South Bay History

Formed in Dec. 1957, the five-member Committee for Decent Literature was an attempt to stem what its members felt was a rising tide of indecent material on Torrance newsstands. (Inspired by the Torrance group, Gardena formed an active Committee for Decent Literature in 1959 with similiar aspirations.)

Retailers were asked to cooperate with the group by removing objectionable publications from their racks. Those who did were given a certificate and window seal for display by the decent literature group.

On Dec. 7, 1959, Rev. William Schatz called for the addition of at least a dozen new members to help halt the increase of obscene magazines and books in the city. Examples were presented at the meeting, including “at least a dozen girlie-type magazines, several detective publications relating bizarre sex crimes, a publication containing pictures taken at a nudist camp, a book on sex problems and one pocket book with obscene passages indicated in red penciling.”

In July 1960, the city sanctioned the committee as an official community group and added two members to it. In Jan. 1961, the Torrance City Council objected to ice cream truck operators who were selling gory “monster” trading cards to kids for 10 cents each, and asked that the decency committee look into the matter.

After a period of inactivity, the committee made news again in the fall of 1962. At a Sept. 25 council meeting, Mayor Albert Isen accused its leader, physician Dr. Donald Cortum, of wrecking the group’s program shortly before Cortum was presented a plaque for his civic contributions in opposing pornography.

More verbal jousting occurred when committee member Clara Jordan complained that the city had refused to pay part of Cortum’s expenses when he attended a national Decent Literature Committee meeting in Chicago.

When Councilman Jay Beasley pointed out that the committee had no chairman and hadn’t been active recently, Isen said, “I’ll tell you what happened, and I’ll go on record. The rest of the committee couldn’t get along with Dr. Cortum.”

Cooler heads prevailed, and the fireworks were smoothed over until Oct. 1962, when the decision to change the committee’s name was the subject of disagreement. After considering several options, the city voted to change it to the Torrance Commission for Good Literary Standards and for Juvenile Welfare, passing on the Association for the Advancement of Torrance Citizens.

El Camino College English professor Eugene Kerstiens was elected chairman at the newly renamed group’s first meeting in Nov. 1962. Mayor Isen also proclaimed Nov. 1962 Stamp Out Smut month in Torrance.

On Nov. 29, the group asked the council to shorten that unwieldly name, and also voted to write the city council to ask that the film “White Trash” not be shown in Torrance.

The last news item in our files on the group comes from Dec. 12, 1962, and mentions the continuing quest for a shorter name for the committee, in addition to clarifying that the committee’s job was not to censor materials. Guest speaker Dr. Cortum said its duties “are to educate the public to reject pornography and to encourage enforcement of laws against filth.”

Cortum, left, went on to become the co-chairman of the national group Citizens for Decent Literature. In 1965, he was honored by the American Educational League for his anti-pornography efforts, and in 1966 he ran for Congress as a Republican in the then-17th Congressional District, losing against Democratic incumbent Cecil R. King.

 

Press Wireless Inc. was formed in 1929 by a group of newspapers in order to transmit news dispatches throughout the world. The papers were disillusioned with the high prices charged by third-party companies in the business, and sought to cut costs by handling transmissions themselves.

Press Wireless established stations on Long Island, NY that could link with Europe, and one just south of San Francisco that was the main contact with Asia. In support of that station, a transmitting base was set up in Playa del Rey, and, in 1938, the company bought 105 acres of land from the Vanderlip family on a hilltop in present-day Rancho Palos Verdes, near Armaga Spring and Highridge roads, for a receiving base.

By 1939, it had constucted six antennas to receive signals from the company’s Asia-based transmitters. With the outbreak of World War II, these rhombic antennas would play a key role in military communications from the Pacific theater back to the U.S.

But then came the case of the man who tried to use the technology against America. Buried on Page 6 of the April 16, 1942 Daily Breeze was a small news item about the arrest of William Arthur Schuler, 23, at his home at 516 Via Bodega in Palos Verdes Estates, by FBI agents. He was accused of transmitting military information to the Axis powers.

 

Daily Breeze story from Nov. 18, 1942, Page 1.

 

Schuler had worked for Press Wireless since 1937 at its Playa del Rey transmitting station. According to FBI agent Richard B. Hood, “He (Schuler) recently approached an unnamed person and offered to transmit messages for foreign agents by means of the wireless facilities of the company (Press Wireless).”

Schuler met with an undercover FBI man posing as an enemy agent and was arrested after transmitting dummy messages given to him to send to the enemy on April 11 and 12.

When agents searched Schuler’s house, they also found several homemade bombs and bomb-making equipment. He admitted to having an interest in the subject to the FBI agents who arrested him.

Schuler was indicted by the grand jury on espionage charges, and pleaded guilty, asking for probation, in May 1942. Instead, he was sentenced to six years in prison.

The Press Wireless operation ended up playing a major role in military communications during World War II especially in transmitting information from the South Pacific theater. In addition, it allowed war correspondents to send dispatches directly from the front lines back to the U.S. almost instantly for the first time in history.

