South Bay History

According to Harry Brolaski, his life changed forever at the age of 18.

The son of a riverboat owner and captain based in St. Louis, Missouri, Brolaski was born in January 1871. Years later, the self-described “green” teenager was on board his father’s docked ship, the Annie P. Silver, one evening when two men approached him and talked him into participating in a crooked gambling scheme at the racetrack.

Brolaski recounts the incident in his 1911 book, Easy Money: Being the Experiences of a Reformed Gambler (Searchlight Press, reprinted as Easy Money: Fishing for Suckers in 2022). The betting scheme he participated in worked improbably in his favor and that first success hooked him on gambling until he finally declared in 1910 that he had quit for good.

Brolaski’s entertaining book details all manner of gambling tricks and schemes used not only in horse racing but also poker playing, pool sharking, casino gaming and just about any other such activity available at the time. By exposing the crookedness in gambling, Brolaski cast himself as something of a reformer.

A year after the book was published, Brolaski moved into a house on Avenue B in the Clifton-By-The-Sea area south of Redondo Beach. Clifton would be annexed by Redondo in 1913.

In April 1912, the Redondo Chamber of Commerce sent him to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on behalf of a bill authorizing $5 million to build a breakwater in Redondo.

The city had lost out on becoming the Port of Los Angeles to San Pedro 15 years earlier in 1897, but still wanted to have its own first-class port. By all appearances, Brolaski worked doggedly for this goal, which did not become a reality in his lifetime.

At the same time, the repentant gambler began speaking out to churches and community groups against the proliferation of saloons and pool rooms in Redondo, where illegal gambling was rife.

Brolaski seemed wholly committed to Redondo, becoming even more active in local politics. In June 1912, he announced that he was starting a real estate firm in the city, and, a month later, he was appointed to the city’s breakwater committee for his efforts.

Also in July, he was asked to run for the 62nd District California State Assembly seat, but declined. A few days later, Miss Susie Miller, the candidate for the seat, withdrew her name and endorsed Brolaski for the office.

He accepted her gesture, but lost the election. Still, his boosterism continued unabated. In fact, he originated a Redondo Beach boosters’ group and was named its president.

In 1914, he ran for a seat on Redondo’s city board of trustees, essentially its city council, and was elected with just seven votes less than the top vote-getter in the April 14th citywide election.

All during these years, brief items in the Daily Breeze and Redondo Reflex referred to Brolaski’s frequent business trips to San Francisco and New York.

In July 1914, the ever-ambitious Brolaski threw his hat in the ring for the California State Senate, 34th District, but he lost in the Aug. 25th primary election.

Despite his frenetic community boosterism, Brolaski made his share of enemies who believed he was ineffective and too often absent from the city. He managed to survive a fairly nasty June 1915 recall election, however.

A lighthearted 1917 New Year’s resolution from Brolaski would prove prophetic. After a recent two-month absence, he vowed never to leave the city because, as the Daily Breeze reported, “affairs are in a fearful state at the city council due to his absence.”

At a contentious trustees meeting on March 22, 2018, Brolaski was named president of the board, making him mayor of Redondo, after the former mayor and three trustees abruptly resigned.

Mayor Brolaski won re-election on April 8, despite having been indicted on stock fraud charges in New York City a week earlier. He would later dodge those charges, but his San Francisco activities would prove to be his undoing.

On Oct. 9, 1918, Brolaski was ousted from office as mayor and as a city trustee by the Redondo board of trustees due to his frequent and lengthy absences, which the trustees felt was hampering progress in the city. At the time, he’d attended just one trustees meeting in the preceding 90 days.

Brolaski moved to San Francisco and became a broker, but, as it turned out, he was brokering hooch. He was arrested on Oct 9, 1920, for his role in a conspiracy to violate the Prohibition law that had gone into effect that January. He was convicted of the bootlegging charges that December. After exhausting his appeals, he began serving his two-year sentence in April 1922.

While in prison, he came down with cancer, and, before finishing his sentence, he was granted  a pardon in March 1923. His condition worsening, he moved to the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles, where he died on Jan. 8, 1924. He was 53.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Easy Money: Being the Experiences of a Reformed Gambler, by Harry Brolaski, Searchlight Press, 1911.

