them were smashed and many of the bombs were dented, miraculously none of them detonated.

Later that same month, Michael McCabe of the Student Mobilization Committee asked the city for a permit to stage another demonstration in front of Dow Chemical on Aug. 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

This second march would have been much larger. McCabe asked to use the full width of Crenshaw in the area of the Dow plant from 2-6 p.m. An estimated 10,000-15,000 protesters were expected to participate.

The city turned down the permit request on July 27, citing safety and traffic concerns. The city of Los Angeles had turned down the group’s request for a Wilshire Boulevard protest the day before.

The anti-war group persisted, but Torrance refused to let them protest near the Dow site or to use the Aug. 6 date. Instead, an alternate route from downtown Torrance to the Civic Center was approved for Sunday, Dec. 17.

In the meantime, the Torrance City Council passed an emergency ordinance aimed at preventing any unauthorized marches that banned parades of any kind on Crenshaw and Hawthorne boulevards and on Western Avenue.

An estimated 900 protesters marched in the second demonstration on Dec. 17, with more than 200 Torrance policemen and sheriff’s deputies on hand to keep peace between anti-war and pro-war groups. Some scuffles were reported, but no arrests were made. The marchers never were closer than one mile to the Dow plant.

Two days later at the Torrance City Council meeting, Mayor Albert Isen issued an official proclamation declaring Thursday, Dec. 21, 1967 “Dow Chemical Day in Torrance.” The resolution praised the plant for its “courage, honor and dignity” in the face of “prolonged harassment and abuse from a noisy minority of persons who object to Dow’s efforts to serve its country at the time of war.”

Despite the fact that the $5 million napalm contract amounted to less than one half of 1% of Dow’s world-wide sales, the company continued to take a public-relations beating from it. When its napalm contract expired in May 1969, the company allowed itself to be outbid by American Electric co. of La Mirada, a much smaller firm that had been making the shell cases for the napalm bombs.

Dow Chemical continues to manufacture plastics at its longtime Torrance location, employing about 55 people.

The Dow Chemcial Co. plant on Crenshaw Boulevard in Torrance. Feb. 2011 Daily Breeze photo. 

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

“Police Break Up Fights: Marchers, Hecklers Scuffle in Torrance Antiwar Parade,” by Ken Reich, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 18, 1967, Pg. 1.

“Students: Ire Against Fire,” Time magazine, Nov. 3, 1967.

“Torrance Plant Under Fire: Supporters, Foes of Napalm Present Their Arguments,” by Tony Shultz, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 10, 1967, Pg. CS1.

The Shamrock Skate Arena closed in 1985 after more than 30 years in business. Photo credit: Shamrock Skating Rink Facebook page and Mark Montgomery.

Located in Old Torrance at 1851 Mullin Avenue, the Shamrock Skate Arena delighted generations of  children and families as well as serving as a teen hangout for older kids during its 30-plus years of operation.

The old-school wooden roller rink opened sometime in the mid-1950s and did a steady business instructing customers on how to do the hokey-pokey on skates.

Its biggest heyday came during the roller-boogie craze that blossomed during the disco era of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Teens flocked to the rink decked out in the dance-floor fashions of the era to skate to music played by a DJ who would alternate between calling for fast skating, slow skating, backwards skating and the ever-popular couples-only skate.

Many would later remember paying their entrance fee to Herb Provost of Lomita, who served as the rink’s manager starting in 1971 until its closure.

The rink even featured live music on occasion. Former South Bay resident Don Waller recalls in an interview playing a live show there in December 1972 with his band the Imperial Dogs, who were opening for another South Bay band, The Clap:
“We didn’t know there wasn’t going to be a real stage — just wooden pallets stacked about four feet high and covered in sheets of plywood. When we got up there and started leaping around, everything started moving up and down — it was like playing in a rowboat! — and all the cords kept getting caught between the moving sheets of plywood and ‘causing guitars and mikes to become suddenly unplugged … But at least 300 people showed up and — even though they didn’t know who we were — we went over really well.”

Unfortunately for the Shamrock, business tailed off drastically in the early 1980s after the disco/roller boogie craze cooled. The owners, Ella Schwartz and Norma Greene, fell two months behind on their rent, and made the decision to close the rink down.

