It was the end of July in 1943. On the radio, Bing Crosby is singing, Bob Hope is joking, and war news – against Hitler, against Japan – echoes and echoes across the dial.
But here in Southern California, there’s something else in the air: a dense, motionless tsunami of something dirty and unexplained. Adults are crying and wiping their eyes. Women’s throat hurts and their eyes are red.
For hours, sometimes days, people are unable to see more than a few feet ahead of them. Policemen controlling traffic cannot tell whether stoplights are red or green, and neither can drivers.
Remember that in 1943 we were at war. Exactly a year earlier, in February 1942, a Japanese submarine had shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, and the very next night, L.A. was ordered into blackout. Anxious Angelenos sat in the dark, disturbed by the sound of sirens and anti-aircraft fire. It turned out to be just a case of panic throughout the city.
This time too it was not Japanese. That suffocating siege in July was the worst but not the first attack by an enemy that Los Angeles was fighting long after World War II ended.
haze.
Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.’s historic battle with smog.
In ’43, L.A. didn’t really have a name. “Smog” is a turn-of-the-century word combining “smoke” and “fog” to describe the sooty, sulfurous air of the London of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.
But as we found out, our smog – photochemical smog – has made the air taste like poison and feel like you’re taking it out with the garbage. And its recipe was a brilliant combination of two things we love so much: cars, and sunlight.
For a long time we did not realize how much damage it was causing. Smog compromised the health of children, the sick and the elderly. It changed the nature of films. It chewed up rubber tires and engine pipes. It destroyed agricultural crops worth billions, destroying entire spinach fields in half a day. It played havoc with our glamorous aviation industry; Once, it reduced the odds at a beauty pageant because contestants flying from Southern California to Glendale Airport could not land in the fog.
Because of smog, even today, when you put gas in your tank, there is a rubber condom around the gas nozzle to prevent the gas fumes from turning into pollution… and that’s why you pay more for that gas.
“Smoglandia” – another mix of words – is big, bigger than any city or county boundaries here. And smog hasn’t gone away, not by a long shot, but – with regulation and technology and psychology – we’ve stopped it to some extent.
If you weren’t here 30 or 40 years ago, you might not remember a time when a grayish-brown curtain descended over the San Gabriel Mountains and you couldn’t see them for months – literally months – at a time.
And it would take years to resolve what the smog was and who caused it, but until then, the West’s famous Wonder City was left wondering what was happening to it.
“Cry Some More, My Lady” became the theme song of Los Angeles due to smog in February 1953.
(RL Oliver/Los Angeles Times)
L.A. The role of topography in smog
You’ve probably heard these words without thinking twice: Los Angeles Basin. Basin. Our beautiful encircling topography of mountains and hills is a bowl filled with smoke and haze created by ancient plate tectonics.
We started doing this about 13,500 years ago, when humans arrived in large numbers. There is evidence that these early Angelenos used fire as a tool – to protect themselves from giant Ice Age wolves and fanged cats, whose fossils fill the La Brea tar pits, and to burn and clear land for farming and running game.
Then hit the fast-forward button, to October 1542, when sailors aboard a Spanish ship captained by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sighted the sight off the coast of LA. The ship’s log summary noted “a large bay, which they named ‘The Bay of the Smokes’ because of the many smokes they saw there.”
The truth is that ever since we have built towns and cities, we have been creating smoke – whatever you want to call it.
The ancient Romans burned so much wood and other fuels – for cooking, for agriculture and industry, even for the eternal flame of the Vestal Virgins – that modern scientists conclude it would have reduced Europe’s climate by 0.5 degrees Celsius, or, as the Romans used to say, point-V degrees.
The smoke from L.A. changed everything around us – even the crystalline lights that the Chamber of Commerce bragged about drove people to come here.
In 1931, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein was spending his first winter at Caltech, and wrote to a friend, “Here in Pasadena, it’s like heaven. Always sunny and clean air…”
The day the lights changed forever in LA
Ten years later, the air around Pasadena was telling a different story. Helen Pashgian is a renowned artist who has been a leader in California’s light and space art movement since the 1960s, and her installations challenge the way we interact with light.
She grew up in Altadena, in the air before the smog, and she is one of the few Angelenos who can remember the era before the smog, when the air was humid, and even from a distance of 20 miles or more, you could actually see Catalina, and the mountains looked as clear as if they were just at the end of your street.
And in its artist’s eyes, that magical light was pure and brilliant… “a special kind of cold light.” She was in elementary school when the war started, and Los Angeles developed factories for the war effort and, as we would soon learn, a manufacturer of ugly air.
“We would see a line of this yellow, pink mist,” Pashgian remembered. “We had never seen anything like this before. And everyone took notice.”
Altadena schoolgirl watching the Big Bang of LA smog.
And this new air, “I think it had a smell…it just smelled dead.”
For decades, people who move to LA have come for its beauty. Now they were coming to defense plants and factories for war work.
And then, this eerie, mysterious mist appears. The country was at war with enemies it could see – soldiers, tanks, bombers – but where could L.A. fight against an enemy it could not identify?
Identifying the source of smog
It first looked to an old enemy, the oil business.
To understand what happened, you have to recognize the relationship of convenience between LA and the oil business. You probably already know this – you’ve seen oil pumpjacks working in tough spots, like on the La Cienega Boulevard shortcut from Baldwin Hills to the airport.
It all started on November 4, 1892, when a hopeful Angeleno named Edward Doheny took a eucalyptus log, sharpened it like a No. 2 pencil, and went chomping on a patch of dirt in Echo Park — and struck oil.
Well, you can’t stop drilling after that. Between downtown and Venice Beach, thousands of homeowners uprooted their orange trees and placed oil derricks in their backyards. Signal Hill near Long Beach was studded with pin-cushions from so many oil rigs that one writer said it looked like “an agitated porcupine.”
But the oil business, with its lakes and spilled oil spills, also made some Angelenos sick. And now, to fuel the war effort, the big smokestacks at those big oil refineries were sending up big black plumes of dirt – and that was supposed to create smog, right?
Chip Jacobs knows the story well. A few years ago, he co-authored the book “Smogtown, The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.”
He said, “There was a lot of negativity against oil companies and refiners … and before we did any chemical analysis, they felt like scapegoats for air pollution because the natural public inclination was, OK, this must be black smoke we’re seeing coming out of a refiner, or it must have come from a factory.”
Official L.A., eager to placate angry and frightened Angelenos, dropped the hammer on a plant near Downtown L.A. It manufactured butadiene, the chemical needed to make synthetic rubber, as the world’s supply of natural rubber was mostly in enemy hands.
The plant was shut down for a while, but like a murder mystery where the killings continue even after the suspect is behind bars, the haze kept coming. And LA still had a mess on its hands.
Everyone in L.A. believed, and official L.A. fervently hoped, that once the war was over and all those smokestacks were closed, the smoke would disappear too. But the war ended, and the smog didn’t, and LA wiped its crying red eyes and demanded some solutions, damn it. The brown, greasy, bleach-flavored clouds were carrying something with them, some feeling of heaven. The economy, the external environment, our culture, and our pride in this place – the smog epidemic not only changed our character, it became a character of our lives, and a miserable one too.
And then someone came in with some answers – not a man in a white hat, like some movie hero, but a man in a white lab coat.