After the war ended in 1945, ham radio pioneer Don Wallace purchased the Press Wireless station in Rolling Hills from Press Wireless and set about building his “radio ranch” on the site.

 

Ham radio operator Don Wallace stands outside of the former Press Wireless building in Rancho Palos Verdes in this undated photo from the late 1940s. (Photo from Don C. Wallace: W6AM: Amateur Radio’s Pioneer.)

 

He operated the site, one of the largest amateur radio stations in the world, with his distinctive opening call, “W6AM, like 6 a.m. in the morning, callling,” for 40 years until his death on Saturday, May 25, 1985 at age 86 after suffering a stroke.

After his death, the city heard debate on establishing a ham radio museum at the remaining 24 acres of his site that would have been named the Don Wallace Radio Ranch Museum, but it was never built.

Wallace had sold most of the property in the early 1960s, and it was developed into luxury homes. 83 more homes eventually were built on the 24-acre site, one of the last relatively flat building sites with views that remained on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

 

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

Don C. Wallace: W6AM: Amateur Radio’s Pioneer, By Jan David Perkins, Vestal Press, 1991.

Images of America: Rancho Palos Verdes, by Ginger Garnett Clark, Arcadia Publishing, 2009.

“Spy Suspect Seized with Bomb Cache, ” The Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1942, Page 1. (Also, follow-up articles from April 23 and May 15, 1942.)

Wartime Palos Verdes, by Donald J. Young, self-published, (1989).

Mines Field in Nov. 1929, shortly before it was renamed Los Angeles Municipal Airport. Photo credit: Los Angeles World Airports.

 

Though the city of Los Angeles took control of Mines Field in 1928, it would be 18 years before regularly scheduled passenger service would come to the airport.

William Mines was a real estate agent who agreed to work with the city to develop an air field in the barley fields near Inglewood in 1926. The staging of the popular 1928 National Air Races at Mines Field was a boost to the nascent airport.

On October 1, 1928, the city of Los Angeles signed a lease for the property, and formed a new agency, the Department of Airports, to manage the field. On June 7, 1930, the facility was dedicated and renamed Los Angeles Municipal Airport.

Though the city’s vision was for the airport to become the main passenger hub in Los Angeles, the passenger air travel industry had yet to come aboard, and there were no regular passenger operations at the airport. The airlines could not be enticed to move their scheduled passenger service that operated from the airports in Glendale and Burbank throughout the 1930s.

A bond issue that would have helped upgrade the airport was voted down in 1939. World War II then put a halt to further development. But The Department of Airports did develop a master plan in 1943, and its particulars convinced the airlines to move to Los Angeles Municipal Airport after the war ended and sufficient improvements could be made to the facility.

A new master plan for the airport was released in 1944, and on May 1, 1945, a $12.5 million bond issue for airport improvements passed by a five-to-one margin.

When major airlines began moving their facilities from Burbank Airport to Los Angeles Municipal Airport in 1946, terminals had to be built quickly. Four wood-frame buildings were erected on the north side of the airport, and a barracks building was converted into a cafeteria. On December 9, 1946, American Airlines, TWA, Western United and Southwest began passenger operations at the airport.

 

In this 1947 photo, terminals make up one row on the north side of Los Angeles Muncipal Airport. Photo credit: Los Angeles World Airports.

 

Once thought to be temporary structures, the terminals would end up being used for 15 years. In those days, air passengers would pass through the terminals directly onto the tarmac to board their flights via portable stairways. But plans were in motion in the mid-1950s to change all that.

The advent of the jet airliner era only served to point up how inadequate the airport’s facilities were. The airport had been renamed Los Angeles International Airport in 1949, but if the city truly wanted to compete with more modern facilities such as San Francisco International, it had to to update. A $59 million bond issue created to do just that passed on June 5, 1956.

Using the bond money over the next few years, new terminals were built, and the roadway was turned into a loop with a separate entrance and exit to smooth traffic flow. A new control tower was built at the eastern entrance to the airport, and the addition of the Theme Building in 1962 helped give the airport a futuristic jet-age feel. (The first commercial jet airliner had landed there on Jan. 25, 1959.)

Most importantly for passengers, boarding planes at the newly redsigned airport was done after walking through long tunnels from the terminals to modular satellite buildings, where jetways connected passengers to planes. No more climbing portable stairs to enter from the tarmac.

 

This Nov. 21, 1961 photo above shows the newly remodeled LAX. There are no parking garages, just open lots on the interior of the roadway area. The control tower can be seen at the eastern entrance to the airport. Photo credit: Los Angeles World Airports.

 

A special three-day opening ceremony for the new facility was held in June 1961. It culminated with the appearance of then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who delivered a speech on June 25 before an estimated 100,000 people.

As the airport boomed during the 1960s, traffic continued to be a problem. Parking garages were built, satellite lots with shuttle service began to appear, and the intersection at Sepulveda and Century boulevards was redesigned.