The last night of public skating at the Shamrock was on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 1985. The very last skates took place in private sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, Aug. 28 and 29.

According to a Daily Breeze story about the rink’s demise, several young die-hard Shamrock regulars showed up on skates in front of Torrance City Hall on Friday morning, Aug. 30 carrying signs protesting the closure.

The city’s then-recreation administrator Bill Klement told them their skates were damaging the tiled grounds and they would have to remove them, which they did. He also told them of plans to build an outdoor rink at Wilson Park, an idea which became the park’s roller hockey facility that finally opened in October 1993.

As for the Shamrock, the South Bay’s last indoor skating rink was one of many small businesses on a 26-acre parcel north of Torrance Boulevard and east of Van Ness Avenue in downtown Torrance that was purchased by American Honda Motor Co. for its U.S. headquarters, which opened in 1990.

It was torn down to make way for the headquarters, and no trace of it remains today.
The long-gone facility still has its fans, though. A Facebook site devoted to the Shamrock began in 2009 and currently boasts more than 800 followers.

Photo courtesy Shamrock Skating Rink Facebook page. 

Sources:

“Good times rolled at that adolescent fun palace, the Shamrock Rink,” by guest columnist Susie Davies Davenport, The Daily Breeze, April 17, 2002, Page A2.

“An Interview With Imperial Dogs Vocalist Don Waller,” This Ain’t The Summer of Love blog, Oct. 24, 2010, http://thisaintthesummeroflove.blogspot.com/2010/10/interview-with-imperial-dogs-vocalist.html.

Shamrock Skating Rink Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/group.php?gid=64885788361

“Shamrock uprooted – Wheels stop rolling at Torrance rink,” by James Bronson, The Daily Breeze, Sept. 1, 1985, Page B1.

One of the largest and most advanced medical research institutes in Los Angeles County spent decades headquartered inside old army barracks.

In 1943, the U.S. Army built the Los Angeles Port of Embarkation Hospital on unincorporated county land on Carson Street near Torrance, part of the processing facility for soldiers preparing to ship overseas during World War II.

Quarters at the Los Angeles Port of Embarkation during World War II. 1944 photo courtesy LA BioMed.

After the war ended in 1945, the Army no longer had a need for the facility, and sold the 72-acre site to Los Angeles County for $48,271.

Harbor General Hospital opened there in 1946, and an informal research group called the Attending Staff Association was formed.

Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute, or LA BioMed for short, traces its origin to 1952, when the Attending Staff Association formally incorporated and issued its first research grant for $3,700 to Dr.Roderick McDonald to study the measurement of lung function.

Harbor General affiliated itself with the UCLA School of Medicine in 1948, and became its southern campus in 1951.

A new hospital building opened in 1963. On Sept. 1, 1978, Harbor General Hospital officially becameCounty Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

The Research and Education Institute’s facilities can be seen at the top center of this 1970 aerial photo, above the main hospital building. Photo courtesy of LA BioMed. 

And through it all, the Harbor-UCLA Research and Education Institute, as it was now known, continued its groundbreaking research in its rustic buildings, supplemented by offices in semi-permanent trailers nearby.

Regardless of its facilities, the dedicated researchers never stopped their important work.

Among its groundbreaking research: devising the modern cholesterol test and the thyroid deficiency test, implementing a program that virtually eliminated new cases of Tay-Sachs disease among high-risk populations, formulating the paramedic model for emergency care in 1969 that changed the way emergency medical services operated and performing the world’s first human ovum transfer in the 1980s.

The institute also established the Women’s Health Care Clinic in 1969. The Perinatal Research Clinic Center, established in 1980, was dedicated to a wide variety of research involving mothers and infants.

Slowly, new buildings began to appear at the Institute. The Albert F. Parlow Library was completed in 1983, the first new building at County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center since the hospital itself in 1963.

In 1987, the Walter P. Martin Research Center was completed, named after the pediatrician who was chairman of the original Attending Staff Association at its first official meeting in 1952.

The Walter P. Martin Research Center shortly after it was completed. Sept. 1987 Daily Breeze file photo.

Partly because of confusion with the outdoor store REI and partly to give the institute a less
bland and more identifiable name, REI officially became the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Center, more commonly known by the catchier name LA BioMed, on July 1, 2004.

