Smoglandia: Quandary — The smog we hate so much versus the cars we love so much

Eighty years ago, the enchantment ended. Los Angeles, that magical realm of shimmering natural beauty, was befouled by smog — maybe forever.

The mayor, Fletcher Bowron, told Angelenos in 1944 to lower their expectations. “We can never go back to the old days where the air was clean and pure and sweet and scented with orange blossoms.”

That was during World War II, when L.A. defense factories were chuffing fumes and smoke in the cause of victory. The U.S. 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.

It took a lot to bestir Angelenos from their bungalows and Buicks, but their throats felt like sandpaper, and their chests hurt like the blazes. L.A.’s sense of outrage was aroused. In the especially nasty autumn of 1954, women in June Cleaver dresses and gas masks protested outside the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Three-year-old Agatha Acker, in a cute gingham outfit and gas mask, brought along her doll, Betty Lou, also tricked out in a pretty dress, and a gas mask.

In Highland Park, the Optimist Club was decidedly pessimistic. They showed up for their October 1954 luncheon in gas masks, and on the wall behind them hung a banner reading “Why wait till 1955? We might not even be alive.”

Angelenos were moving away, and tourists were staying away. A hundred years of perky boosterism were being obliterated by smog.

Oh, L.A. had glimmers of whimsy to keep up our spirits. Locals loved the story about the one-eyed New York man who had a special bloodshot glass eyeball made, so that when he came to L.A. on business, his fake eye matched his real one. A husband-and-wife pair of actors marketed “authentic” canned smog. As the Technicolor label bragged, “This is the smog used by famous Hollywood stars!”

Smog warriors did battle for L.A. On Valentine’s Day 1953, a young L.A. County supervisor named Kenneth Hahn wrote the first of almost 15 years’ worth of letters to the big carmakers. What were they doing to develop “anti-smog muffler devices”? A month later, Hahn got back the first of many testy, patronizing responses. “It is the opinion of the Ford Motor Company that automobile exhaust gases are dissipated in the atmosphere quickly and do not present an air pollution problem.”

L.A. begins its battle with Detroit

In 1955, S. Smith Griswold, an actor-handsome Stanford man, took over the local air quality agency and worked for 10 years to put more muscle and teeth into it. It was his gutsy idea to shut himself in a hot “smog chamber,” breathing concentrated pollution for two hours, to demonstrate that smog was personal. He came out woozy and lightheaded, temporarily losing 22% of his lung power, and coughed for a month.

Griswold also painted a bull’s-eye on Detroit’s carmakers. “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 — has consisted of less than one year’s salary of 22 of their executives,” he said.

L.A. was also not above trolling Detroit. In 1958, as automakers were giving us gas-swigging engines, chrome, and big fins, L.A’.s mayor, Norris Poulson, canceled the order for a Cadillac as his official car, and bought a Rambler instead.

He reasoned that smaller cars using a third as much gas made only a third as much smog, and he suggested that Angelenos follow his example. Detroit’s mayor clapped back that Detroit might just boycott big California things, like certain “physical phenomena shared by many of your top female movie stars.”

None of this mopped up the air. Frustration slipped into resignation. In that miserable month of October 1954, the county pollution boss said earnestly that he believed smog could be cut by 80% within two years. But then, he predicted that industries would start using uranium and radium, and pretty soon we’d have … radioactive smog.

An L.A. city councilman, at his wit’s end, joked that the city could end the smog problem by adopting a resolution “creating an eight-mile-an-hour wind” to blow it all away.

It took a wind of a different kind to blow away one smog control obstacle: political boundaries.

You couldn’t build a wall high enough to keep, say, El Segundo smog out of Inglewood. And L.A. County was and remains a Frankenstein’s monster, dozens of cities stitched awkwardly together. But smog anywhere was 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 smog’s 21st anniversary.

(Los Angeles Times)

Communities join forces to fight smog

Following the spillover of smog, the region’s pollution control domain necessarily grew bigger. L.A. city’s pre-war smog boss was succeeded, in 1947, by the nation’s first pollution control district for the entire Los Angeles County. Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties soon began their own, and in 1977, all four counties joined forces as the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD). It regulated fixed smog sources, mostly businesses, across nearly 11,000 square miles, sometimes against muscular industry resistance, and sometimes losing.

