The magic ended eighty years ago. Los Angeles, that magical region of shimmering natural beauty, was shrouded in smog – perhaps forever.
The mayor, Fletcher Bowron, told Angelenos to lower their expectations in 1944. “We can never go back to the old days when the air was clean, pure, sweet and fragrant with orange blossoms.”
That was during World War II, when L.A. defense factories were blowing smoke and smoke to victory. America won the war against fascism; Smog was winning the war against Los Angeles.
Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.’s historic battle with smog.
Angelenos had to work hard to make the best of their bungalows and Buicks, but their throats felt like sandpaper, and their chests hurt like flames. A feeling of outrage arose in LA. In a particularly bad autumn of 1954, women wearing June Cleaver dresses and gas masks protested outside the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Agatha Acker, three years old, in a beautiful gingham dress and gas mask, brought her doll, Betty Lou, also in a beautiful dress and gas mask.
In Highland Park, the optimistic club was decidedly pessimistic. He came to his October 1954 lunch wearing a gas mask and had a banner hanging on the wall behind him that read, “Why wait until 1955? We probably won’t even be alive.”
Angelenos were moving away, and tourists were staying away. Hundred years of dangerous boosterism were coming to an end due to smog.
Oh, L.A. had just a touch of whimsy to keep us in our spirits. Locals loved the story of a one-eyed New York man who had a special blood-glass eyeball made so that when he came to LA on business, his artificial eye would match his real eye. A husband-wife duo of actors marketed “authentic” canned Smug. As the Technicolor label bragged, “This is the smog used by famous Hollywood stars!”
Smog Warriors Battle for L.A. On Valentine’s Day 1953, a young L.A. County Supervisor named Kenneth Hahn wrote his first letter to the big car manufacturers in nearly 15 years. What were they doing to develop an “anti-smog muffler device”? A month later, Hahn received the first of several testy, patronizing responses. “The Ford Motor Company is of the opinion that automobile exhaust gases dissipate rapidly in the atmosphere and do not create air pollution problems.”
LA begins its battle with Detroit
In 1955, S. Smith Griswold, an actor-turned-handsome Stanford guy, took over the local air quality agency and worked for 10 years to add more muscle and strength to it. It was his bold idea to lock himself in a heated “smog chamber”, breathing concentrated pollution for two hours to demonstrate that smog was personal. He came out irritable and light-headed, which temporarily reduced his lung power by 22% and left him coughing for a month.
Griswold also took aim at Detroit’s car manufacturers. He said, “The auto industry’s total investment in controlling the nation’s number one air pollution problem – a blight that is costing the rest of us $11 billion a year – covers less than a year’s salary for 22 of their executives.”
LA also wasn’t above trolling Detroit. In 1958, when automakers were giving us gas-swigging engines, chrome, and big wings, L.A.’s mayor, Norris Paulson, canceled the order for a Cadillac as his official car, and bought a rambler instead.
He argued that small cars that use one-third more gas produce only one-third more smoke, and he suggested that Angelenos follow his example. Detroit’s mayor clapped back, saying Detroit could boycott big things in California, like some “physical events shared by many of your top female movie stars.”
None of these cleared the air. Frustration turned to resignation. In that tragic month of October 1954, the county pollution boss seriously stated that he believed the smog could be reduced by 80% within two years. But then, he predicted that industries would start using uranium and radium, and very soon we would have… radioactive smoke.
An L.A. city councilman joked that the city could end the smog problem by adopting a resolution to “create an eight-mile-per-hour wind” to dispel the smog.
Clearing the smog control hurdle required a different kind of wind: political boundaries.
You can’t build a wall high enough to keep the El Segundo smog out of Inglewood. And L.A. County was and remains a Frankenstein’s monster, dozens of cities strangely linked together. But smog anywhere, smog everywhere.
Mrs. Afton Slade, President of SOS (Stamp Out Smog) at a press conference at the Ambassador Hotel. In the foreground is a cake celebrating the 21st anniversary of Smaug.
(Los Angeles Times)
Communities come together to fight smog
After the smog spread, the pollution control zone of the area definitely became larger. In 1947, the nation’s first pollution control district was created for all of Los Angeles County, after the city of L.A.’s pre-war smog boss. Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties soon followed, and in 1977, all four counties joined as the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD). It regulated fixed smog sources, mostly businesses, spanning about 11,000 square miles, sometimes against muscular industry resistance, and sometimes facing defeat.