In April 2010, LA BioMed won nearly $10 million in federal funds for the construction of a new research building to take the place of the Army barracks and portable trailers that its researchers had worked in for so long.

The two-story building, the Chronic Disease Clinical Research Center, will house researchers working on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiac disease and HIV/AIDS when completed in 2013.

LA BioMed currently has more than 150 researchers working on more than 1,000 ongoing studies, and has become one of the nation’s largest independent nonprofit biomedical research institutes.

LA BioMed at County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. January 2011 Daily Breeze photo.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

“LA BioMed: Five Decades of Achievement,” “Basic Facts,” http://www.labiomed.org/users/labiomed/Five%20Decades%20of%20LA%20BioMed%20Achievements.pdf.

“The Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center: History,” http://www.labiomed.org/users/giving/History.pdf.

Special thanks to Laura Mecoy at LA BioMed for providing photos and resources.

He was born Anthony Stralla, but he preferred to be known as Tony Cornero, one of the most colorful figures ever to do business in the South Bay.

We mean “in the South Bay” literally. Cornero, right, operated a fleet of gambling ships that moored off the Southern California coast in the 1930s that included the Rex in Redondo Beach.

Cornero, who was also known as “The Hat” and Admiral Cornero, began his entrepeneurial activities by becoming one of the most successful rum-runners in Southern California during the early 1920s era of Prohibition.

He specialized in bringing high-quality liquor to the mainland illegally, building up a lucrative business as a “whiskey importer” before federal authorities indicted him for his bootlegging activities on Dec. 22, 1926.

Improbably, Cornero slipped away from police custody in April 1927. After mistakenly being let go by authorities, he boarded a train headed north, jumping off it in Northern California to elude authorities. He then a hired a plane that took him to Portland to re-catch the same train, from which he jumped again to freedom somewhere between Portland and Seattle.

He stayed on the loose for two years before finally giving himself up on Oct. 28, 1929. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison, which he served at the then-federal prison at McNeil Island near Seattle.

Cornero turned over a new leaf after being released from prison in 1931. He teamed up with his brothers Frank and Louis to build the Meadows, one of the first Las Vegas hotel-casino complexes.

Its classy layout attracted some of the city’s most distinguished citizens, but because of the Depression, the Corneros only operated it briefly.

The Meadows gave Cornero a taste of the lucrative nature of the gaming industry, and he next turned to floating gambling ships.

The Johanna Smith off of Long Beach probably was the first of these seagoing gambling dens. It began operating in 1926. As many as seven of these ships may have operated in coastal waters during the 1930s.

The Rex was Cornero’s flagship. The well-appointed vessel cost upwards of $200,000 to outfit, and was designed to appeal to the middle class customer rather than to scruffy underwold types.

The S.S. Rex was the flagship of Tony Cornero’s offshore gambling empire. Photo: Redondo Beach Historical Society.

Games available included roulette, blackjack, poker and craps. It had 300 slot machines on board, and a bingo parlor that seated 500 players.
I

While operating between May and December 1938, Cornero claimed that the Rex brought in $500,000 a month. He would moor the barely seaworthy boat just outside the three-mile limit in order to keep authorities from cracking down.

But Cornero made it difficult for police to turn a blind eye to his activities. The Rex became a phenomenon thanks to ads in local newspapers extolling its amenities. A fleet of water taxis arose to ferry patrons to the ship.

This ad extolling the virtues of the S.S. Rex ran in the Daily Breeze on May 5, 1939, Page 5.

Finally, then state attorney general Earl Warren, who later would become governor and then chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, began an aggressive campaign to close the gambling ships down.

Authorities stepped up their raids on the Rex during July and August 1938. Warren and the feds would storm the ships, and Cornero’s men would respond by blasting water hoses, with Cornero defiantly refusing to give up his ship.

A Sept. 7, 1938 raid on the Rex, the second in three months, resulted in 10 arrests, including four Cornero employees from Redondo Beach.

The sea skirmishes eventually settled into a lengthy court battle, with Cornero finally giving up on the Rex in Nov. 1939.

He turned to the shipping business, and managed to stay out of trouble for awhile. The Tango and the Rex were refitted as cargo ships and pressed into military service during World War II. The Rex, renamed the Star of Scotland, was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat in November 1942 off the African coast.