 

This 1971 Daily Breeze file photo of the United Air Lines passenger terminal shows the separation of terminals and passenger loading hubs. They were connected by below-ground tunnels.

 

This April 1976 aerial photo shows the redesigned eastern entrance to the airport and the addition of parking garages. Note the blank spot at the western end of the roadway where the Tom Bradley International Terminal would later be built. Photo credit: Los Angeles World Airports.

 

Another major renovation would be necessary, and the impetus of the 1984 Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles gave urgency to the efforts. Work was begun in 1981 on constructing a second-level elevated roadway, as well as a new international terminal and three new parking garages.

 

Traffic fills the ground level roadway as work continues on the upper level roadway and the new Tom Bradley International Terminal in this Aug. 1983 Daily Breeze file photo.

 

All of the work on the second level was done while traffic still continued to flow through the airport. The construction resulted in periodic traffic snarls, especially during holiday periods, but ultimatley both the upper roadway and the new Tom Bradley International Terminal were completed in time to accommodate the influx of visitors for the 1984 Olympics.

Passengers now were funneled to different roadways for departures (upper level) and arrivals (lower level). A new control tower was added in 1996, and LAX as we know now it was mostly complete. (The distinctive signs and light towers were aded to its entrance from 2000-2001 as part of the Gateway 2000 project.).

Currently, a $1.5 billion expansion of the Tom Bradley International Terminal is under way. When completed in 2012, the news structure will stand almost nine stories tall. Other changes include the remoeling of Terminal 6 and a spate recently signed food and retail concessions deals with a variety of new providers.

 

 

The departure level of LAX is shown in this Nov. 24, 2010 photo by Daily Breeze staff photographer Scott Varley.

 

 

 

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

LAX: Los Angeles International Airport: From Lindbergh’s Landing Strip to World Air Center, by Tom Moran, CCA Publications, 1993.

Images of Aviation: Los Angeles International Airport, by William Schoneberger, Ethel Pattison, Lee Nichols and Flight Path Learning Center of Southern California, Arcadia Publishing, 2009

Two recent posts to the South Bay History blog led me into cemeteries along the way.

My item about San Pedro pioneer Augustus Timms brought me face to face with his grave monument at the tiny Harbor View Cemetery in San Pedro, and the recent post about Charles Bukowski led to his final resting place at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes.

The grave site of San Pedro pioneer Augustus Timms lies in Harbor View Cemetery. Daily Breeze photo.

 

Maybe I’m morbid, but it got me to thinking about other well-known figures of the past who have been laid to rest in area cemeteries. Fortunately, the comprehensive Find A Grave website can answer such questions.

As you might expect, cemeteries in the Los Angeles area contain a greater concentration of celebrities. Forest Lawn in Glendale has Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis Jr., Walt Disney, Nat “King” Cole and dozens of other film and entertainment figures.

Hollywood Forever cemetery has Cecil B. De Mille, Nelson Eddy and “Wizard of Oz” director
Victor Fleming, among others. Marilyn Monroe, right, lies in Westwood Memorial Park cemetery along with Farrah Fawcett, Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin and Jack Lemmon.

Closer to the South Bay, the two cemeteries in Culver City contain the graves of many celebrities, thanks in part to their proximity to the former MGM studios (now Sony Pictures). The Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery has actors John Candy, Jimmy Durante and Rita Hayworth, as well as legendary director John Ford, singer/actor Bing Crosby and beloved Lakers announcer Chick Hearn.

The Jewish cemetery Hillside Memorial Park, also in Culver City, has the grave of Jack Benny and his wife, Milton Berle, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges and the highly visible monument for Al Jolson.

As far South Bay cemeteries go, Inglewood Park Cemetery just north of the Forum has the largest number of well-known grave sites. It has an extraordinary number of musicians, most notably the legendary Ray Charles, rhythm and blues star and composer of “Louie Louie” Richard Berry, jazz greats Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, and blues performers Big Mama Thornton and T-Bone Walker.

 

Ray Charles, shown performing at the Marciac Jazz Festival in France in August 1997, is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery. (Photo: Jean Pierre-Muller/AFP/Getty Images.) 

 

Athletes buried there include baseball players Curt Flood, Dock Ellis and Lyman Bostock, volleyball great Flo Hyman and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Public servants include former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and longtime congressman Julian Dixon.

In addition to Bukowski, some other well-known figures rest in Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes.  Notables from the world of sports include football coach George Allen, NBA star Dennis Johnson and two-time WWF wrestling champion Rodney “Yokozuna” Anoai. D. Boon of the San Pedro punk pioneers The Minutemen is bured there, as is longtime Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad and former longtime congressman Glenn Anderson.

Redondo Beach’s Pacific Crest Cemetery has silent film star Mae Marsh, who starred in films for Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith, and character actor George Chesebro, who starred in low-budget Westerns and serials in Hollywood’s early days.

In Carson, jazz musician Hampton Hawes and journalist Chester Washington are among
those at Lincoln Memorial Park cemetery, while legendary rhythm and blues performer Big Joe Turner is buried at Roosevelt Memorial Park cemetery in Gardena.