Find A Grave website.

Los Angeles Times archives.

Redondo Reflex archives.

Among the many legacies left by the Spanish land grant families who once owned most of Southern California are a plethora of colorful place names, many of which we still use today.

Redondo Beach, for instance, was once part of the Rancho Sausal Redondo land grant. “Redondo” means round in Spanish, and probably refers to the general shape of the parcel. The rancho’s name literally means “round willow grove ranch.”

The many places bearing the Sepulveda and Dominguez names also come from major land grant families in the area.

As for the Walteria area in southwest Torrance, it sure sounds Spanish. But the name actually comes from A. Richard Walters, who built a hotel in the then-desolate area in the late 1800s. Developers later decided that “Walteria” sounded more appealing than “Walters.”

The practice of coining faux-Spanish names became an art form during the development of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the 1920s, though developers also used many actual Spanish names. Lunada Bay, for instance, comes from “lunada,” the Spanish word for the crescent-shaped moon, an apt description of the stunning semicircular bay.

Malaga Cove is thought to derive from a distant unidentified Spanish sea captain who hailed from the Spanish coastal city of the same name. The eastern portion of the Peninsula known as Miraleste comes from the phrase, “Mira al este,” which translates “look to the east.”

But name creators also weren’t shy about making up Spanish-sounding place names. The Valmonte area of Palos Verdes Estates combines “val” and “monte” to create a new word meant to signify “where the valley meets the hill.” “Montemalaga” also coins a new word by combining the word for hill with Malaga to denote the hilly area of Malaga Cove.

Up the coast in northern Manhattan Beach lies El Porto, first named in 1911. The 30-acre tract was annexed by Manhattan Beach in 1980. But its name doesn’t mean “the port” in Spanish. In that case, the name would have been  “El Puerto.” Porto is the Portuguese word for “port,” but that language doesn’t use “el” as an article. The  derivation is unclear, but developers probably simply thought “porto” meant port in Spanish.

The unincorporated El Nido area on the border of Torrance and Redondo Beach is Spanish for “the nest,” while the similarly unincorporated Del Aire area between Hawthorne and El Segundo means “of the air.”

Before writing about the Marble Estates development in Torrance for this blog in 2020, I assumed the name must have referred to marble, the rock; perhaps there’d been a quarry on the site once upon a time.

I learned that Marble Estates took its name from the Marble family, who owned the 200 acres  southwest of the corner of Crenshaw and Sepulveda boulevards known as the Marble Fee property before selling it to Standard Oil during the 1920s oil boom. The company’s derricks eventually were cleared out to make way for the Marble Estates houses built in the mid-1960s.

The city of Gardena was created in 1930 with the unification of the communities of Strawberry Park and Moneta. Strawberry Park derived from the acres of berry farms that blanketed the area, mostly farmed by Japanese American workers.

The neighboring Moneta area was named much earlier, in the late 1880s. Its origin is unclear, but it is believed that it was another case of developers merely liking the Spanish sound of the word and not honoring the Roman goddess Juno Moneta.

Shipping magnate Phineas Banning gave the town of Wilmington its name, after the Delaware city where he was born. Nearby Terminal Island got its name when it became the southern terminus of the Los Angeles Terminal Railway line that briefly connected the Harbor Area to Pasadena in the 1880s.

San Pedro’s Point Fermin was given its name by British explorer George Vancouver in 1793. He had just met California missions head Father Fermin Francisco de Lasuen in Carmel in 1792, and decided to name the point after him as he sailed down into San Pedro Bay a year later. (San Pedro’s Fermin Lasuen High School, open 1959-1971, also was named for the padre.)

A bit further west of Point Fermin, Portuguese Bend derived its name from the community of Portuguese whalemen from the Azores led by Jose Machado who fished the area from the 1850s through the 1880s.

What about Terranea, the luxury housing/resort development built on the former Marineland site in Rancho Palos Verdes that opened in 2009? It sounds like a real word, but it was crafted from and is meant to evoke “Mediterranean.”