He tried offshore gambling again, outfitting a former mine sweeper into the Lux, which he moored off of Long Beach in 1946, but authorities closed it after only two weeks of operation, and Cornero lost the subsequent court battle.

Cornero made news again when an intruder burst into his Elm Drive home in Beverly Hills and shot him point blank on Feb. 9, 1948. He survived, and failed to cooperate with police investigating the incident.

In the early 1950s, Cornero turned his attention back to Las Vegas, working on the development of a $6 million project: the Stardust Hotel.

This early 1960s postcard shows the Stardust, which opened in Las Vegas in 1958.

Construction on the Stardust was well under way on July 31, 1955, the day when Cornero dropped dead of a heart attack while gambling at a dice table at the Desert Inn.

An overflow crowd of more than 500 attended Cornero’s funeral in Los Angeles on Aug. 4, 1955. He was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Sources:

“The First 100 Persons Who Shaped Southern Nevada: Part 1: Tony Cornero: More Sinner Than Saint,” by Alan Balboni, Las Vegas Review-Journal website: http://www.1st100.com/part1/cornero.html.

“High Stakes on the High Seas,” by Dennis Johnson, The Daily Breeze, Dec. 2, 2001, Page A4.

Los Angeles Times stories, including:  

“Tony Cornero Dies at Gaming Table | Companions Say He Dropped Dead While Trying to Get Even at Dice,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 1, 1955, Page A1.

“500 crowd chapel for Tony Cornero Funeral,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 5, 1955, Page A1.

“The Sinking of the California Gambling Fleet,” by Robert J. Gore, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1980,  Page SE1.

Old Redondo: A Pictorial History of Redondo Beach, California, by Dennis Shanahan, Legends Press, 1982.

(Photo of Tony Cornero from Old Redondo.)

A vintage postcard shows the Los Angeles Motordrome, built in Playa del Rey in 1910.

The world’s first elevated wooden board track built for race cars took 16 days to build and cost $12,000.

The Los Angeles Motordrome opened on April 8, 1910 near the present-day intersection of Culver and Jefferson boulevards in Playa del Rey.

Promoters Fred Moskovics and Walter Hemple had taken notice of the success of automobile races involving now-legendary driver Barney Oldfield at Los Angeles tracks in the early 1900s, and hired velodrome designer Jack Prince to design a raised wooden track designed specifically for motorized racing.

Construction on the one-mile round banked track began in Feb. 1910. According to Prince, more than 2 million square feet of lumber and 30 tons of nails were used in its construction.

The Los Angeles Pacific Railway built a special spur to bring fans to the track, which held 12,000 spectators. Sportswriters immediately began referring to the structure as a “pie pan” due to its circular shape and banked track.

Oldfield was the biggest name at its opening seven-day racing meet, which also featured racers Ralph DePalma, George Robertson, Lewis Strang, Roy Harroun and Caleb Bragg.

The event was a success, and both automobile and motorcycle races were held regularly at the motordrome for the next three years.

The motordrome at Playa del Rey was the first of several that eventually would be built in the Los Angeles area, including wooden tracks in Beverly Hills, Culver City, and the Los Angeles Coliseum motordrome at Hooper Avenue and 35th Street.

On the afternoon of Aug. 11, 1913, a fire broke out under the wooden track in Playa del Rey. Though it did not fully destroy it, the damage was severe enough that rebuilding it wasn’t feasible. A Los Angeles Times news story detailing the fire blamed it on vagrants sleeping beneath the track who were careless with matches.

Wooden tracks eventually died out as other surfaces such as asphalt began to be used for auto racing tracks in the late 1920s, replacing the more dangerous wooden structures.

Sources:

Board Track: Gold, Guts and Glory, by Dick Wallen, Dick Wallen Productions, 1990.

“Board Tracks: Before Indianapolis, L.A.’s Toothpick Ovals Were King,” By Shav Glick, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 14, 1987, Page C1.

“Famous Race Course Burns,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 1913, Part II, Page 4.

The Hotel Metropole was an early landmark on the Avalon shoreline. Photo: Library of Congress, Detroit Photographic Co., 1901.

After he purchased Catalina Island in 1887 for $200,000, developer George Shatto immediately built the Hotel Metropole on the shoreline in Avalon that same year.