Though no famous pets are listed as being buried at Pet Haven Cemetery in Gardena, two well-known animals are interred at Hollywood Park Race Track: three-time Hollywood Gold Cup winner Native Diver, and much-loved filly Landaluce, who won her first five starts in a row before becoming ill and dying in 1982.

Two-year-old filly Landaluce died of a viral infection after a brief but spectacular career. She is buried on the infield at Hollywood Park. (Associated Press photo.)

 

Sources:

“Find a Grave” website, www.findagrave.com.

 
This 1957 photograph shows a typical fallout shelter that includes a 14-day food supply that could be stored indefinitely, a battery-operated radio, auxiliary light sources, a two-week supply of water, and first aid, sanitary, and other miscellaneous supplies and equipment. Photo credit: U.S. National Archives.

 

Fallout shelters were a critical part of the civil defense strategy of the 1950s and 1960s.

The atomic bomb had helped the U.S. end the World War II in the Pacific when used in against Japan on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later.

But when our former ally Russia exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, it signaled the beginning of the Cold War, during which both sides began to build and stockpile these weapons of mass destruction.

Nuclear weapons presented a whole new type of warfare, one in which the objective was to survive not only the initial blast, but also to outlive the radioactive fallout that would follow.

Enter the concept of fallout shelters, both public and private, where people could live for weeks and even months while waiting for radiation levels to subside.

There was much concern in the South Bay over the lack of such public facilities. A June 14, 1962 Daily Breeze story indicted that a study by the South Bay Engineering Co. in Palos Verdes Estates had determined that there was space for 12,810 people in South Bay fallout shelters.

“But what are we going to do with the other 550,000 people in the South Bay?” lamented project administrator Frederic J. Wood. The bulk of the 12,810 spots were in Redondo Beach, which had 9,453 such spaces.

The city of Redondo Beach established three public fallout shelters in the early 1960s, drawing from a list of 15 structures in the city which the federal government had declared sound enough to use as shelters. It became the first city in the South Bay to designate public fallout shelter locations.

In Jan. 1963, the Redondo Beach City Council entered into an agreement with the May Co. Department Stores to use the basement at the May Co. location at South Bay Center (later to become the South Bay Galleria). It was designated a Civil Defense shelter with the familiar yellow and black signs, and Civil Defense authorities were allowed to stock it with emergency food provisions.

In Feb. 1963, two other locations were so designated: The Lincoln Building, an abandoned classroom at Redondo Union High School that hadn’t been used in 15 years and was being used for storage by the South Bay Union High School District, and a portion of the Plush Horse Inn at Pacific Coast Highway and Palos Verdes Boulevard, which would later become the Palos Verdes Inn.

Other cities had been encouraging private citizens to build their own fallout shelters  on their property.

Plans for do-it-yourself fallout shelters were made available in many cities, including Gardena and Lomita, as well as from area post offices.

In Aug. 1961, the Torrance City Council approved designs that could be used by residents to build fallout shelters, with different designs for front yards and backyards. (See clip above.)

A Daily Breeze article from Sept. 1, 1961 announced that four South Bay residents had applied to build fallout shelters within one single week, two in Manhattan Beach, one in El Segundo and one in Torrance.

The Berlin Wall had gone up on Aug. 13, 1961, and the Russians conducted a major nuclear test on Sept. 1, 1961, fueling the drive to build shelters. President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10952 on July 20, 1961, which called for more than $200 million to be spent on a nationwide fallout shelter program. In October 1961, Kennedy advised American families to build their own shelters in the event of nuclear war with Russia.

 
Though Cold War tensions reached a frenzied peak during the Oct. 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, concerns over fallout shelters continued throughout the 1960s. In 1966, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn was continuing to call for the construction of fallout shelters at all public schools in the county, an idea he had first proposed 10 years earlier.

With the thawing of the Cold War through diplomatic means such as detente in the early 1970s, the fervor for fallout shelters abated somewhat. Though a strong civil defense system remains of paramount importance, fallout shelters themselves began to be considered as remnants of a much scarier era when nuclear conflagration seemed to be just around the corner.

 

Sources:

 

Daily Breeze files. (Clip at left is dated Aug. 31, 1961.)

One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, by Kenneth Rose, NYU Press, 2001.

“Teaching With Documents: Photographs and Pamphlets About Nuclear Fallout,” U.S. National Archives website, http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fallout-docs/.

 

The Community Baptist Church of Hermosa Beach began in 1911 in a small building at 26th Street and Myrtle Avenue in Hermosa Beach. On July 3, 1917, the church moved to a bigger location at 1215 Manhattan Avenue.

When the rapidly growing Manhattan Avenue congregation needed larger quarters, the church raised $40,000 to build a new structure on the site. The mission-style structure with its distinctive bell tower was dedicated on March 30, 1924, and would become a local landmark for the next few decades.

The Community Baptist members eventually moved to a new location, and Southern Baptists took over the church building in 1957, rechristening it as the First Baptist Church.