Oh well, at least Palos Verdes itself really does mean “green hills,” doesn’t it? No, it actually  means “green timber” or “green willows.” Maybe it was just hopeful thinking; the hills appear to be mostly barren in photos from the early 1920s. 

Place naming is an inexact science.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

L.A. Street Names website.

Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.

The Palos Verdes Story, by Deelane Morgan, Palos Verdes Review, 1982.

Wikipedia.

The last major accident to date at the Torrance oil refinery occurred a decade ago in 2015, when it was still being operated by ExxonMobil. Four workers were injured when a massive explosion destroyed the plant’s catalytic cracking unit and covered nearby cars and neighborhoods with ash and dust.

A year later, PBF Energy bought the troubled plant from ExxonMobil and renamed it the Torrance Refining Company. Since then, things have been relatively quiet at 3700 W. 190th St., in contrast to the refinery’s past litany of dangerous incidents.

Perhaps the darkest day in the refinery’s long history came on Monday, Dec. 3, 1979, 50 years after it first opened.

Just before 6 p.m. that evening, 19-year-old Cynthia Elizabeth Moore of Redondo Beach was driving her 1973 Camaro along Van Ness Ave., which borders the eastern edge of the 750-acre refinery property.

Moore, who worked at Gentry Travel Service’s Torrance office, had no way of knowing that  an abnormally large cloud of highly flammable vapor had drifted out across Van Ness from  overheated gas being moved into a fuel storage tank at the refinery.

The heavier-than-air vapors rolled along the ground, causing her car to stall. When she attempted to restart it, the ignition triggered the dense vapors to explode, engulfing her car in flames.

She ran from the burning car and collapsed a short distance from it. An ambulance crew spotted her on the ground and rushed her to Torrance Memorial Hospital Medical Center. Burned on 90 percent of her body, she died there the next day.  

The burning car ignited the vapor cloud, sending a fireball racing back toward the storage tank. 

The tank immediately exploded into flames, killing 57-year-old refinery worker Robert Mackinga of Hawthorne instantly. Mackinga was a World War II veteran who had worked at the refinery for 35 years.

Torrance resident Dick Love, 50, also was taken to Torrance Memorial, where he died the next day from burns received in the blast. 

Mackinga, Love and 22-year-old Charles Stone had gone to the tank to investigate a strong odor emanating from it. Stone, who survived, told the Daily Breeze, “There was a mist on the roof like a fog. That’s when I knew something was wrong.”

Moments later, they heard what Stone called “a pop” and looked over to see Moore’s car on Van Ness engulfed in flames.

The explosion that followed literally blew the lid off the 50-foot-high tank estimated to be two-thirds full at the time, and the fire quickly spread to nearby tanks, sending flames and thick clouds of black smoke skyward. 

The younger Stone was able to outrun the flames. He was treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation and released.

More than 200 nearby residents were evacuated, and the column of smoke could be seen from as far away as Hollywood.

More than a hundred firefighters from throughout the South Bay battled the stubborn refinery blaze, which finally burned itself out at about 2:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 5th. Evacuated residents were allowed to return, though streets in the area remained closed for several days after the blast and fire.

The death of Moore, the stepdaughter of Torrance police lieutenant Larry Robinson, resulted in a 1980 lawsuit against Mobil Oil Corp. The suit was filed by Robinson’s wife, Irma, and her ex-husband and Cynthia’s father, James Moore.

The trial began on Monday, Nov. 28, 1984. Mobil attorney Chris Gilman succeeded in thwarting the plaintiff’s attempts to make the company pay punitive damages, though considerable evidence was heard alleging the company’s negligence leading up to the accident.

Gilman argued that the explosion and blaze was just that, an accident. Judge John Shidler ruled in his favor, and no punitive damages were allowed

On Dec. 6, 1984, the jury voted to award Moore’s parents the sum of $503,400. Both sides expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome. 

After the verdict was read, the trial ended and the courtroom emptied, Irma Moore told Daily Breeze reporter David Hall, “You know, the entire time, no one from Mobil ever said they were sorry.”

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Torrance Refining Company website.