When the foundation for the visually striking building was dug, workers found hundreds of Indian artifacts; the site formerly had hosted Indian feasts before being settled.

Shatto worked for four years to develop Avalon as a top tourist attraction, but his financial obligations overwhelmed him, and he was forced to sell out to the Bannings, Phineas Banning’s three sons William, Joseph and Hancock, in 1892.

The hotel was such a success that additions to it were made in 1893 and 1897. The 1897 addition gave the hotel 58 more rooms as well as a large reception area and a ballroom.

The distinctive green Hotel Metropole can be seen at the center of this view of Avalon in 1903. Photo: Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Co.

The Metropole continued to thrive during the early years of the 20th century, right up until the disastrous early morning hours of Nov. 29, 1915.

Between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m., a fire started mysteriously near the rear of the hotel. Avalon’s small fire department quickly was overwhelmed by the blaze, which spread until it had destroyed fully half of the town’s hotels and buildings. Many residents were left homeless.

The 1915 Catalina fire destroyed half of the resort town. Photo courtesy Jeannine Pedersen, Curator, Catalina Island Museum.

The Hotel Metropole was a total loss, as were five other Avalon hotels: the Central, Bay View, Rose, Grandview and Pacific.

Damages from the blaze topped $2 million, and the Bannings took a major financial hit.

Though no definitive cause was found, the unofficial word was that a man who lived in a small apartment at the rear of the Metropole was about to be foreclosed upon, so he set the blaze in order to get insurance money.

Six months later, grand plans to rebuild an even bigger and better version of the hotel on the site were announced, but the Bannings instead began devoting their energies to build another famous Catalina luxury resort, the Hotel St. Catherine, at nearby Descanso Bay.

A 52-room Hotel Metropole now stands on the site of the original structure in Avalon at the center of the Metropole Market Place development.

Sources:

“Another Annex to the Hotel Metropole,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1897, Page 26.

The Catalina Story, by Alma Overholt, Catalina Island Museum Society, 1962.

“Famous Hotel Greater Still: Architects Commissioned for a Bigger, Better Metropole,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1916, Page 11.

“The Fire of 1915,” by Jeannine Pedersen, Curator of Collections, Catalina Island Museum, http://www.ecatalina.com/catalina-history-1915.html.

Special thanks to Jeannine Pedersen of the Catalina Island Museum.

Romayne Martin, right, speaks with her friend Thyra Bliss at Martin’s 100th birthday party in May 1989. Daily Breeze file photo.

Every city just starting out should be fortunate enough to have citizens such as Romayne Martin.

“She was like a walking treasure,” said Rancho de los Palos Verdes Historical Society president Mary Roderman upon Martin’s death at 101 years old on April 9, 1991.

Born on May 4, 1889, the Boston native came to the beautiful but mostly barren Palos Verdes Peninsula in 1923 with her husband, landscape architect Farnham Martin. He had been hired by the Olmsted Brothers architectural firm to lay out the trees and other foliage on the Hill.

She quickly determined that the area needed a permanent school, even though it had few residents at the time. As she told Jay Lawyer, the general manager of the Palos Verdes Project, “If we have fine schools, we’ll build up our population faster than any other way you could do it – because people want their children to go to good schools.”

At the time, the area’s 12-14 students were sent by bus to Redondo Beach schools.
Lawyer agreed to let Martin open her school in some rooms on the top floor of the Gardner building in Malaga Cove, providing the county schools superintendent approved the plan.

In 1925, Martin became one of the first three trustees of the newly formed Palos Verdes Peninsula School District. At her urging, an $85,000 bond issue was brought to voters to build a permanent school on seven acres in Malaga Cove. Voters passed it unanimously.

Palos Verdes School Board trustees Colonel John Chambers Low and Romayne C. Martin plant a tree in the patio area of Malaga Cove School in April 1926. The school’s distinctive tower is visible in background. Photo: Palos Verdes Library District collection.

The Palos Verdes School opened upstairs in the Gardner Building on Sept. 8, 1925, with 24 students. Less than a year later, the newly built Malaga Cove School opened to 35 K-8 students on April 5, 1926.

The school became an intermediate school in the 1960s with additional buildings. It was closed in 1991, but the building still houses a county-run special education school and a natural history museum.

Having played a key role in establishing the first school in Palos Verdes, Martin then turned her attention to setting up its first library.