The congregation’s numbers began to fall off in the late 1960s, however, and in 1973, the Baptists decided to sell the church to a developer. His plans to build a series of restaurants on the site faltered when the money ran out.

In 1975, new owners Sam and Lorraine Elton stepped in, purchasing the property for $150,000. Though it was structurally sound, the interior of the empty building already had deteriorated considerably.

The Eltons not only cleaned things up, but came up with a new use for the building. Calling it the Creative Craft Center, they rented out space to artists and craftsmen who would create goods onsite that they would then sell at the Center. The concept seemed to work well at first, but problems arose.

The city expressed concerns over the building’s failure to conform to code, with the major sticking point being its lack of an overhead sprinkler system in case of fire.

After three years of bickering over the property and the business, the Eltons closed the craft center and sold the building to Hermosa Beach developers Mac McClelland, Norm Steiner and Velma Hastings.

The new owners planned to transform the property into a shopping center and office complex, with increased parking and a variety of tenants. There was talk of preserving the building’s character under the new plans, but there were also growing concerns that it would be razed and the resulting commercial structures would be out of character with the area.

 

This September 1983 Daily Breeze file photo shows the abandoned church with the “Creative Craft Center” sign over the entrance.

While negotiations continued, squatters continued to live in the abandoned and increasingly run-down church. In addition to the indigent, residents included artists and craftsmen and a rapidly growing number of musicians who were using the building as a rehearsal space.

The punk-rock revolution was in full flower in 1978 and 1979. Among the musicians renting space in the abandoned church were the members of an upstart hardcore punk band known as Black Flag, a very young band from Hawthorne known as The Tourists that would become first Red Cross and then, for legal reasons, Redd Kross, and members of Hermosa Beach bands The Last and the Descendents.

This loose aggregation of musicians and artists gave the building its simple new name: The Church.

The building and its colorful residents gained additional notoriety when director Penelope Spheeris shot much of her landmark punk documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization” there. In the film, then-Black Flag vocalist Ron Reyes describes living in a closet he was renting at The Church for $16 a month, and the band performs three songs.

Meanwhile, plans to develop the site into a shopping center failed to take off after months of dickering. McClellan discussed a new plan for a 160-room hotel in 1983, but it never came to fruition.

The scene began to die out as the musicians involved became more successful and were able to move to more civilized forms of habitation. After The Church finally was torn down, a skate park built on its foundations was there briefly before the property finally was redeveloped.

The restaurant/pub Ein Stein’s moved in the late 1990s. After it moved out, it was followed by the property’s current occupants the Union Cattle Co. Brewhouse and Grill, which opened in June 2003.

 

The entrance to the Union Cattle Co. restaurant and bar in Hermosa Beach is shown in this June 2004 Daily Breeze file photo.

Sources:

 

Daily Breeze files.

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

“Future of Aging Church Spurs Brouhaha,” by Victor Merina, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 7, 1979.

“Black Flag: A Twelve-step Program in Self-Reliance: How L.A.’s Hardcore Pioneers Made it Through the Early Years,” by Jay Babcock, L.A. Weekly, June 22, 2001.

 

The Lomita Theatre, shown here in 1928, was located next to the old Lomita Hotel on Narbonne Avenue. (Photo from Lomita…A Century Remembered)

The Lomita Theatre opened for business on May 31, 1924, with a showing of the film “Little Old New York” starring Marion Davies. 

According to an advertisement, the evening also included “Sunshine Comedy and Two Acts of Vaudeville.” (Fox “Sunshine Comedies” were a series of two-reel silent comedy features, only a couple of dozen of which have survived.)

 

The theater was located at 1063 Narbonne Avenue, near the Lomita Hotel. (The building’s current-day address became 24333 Narbonne when the address numbering system changed.)

 
In those days, it wasn’t unusual for movie theaters to offer live entertainment along with films. Vaudeville acts were commonly used to keep the audience occupied while the bulky film reels were changed.

The Gumm Sisters were one such act. Their father, Frank Gumm, was himself a former vaudevillian who had been making a living operating movie theaters first in Minnesota and later in Lancaster, Calif.

The Gumm Sisters (a.k.a. The Garland Sisters), left to right, Mary Jane, Frances Ethel (bottom) and Dorothy Virginia.

 

The sister act had been performing throughout Southern California since the 1920s, with its youngest member, Frances Ethel Gumm, or “Baby Frances”as she was once known, often stealing the show.

 

Its first performance was at the New Lancaster Theater on May 21, 1927, a movie theater in Lancaster that Frank Gumm rented and managed shortly after the family settled in California after moving from Grand Rapids, Minn.

The trio continued performing all around Southern California in the hopes of being discovered by the Hollywood film industry. According to one source, the act changed its name to the Garland Sisters after being introduced with that name onstage by George Jessel in 1934.

 It was as the Garland Sisters that they performed between features onstage at the Lomita Theatre on June 8, 1935. Shortly afterward, the trio performed live for the last time at an engagement in July 1935 at the Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe.