The first official smog alert was on Aug. 1, 1955. In time, alerts were refined into three stages. Stage 1, unhealthy. Stage 2, very unhealthy — keep the kids inside. Stage 3, hazardous. That’s when authorities had the power to close down businesses, schools, and most traffic — but pretty much didn’t. Eventually there were thousands of alerts, sometimes a hundred or more in one year: mostly first-stage alerts, sometimes second, and almost never — and not since 1974 — a Stage 3 alert.

Smog authorities put a stop to some of our dunderheaded pollution-generating self-owns. Houses in L.A. and parts of Orange County had backyard incinerators. Take your household trash out back, set it on fire, and whoosh, all that junk was smoke, and no longer your problem. But it was, everyone’s. People loved their incinerators — burning stuff was free — but in the late 1950s, incinerators were finally banned.

But the cars remained beyond the reach of the AQMD. Smog from 2 million tailpipes filled L.A.’s streets and burned the lungs of its denizens, but it was really created more than 2,000 miles away, in Detroit. It would be several decades before smog regulations changed the way Detroit made its cars.

The Queen of Green and the artist in the gas mask

In the year 1979, smog marked the lives of two Southern California women — one fleetingly, one for her entire career.

A young lawyer named Mary Nichols became Gov. Jerry Brown’s choice to head up 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 before she acquired a nickname, and the authority to go along with it: the Queen of Green. She became the woman who, more than perhaps any one other person, made California’s air tolerable, if not technically healthy, and revved up the state’s climate and greenhouse gas policies.

Nichols came to California at a tipping point. 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 gave even individuals the right to sue polluters.

At the same time, Californians themselves were feeling an environmental epiphany. California the magnificent, California the glorious, was slipping away, disappearing into smog, covered over by concrete. The catastrophic 1969 offshore oil spill in Santa Barbara 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 finite coastal lands.

So California was about 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 was using, that the legal authority was there to do some more things than had previously been tried.”

Smog was now a statewide affliction, and most Californians, she felt, were more than ready to try to put an end to it, and more inclined to vote for clean air regulations, “even when they were told that it was going to raise prices.”

And she believes that businesses like oil companies and carmakers cried “wolf” too often, and lost public credibility. “Every time there was an effort to impose a new requirement … they would always claim [prohibitive] costs, which were always much less when it actually came into effect,” and often found cheaper ways to follow the new rules.

CARB was also able to phase out leaded gasoline in 1992, a few years before the feds did. Now, just like daylight saving time, California switches back and forth from winter-formula gasoline to summer-formula gasoline.

Summer gasoline is sold from about April Fools’ Day to Halloween, and winter fuel the rest of the year. Summer blend gas is more expensive, brewed to keep down higher summertime pollution. And California gas is more expensive year-round — a favorite “look at that!” point for politicians who like to beat up on California — because more than 50 cents per gallon goes to tackle environmental costs, like pollution.

Nichols’ work cooperated with some presidents and conflicted with others; the next column will take up the new dangers to California’s air quality, coming from D.C.

Seraphine Segal wears a mask designed to filter out airborne particles during a Los Angeles smog alert on June 29, 1979.

(Boris Yaro / Los Angeles Times)

Oh, that other woman touched by smog in 1979? Seraphine Segal still lives where she has for decades, in a Studio City house with her artist’s studio set in her enchanting garden. Her artist’s eyes, and nose, had taken the measure of smog right away, after she moved here. “The thing about smog is that it smelled like a color to me because I live in color, and the way I described it was yellowish, greenish — murky.”

Like other Angelenos, she lived her L.A. life on wheels, and in 1979, she was driving around town in her snazzy little convertible, a Triumph TR 4, wearing a very personal after-market accessory: a gas mask.

A car pulled up alongside her, and the driver waved a sign that said “LA Times.” The photographer motioned her over, and took her picture. Her pixie haircut, her irresistibly 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 an interview for the “Smoglandia” podcast, she obligingly went looking through her things and, sure enough, found her gas mask. As you’ll read in the fourth installment, she might need it again. The rest of us too.