From some bookshelves in the upstairs school, the library was moved next to the post office in the Gardiner Building at Malaga Cove, where it opened as a branch of the Los Angeles County Free Library in June 1926 with a collection of 660 books.

Martin and her husband knew the branch would soon be inadequate, so they scouted out a potential site originally intended for a church.

The land was purchased in April 1929, and the Palos Verdes library district became an independent entity on July 1, 1929.

The handsomely furnished library, which Martin wanted to have a comfortable, non-insitutional feel, was opened to the public in June 1930. It still contains much of the original Renaissance-style furniture imported from Italy and the Mediterranean.

The Malaga Cove Library remains one of the area’s most beautiful structures, and is listed on both the state and National Register of Historic Places. It’s located next to the Farnham Martin Memorial Park, a grassy area dedicated in honor of Martin’s husband. He died in an automobile crash in 1928, leaving her a widow at age 39. She never remarried.

The Malaga Cove Library in Palos Verdes Estates. Daily Breeze file photo, March 2006.

Martin became a supervisor at the interior design department of Bullock’s department store, and later formed her own interior decorating business. She organized a children’s ballroom dancing studio where she also taught etiquette and sponsored dances that became known as Martin Assemblies.

As an 80-year-old, she and her daughter Betsy took a six-month, 25,000-mile trip all over Europe in a Volkswagen squareback.

In May 1989, nearly 200 people came to Malaga Cove Library to pay tributes of all kinds to the remarkable Martin on her 100th birthday.

Romayne Martin at her 100th birthday party in May 1989. Daily Breeze file photo.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

Palos Verdes Library District local history photo collection.

The Palos Verdes Story, by Delane Morgan, Review Publications, 1982.

Philanthropist Kenneth T. Norris Jr. is shown in a November 1980 photo, when he was the head of Norris Industries. Daily Breeze photo.

The Norris name is a familiar one around the South Bay and in the Los Angeles area.

The Norris Theatre for the Performing Arts in Rolling Hills Estates, the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, the voluminous Norris Medical Library near County-USC Medical Center and the Eileen Norris Theater of Cinema at USC all came about as a result of Norris and his family’s dedication to using their wealth for important causes.

His father, Kenneth T. Norris, groomed him to be head of the military manufacturing firm, Norris Industries, which he had founded in the 1930s.

Kenneth T. Norris Jr. eventually did take over the company, which had grown into a conglomerate that owned such firms as Thermador Waste King and plumbing fixtures giant Price Pfister by the time he took over as chairman and CEO in 1969.

Norris was highly regarded by his employees. They told of how he used to dress up as the Grim Reaper for Halloween and put rubber spiders on their desks. He didn’t care for suits and ties at work, and decreed that his employees could dress informally as he often did.

Norris collected kites, swords and guns, and lost his left eye at 18 in a boxing match.

Norris Industres had 10,000 employees by the time Norris sold it to a group of investment bankers in 1981.

After selling, Norris devoted himself to the philanthropic activities of the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, which his father had begun in 1963.

His $5 million 1983 gift began the cancer center named after him at USC, at the time the only facility in Southern California created solely for the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

The Norris Theatre for the Performing Arts in Rolling Hills Estates is shown in this Sept. 2007 Daily Breeze file photo.

His involvement with the Norris Theatre came about after an unsuccessful attempt to donate $1 million to the Terrace Theatre in Long Beach, which balked at changing its name to Norris.

So Norris turned his attention to establishing the Rolling Hills Estates theater, which has become a centerpiece for theater productions in the South Bay since its opening on Sept. 23, 1983 with a gala concert by Cleo Laine and John Dankworth.

Norris himself even took a turn at the acting life for a time in the early 1980s. His screen credits included a guest role on the series “Little House on The Prairie,” the television biopic “Sophia,” about Sophia Loren, and a part in the film “The Doorman” with Mike Connors.

Norris knew Connors as his neighbor in Lake Arrowhead, where Norris had a vacation house.

Unfortunately, it was at Lake Arrowhead that Norris died on Sept. 21, 1996, when he apparently fell overboard while flying a kite from the back of his boat on the lake.

In November 1999, the Harlyne J. Norris Pavilion opened near the theatre. The annex was named for Norris’ widow.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.