The Tahoe engagement was eventful. Frances introduced Mary Jane to her future husband, musician Lee Kahn. Their marriage in August helped spell the end of the act.

Frances Gumm changed her name to Judy Garland and signed a movie deal that fall with Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and never performed in vaudeville again. (Frank Gumm died suddenly in November 1935.)

 

Judy Garland in Paris, in Sept. 1960. (Photo credit: Staff/AFP/Getty Images) 

 

She would go on to star in “The Wizard of Oz,” “Meet Me in St. Louis” and dozens of other movies. Her solo concert performances would become legendary, as would a series of television specials in which she starred in from 1955-1963. She died at 47 on June 22, 1969.

 

As for the Lomita Theatre, its arc was less spectacular. The advent of television hurt a lot of small movie theaters that were unable to fight back with bigger screens and fancy projection techniques in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Business fell off, and the theater closed somtime in 1955.

 

 

(Daily Breeze photo, Nov. 2010)

 

 

Several businesses moved in and out of the structure over the years. Its current occupant, the indoor baseball batting cage facility House of Hardball, above, moved into the building in 2004 after a major renovation.

 

Despite the renovation, the theater’s original supporting structure can still be seen if you look closely enough on on its roof.

 

The original wood frames from the old Lomita Theatre can be seen atop the rear of the building at 24333 Narbonne Avenue. (Daily Breeze photo, Nov. 2010.)

 

Sources:

Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend, by David Shipman, Hyperion Books, 1993.

Lomita … A Century Remembered, By Jim Cole, City of Lomita, 2007.

 

“1922-1939 Timeline,” The Judy Room website, http://www.thejudyroom.com/timeline.html.

 

 

  

General William Starke Rosecrans, or “Old Rosy” as he was known to his men, gave more to the South Bay than just his namesake Rosecrans Avenue.

He was many things during his long and varied life: a Civil War general, an anti-slavery Democrat, a California congressman, registrar of the U.S. Treasury, and, by some accounts, very nearly the first Catholic President of the U.S.

Rosecrans, shown at right in a Civil War-era portrait by legendary photographer Matthew Brady (photo courtesy Library of Congress), was born in Kingston Township, Ohio, (near Sunbury) on Sept. 6, 1819. The original family name was “Rosenkranz,” which means crown or wreath of roses.

He attended West Point, and upon his graduation joined the Army Corps of Engineers. He resigned his commission in 1854 after reaching the rank of first lieutenant in order to spend more time with his family. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and engaged in various business ventures that included civil engineering, coal mining, river navigation and oil refining.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Rosecrans re-enlisted in the Army and became a brigadier general after volunteering for General McClellan in Ohio. He led troops to an early victory at Rich Mountain, and participated in campaigns at Corinth, Chattanooga and Murfreesboro.

After a reorganization, he was made commander of the Department of the Cumberland, a post he held from Oct. 1862 to Oct. 1863. He was considered one of the Union’s brightest leaders until his forces were defeated at Chickamauga in Sept. 1863.

Artist’s rendition of the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga, with General Rosecrans depicted at left and Confederate General Braxton Bragg at right, both on horseback. Credit: Library of Congress.

 

After that battle, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Gen. Ulysses Grant relieved him of command, an action which embittered Rosecrans against the two men.

Here’s where the White House almost came into play. In 1864, the story goes, Rosecrans decided to accept President Abraham Lincoln’s offer of the Vice Presidency, but somehow his cable to Washington, D.C. never got through. Speculation ran that War Secretary Stanton intercepted and destroyed it.

If not for that possibly apocryphal bit of intrigue, Stanton could have ended up as U.S. President instead of Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination. He would have been the first Catholic in the office, something which didn’t come to pass until John F. Kennedy’s election nearly a century later.

After a stint as U.S. Amabassador to Mexico from 1868-69, Rosecrans settled in San Francisco, where he became one of the 11 founders of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

He eventually migrated south to Los Angeles. In 1869, he purchased 13,000 acres of the Rancho Sausal Redondo land grant for $2.50 an acre.

His property, which would become known as Rosecrans before eventually becoming part of Gardena and South Los Angeles, was bordered by, roughly, Crenshaw Boulevard on the west, Central Avenue on the east, Florence Avenue on the north, with a southern border just north of Artesia Boulevard.

He built a family home near the present-day intersection of Vermont and Rosecrans avenues, where he became a gentleman farmer.

After many entreaties from his supporters over the years to run for public office, the affable and by all accounts well-liked former general decided to run for Congress in 1881. He won the election and served in the House of Representatives until 1885.

In 1885, he was appointed Registrar of the U.S. Treasury, the person whose signature at that time appeared on U.S. currency along with that of the Secretary of the Treasury.

In 1887, he returned to his Southern California home and began developing his land as the town of Rosecrans, even building a railway from the town to nearby Redondo Beach to encourage development. He subdivided into 3,000 house-size lots, which he began selling for $50 each. Sales were profitable, and he used the money to continue his only sporadically successful ongoing mining ventures.