The first official smog alert was on August 1, 1955. Over time, the alerts were refined in three phases. Stage 1, unhealthy. Stage 2, Very Unwell – Keep children inside. Stage 3, dangerous. That’s when officials had the power to close businesses, schools and most traffic — but didn’t. Ultimately thousands of alerts came, sometimes a hundred or more a year: mostly Stage 1 alerts, sometimes Second, and almost never – and not since 1974 – Stage 3 alerts.
Smog authorities have cracked down on some of our foolish pollution-causing self-owners. There were houses in parts of LA and Orange County backyard incinerator. Take the trash out of your house, set it on fire, and hey, all that trash was smoke, and it’s no longer your problem. But it was, everyone’s. People loved their incinerators – it was free to burn stuff – but in the late 1950s, incinerators were finally banned.
But the cars remained beyond AQMD’s reach. Smoke billowing from 2 million tailpipes filled the streets of L.A. and burned the lungs of its residents, but it was actually born in Detroit, more than 2,000 miles away. It would take decades before smog regulations changed the way Detroit built cars.
The green queen and the artist in the gas mask
In the year 1979, smog affected the lives of two Southern California women – one for a fleeting moment, one for their entire career.
A young lawyer named Mary Nichols became Governor Jerry Brown’s choice to head the California Air Resources Board, a state agency charged with protecting the public from the harmful effects of air pollution. Except for a stint with the federal EPA, Nichols would serve on that board under four governors, Republican and Democratic.
And it didn’t take long for her to earn a nickname and the right one to go with it: the Queen of the Green. She became the woman who, perhaps more than any other person, made California’s air tolerable, if not technically healthy, and improved the state’s climate and greenhouse gas policies.
Nichols came to California at a critical juncture. The new 1970 federal Clean Air Act acknowledged that air pollution was a national threat, allowed states (hello, California) to set strict air quality standards, and even gave individuals the right to sue polluters.
At the same time, Californians themselves were experiencing an environmental sensation. Glorious California, glorious California, was slipping away, disappearing in smoke, covered in concrete. A catastrophic offshore oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969 killed thousands of sea birds and marine mammals. And in 1972, Californians voted to create the State Coastal Commission to protect the state’s fragile and limited coastal lands.
So California was as ready for Nichols as she was for California.
At CARB, Nichols recalled, “I was able to help reinforce the view that the state had more power than it used, legal authority to do some more things than it had before.”
Smog has now become a statewide problem and he believes most Californians are willing to try to eliminate it, and are more willing to vote for clean air regulations, “even when they were told it was going to raise prices.”
And he believes that businesses such as oil companies and car manufacturers often cry “wolf”, and lose public credibility. “Every time there was an attempt to impose a new requirement… they would always claim (prohibitive) costs, which were always much lower than what was actually implemented,” and often found cheaper ways to comply with the new rules.
CARB was also able to phase out leaded gasoline in 1992, a few years before the Fed did so. Now, like Daylight Savings Time, California switches from winter-formula gasoline to summer-formula gasoline.
Summer gasoline is sold from approximately April Fools’ Day to Halloween, and winter fuel is sold the rest of the year. Summer mix gas is more expensive, it is made to keep the pollution high in summer low. And California gas is more expensive year-round – a favorite “take a look at that!” This one’s for the politicians who love to attack California – because more than 50 cents per gallon goes toward dealing with environmental costs like pollution.
Nichols’s work was cooperative with some presidents and confrontational with others; Next column will raise new threats to California’s air quality coming from D.C.
Serafin Segal wears a mask designed to filter airborne particles during a Los Angeles smog alert on June 29, 1979.
(Boris Yarrow/Los Angeles Times)
Oh, that other woman touched by Smaug in 1979? Seraphine Segal still lives where she has for decades, in a studio city house with her artist’s studio set in her charming garden. Once he arrived, his artist’s eyes and nose quickly took the measure of the smog. “The thing about haze is that it smells like a color to me because I live in color, and the way I described it was yellow, green—hazy.”
Like other Angelenos, she spent her L.A. life on wheels, and in 1979, she was driving around town in her charming little convertible, the Triumph TR4, wearing a very personal after-market accessory: a gas mask.
A car stopped next to him, and the driver waved a sign that read “LA Times.” The photographer gestured to him and took his picture. Her pixie haircut, her extremely cheeky attitude behind the gas mask – the photo made its way everywhere, even to her home in Louisiana, to her grandfather’s general store in Gonzalez – the jambalaya capital of the world.
While preparing for the interview for “Smoglandia” PodcastShe obliged and went through her things and sure enough, she found her gas mask. As you’ll read in the fourth installment, he may need it again. The rest of us too.