Rosecrans resigned as Registrar of the Treasury in June 1893. Around this time, Rosecrans, then in his mid-70s, moved into the luxurious Hotel Redondo and became a well-known figure in Redondo Beach.

When his health began to fail, he was moved back to his house in Rosecrans, where he died on the morning of March 11, 1898.

After thousands passed by his coffin lying in state in Los Angeles City Hall, he was buried in Los Angeles with much ceremony. In 1902, his body was moved to its final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery.

In addition to Rosecrans Avenue, the general has been commemmorated by the Ft. Rosecrans military post at Point Loma in San Diego, Rosecrans Hall at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, Gardena’s General William Starke Rosecrans Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3261, Rosecrans Park in Gardena and Rosecrans Elementary School in Compton.

 

Rosecrans Avenue in Manhattan Beach. Daily Breeze staff photo.

 

Rosecrans Avenue is one of the South Bay’s major thoroughfares, running from its western terminus in Manhattan Beach all the way to Euclid Street in Fullerton at its eastern end.

In 1940, a historical boulder marker commemorating Rosecrans was placed in Sunbury, Ohio. On August 23, 2010, General Rosecrans Elementary School was dedicated in Sunbury, and its citizens currently are engaged in a drive to commission a statue of the general to be erected in the town square.

One final note about Rosecrans’ funeral: his funeral Mass was celebrated by Bishop George Montgomery, the same Bishop Montogomery after whom the Torrance parochial high school is named. Sounds like another topic for another blog post.

 

Sources:

“Ask Us: Gen. Rosecrans,” By Stephanie Walton, The Daily Breeze, April 16, 2000, Page B2.

“General Rosecrans’ Department Of  The Ohio Headquarters Unit” website,  http://rosecransheadquarters.org/index.htm.

“L.A. Then and Now: A Noted General Who Might Have Been President,” By Cecilia Rasmussen, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 26, 2000, Page B-3.

“There Are Stories In Every City Map,” By Sam Stewart, The Daily Breeze, Aug. 24, 1967.

“William Starke Rosecrans,” Dictionary of American Biography.

 

The Broadway, one of the three anchor stores at the Hawthorne Plaza mall, is shown in a 1977 Daily Breeze file photo.

 

Though it didn’t open until February 1977, the genesis of the Hawthorne Plaza Mall can be traced back to the late 1960s.

The shopping center was a key part of the Hawthorne Plaza Redevelopment Project, a plan to revitalize a 35-acre area in the city’s core that was approved by the Hawthorne Urban Renewal Commission in April 1969.

The site is bounded by El Segundo Boulevard on the south, 120th Street on the north, and Hawthorne Boulevard and Birch Avenue on the west and east.

 

Other components of the plan including parking garages, office buildings and an area for hotels and motels, with the retail area itself originally envisioned as an outdoor shopping mall.

The city spent the next few years negotiating the acquisition of the parcels that made up the site, and clearing the land for construction. Finally, on Jan. 21, 1974, the Hawthorne Plaza site was dedicated. About 250 residents attended the groundbreaking.

Historic photographs and other materials were placed in a time capsule that was buried on the site. According to Daily Breeze stories at the time, the capsule is scheduled to be reopened during Hawthorne’s 100th anniversary celebration in 2022.

 

By late 1974, few landmarks remained on the site as crews began to clear and grade the land. The small, round park Broadway Circle would be leveled, and the Calvary Presbyterian Church would be lifted from its foundation and sold for $200 to another church out of the area. Its congregation ended up building a new church at 13560 Hawthorne Boulevard.

The city’s longtime movie theater, the Plaza, already had been torn down to make way for the project.

 

By Dec. 1975, the Hawthorne Plaza already had leased more than a third of its retail space, including the three anchor stores, The Broadway, J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward. Smaller shops that had signed up included Chess King, Contempo Casuals, Thom McAn, Gallenkamp, Kinney’s Shoes, Orange Julius, Swiss Colony and Morrow Nuts.

The mall was designed by the Los Angeles architectural firm of Charles Kober Associates. Its developers were Hawthorne-based Ernest W. Hahn, Inc., Carter Hawley Hale Properties Inc., and Urban Projects, Inc., who together formed an entity called H, B-H Associates for the project. (The Hahn firm also developed Fox Hills Mall in Culver City.)

Construction on the $50 million retail complex continued throughout 1975 and 1976. Security Pacific Bank, Citizens Savings and Loan and Miki’s Restaurant were the first of the mall’s eventual 134 businesses to open in Nov. 1976. The rest of the mall stores opened during February 1977.

 

The interior of Hawthorne Plaza is decorated for its first Christmas shopping season in this November 1977 Daily Breeze file photo.

 

At first, business was booming. But some ominous signs surfaced early, including two shootings in 1979 that gave the impression the mall was unsafe and crime-ridden.

It continued operation through the 1980s, contributing as much as $1 million in tax revenue for the city. By the 1990s, however, the mall began to deteriorate. Its customer base was hurt by economic factors such as the downsizing of the aerospace industry.

The Florida firm Arden Group Partnership bought the mall in 1991, but never followed through on its promises to renovate it. They sold it to a coalition led by activist Danny Bakewell in 1995, when its store vacancy rate neared 30 percent. J.C. Penney was the last anchor store to leave Hawthorne Plaza, closing in 1998. By 1999, the mall was shut down completely.

 

Hawthorne Plaza in Feb. 1999, after J.C. Penney had closed down. Daily Breeze file photo.

 

Bakewell’s group also was unable to turn around the property despite repeated efforts, and sold it to Arman Gabay of The Charles Co. for $7 million in 2001.

Gabay converted part of the site into offices used by Los Angeles County’s Welfare Fraud Division, but his plans to convert the rest of the facility into a mixed-use “lifestyle center” with condominiums, offices and shops has met with resistance from city leaders, who nixed the plan in 2008.

So the once-promising retail center of the city mostly has become an abandoned hulk, its deteriorating structures home only for rodents, vagrants and taggers.

As of Oct. 2010, the city and Gabay were still at odds over how best to develop the land. Gabay favors a mix of housing, retail and restaurants that the city feels is too dense for the area.

Councilman Alex Vargas held a meeting recently  to poll residents. His findings: “Residents do want to see a variety of uses at the Hawthorne mall site, and what stood out here is they want to see restaurants, retail stores and open space.”

While the discussion continues, Hawthorne Plaza remains an empty shadow of its former self, as it has for more than a decade now.

 

Hawthorne Plaza remains empty as its abandoned presence contributes to the blight of Hawthorne Boulevard. April 30, 2008. Daily Breeze file photo.

 

 

Source:

Daily Breeze files.

 

Special thanks to Daily Breeze Staff Writer Sandy Mazza for her assistance.

Aerial view shows the Tomlee Avenue home in Torrance that was destroyed by an explosion on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2002 while it was tented for fumigation. Daily Breeze file photo.

 

On Monday, Aug. 12, 2002, at 3 p.m., the Anaheim-based Network Fumigation and Exterminating Co. tented the house of Robert and Helen Mimura in the 20900 block on Tomlee Avenue in Torrance for purposes of fumigation.

The next morning, Tuesday, Aug 13 at approximately 5:45 a.m., the nearly 1,700-square-foot house exploded into an orange and yellow fireball. It was completely destroyed.

“It sounded like a meteor was hitting the earth,” said Tomlee resident Stephanie Hoffman at the time.

The massive explosion sent tons of debris skyward, and knocked out windows in houses on Tomlee and Prospect near the blast site. A 23-member crew from Torrance’s road, street-scape and sanitation departments would later spend hours removing 12 1/2 tons of debris from the site.

 

City of Torrance employees clean up debris from the home explosion on Tomlee Avenue in Torrance on Aug. 14, 2002, the day after the early morning blast left. Daily Breeze file photo.

 

 

Damage also was reported on South Lucia and South Juanita avenues, as well as on nearby Torrance Boulevard.

Ten people reported minor injuries following the blast, but, somewhat miraculously, no one was seriously injured.

About 150 homes were damaged. Building inspectors put cautionary yellow tags on 11 houses that were more seriously damaged, and one house was red-tagged (declared uninhabitable), the one next door to the one that was destroyed. That home, owned by Ralph Losorelli, was dislodged from its foundation by the force of the blast, though it eventually would be rebuilt.

The Mimuras also would completely rebuild their destroyed house. Except for brief statements from their son Garry, the Mimuras never commented publicly on the explosion.

After an investigation, the Torrance Fire Department determined that a rupture in the 40-year-old pipe near the gas meter had sent natural gas into the tented house at the rate of 25 pounds per square inch.

Fireman hoses down debris left from house explosion on Tom Lee Ave. in Torrance. What detonated the gas was unclear, but authorities speculated that it could have been a spark from an electrical device such as one of the fans left running to aid the fumigation. What caused the pipe to rupture in the first place also remains a mystery.

 

Fireman hoses down debris left from house explosion on Tomlee Ave. in Torrance on Aug. 13, 2002. Daily Breeze file photo. 

 

 

For weeks after the explosion, displaced area residents were forced to live in temporary quarters such as apartments and nearby extended-stay hotels while attempting to piece their houses and lives back together.

Terrified pets went missing for weeks. Children and adults were traumatized to the point of jumping at sudden loud noises.

Eventually, the neighborhood began to return to normal. Residents began to rebuild. As Tomlee homeowner Diane Evans told the Daily Breeze in May 2003, “Everybody says, ‘You got new furniture.’ Well, yeah, but I didn’t want it. Not like this.”

Two years after the blast in Aug. 2004, a barbeque party was held after the last of those affected by it had moved back into the neighborhood. They sat and shared memories of  of that day when their lives were turned upside-down, when the early-morning stillness was punctuated by a sudden, powerful explosion that hit with the force of an estimated 200-400 sticks of dynamite.