Smoglandia: Smog was killing L.A., and a Caltech chemist found the murder weapon — in our garages

Just like a Hollywood crime movie — everyone, everything was a suspect.

The crime: smog. The victims: any Angeleno with a set of lungs.

That master of detective stories, Raymond Chandler, described the crime scene in 1953, in “The Long Goodbye”:

“The weather was hot and sticky, and the acid sting of the smog had crept as far west as Beverly Hills. From the top of Mulholland Drive, you could see it leveled out all over the city like a ground mist. When you were in it you could taste it and smell it and it made your eyes smart. Everybody was griping about it. … Everything was the fault of the smog. If the canary wouldn’t sing, if the milkman was late, if the Pekingese had fleas, if an old coot in a starched collar had a heart attack on the way to church, that was the smog. …”

Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.’s historic battle with smog.

Smog went on throttling Southern California — through the 1940s, into the 1950s, getting worse, not better. A magazine called National Defense, published in Arcadia, warned in 1948, “If you value your life, your health and comfort, stay away from California, or at least stay away from … Los Angeles County.”

Local air pollution authorities, possessing little power and even less solid science, singled out oil industries, factories, manufacturers and chemical companies, and they weren’t wrong — just looking through the opposite end of the telescope. Some gave up and said the only solution to smog was a good strong wind.

War industries put in the spotlight

Nothing was too minor to blame. One of L.A.’s pollution chiefs warned that “anyone who smokes a pipe, even, contributes to the smog menace.” At one point housewives were admonished not to shake their dust mops outdoors lest that contribute to smog.

But a Caltech biochemist was about to deliver some good news … and some bad news.

Arie Haagen-Smit was from the Netherlands, and at Caltech he researched plant biochemistry. Like many Angelenos, he found life here a bit expensive. Years later, his wife, nicknamed Zus, told a Caltech interviewer that they were able to buy their family house because Haagy — that was his nickname — had a side hustle, testing the urine of racehorses for illegal doping.

Looking down from Arroyo Seco Parkway at Los Angeles City Hall and Civic Center buildings surrounded by smog, 1948.

(UCLA Library Digital Collection)

Two things persuaded Haagy to shelve his own plant research and zero in on the mystery of sky-darkening smog. One was that, from Pasadena flower beds to Compton’s crop acreage, plants across L.A. were dying. The other was being recruited by Arnold Beckman, a Caltech alum, a renowned inventor of scientific instruments, and scientific advisor to L.A.’s rudimentary air pollution control operation.

By 1952, Haagy had figured out the smog recipe: Start with the dirty leftovers of burning fossil fuel from factories, oil refineries, and the unburned gas exhaust from cars and trucks. Add “volatile organic compounds,” which come from cars, paints, industrial processing, perfumes, cleaning supplies — just open your cabinets and you’ll find some. Then add sunlight and you get ozone. Not the good, high-altitude ozone that shields us from dangerous UV light, but bad ozone, hovering right above ground level — stinking, brownish, grayish photochemical smog.

Haagy explained it in a 1959 black-and-white educational film that hadn’t been viewed in decades. It was rescued and saved by Rick Flagan, a professor of chemical engineering and environmental science, who found it in a tin film canister in a Caltech closet. The Times converted it to a viewable format.

Here’s Haagy’s introduction to his work: “Most people don’t give much thought to air. After all, it’s invisible and it doesn’t seem to have much weight. And so we only hear about air when it is too hot or too cold, or perhaps too smoggy.”

And so it was. The evidence was all around us. So was smog’s price tag: decimated crops.

In our age of subdivisions and suburban spread, try to wrap your head around this: For the first half of the 20th century, L.A. was the richest agricultural county in the nation.

From pigs to pig iron

There wasn’t much we didn’t grow. Walnuts, avocados, peaches, lettuce, beans, grapes, tomatoes, olives, berries, onions, and, from La Mirada to Malibu, fields of commercial flowers. Smog, however, could kill off a spinach crop in half a day. By 1947 commercial beekeepers were moving their hives miles away; smog was killing the bees, or making them crazy so they couldn’t find their way back home.

No one saw this faster or closer up than the San Bernardino County town of Fontana. Until 1942, Fontana was where plain folks worked hard land, with pig farms, grapes, vegetable gardens. It’s also where and when industrial titan Henry J. Kaiser broke ground on a steel-making defense plant, and within a year, Fontana had been utterly altered, as the headlines said, “from pig farms to pig iron.”

Historian Ric Dias tells that story in his book “Kaiser Steel of Fontana.” One woman who worked at a berry farm before the steel mill opened told him “as soon as that plant fired up … everything died.” Once the farm jobs disappeared, she went to work in the mill. She told Dias that they just didn’t have the money to stand up to Henry J Kaiser.

Smog also wrapped its smudgy grip around Hollywood.

On a film shoot, smog meant lost time and money. That perfection of air and climate that lured filmmakers here in the first place was being lost in a brown miasma. L.A. still had a year-round climate, but it sure didn’t have year-round clear air.

In 1953, Alfred Hitchcock was shooting “Rear Window” on a sound stage, but the blowers sucked in so much smoggy air that Hitchcock had to send his stars Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and everyone else, home for the day.

Actors Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra griped about the smog. Don Knotts, “Mr. Chicken” himself, was ready to fly the coop out of L.A. “Everybody makes a joke of the smog. But it’s not funny. It could kill us all. I didn’t know it was that bad when I moved out here,” he complained. “If it doesn’t get better, I’m selling my new house in Glendale and heading back to Jersey.”

Most ominously, the “airborne garbage” we were breathing was exacting a price on everyone’s health.

In 1953, the L.A. County Medical Assn. warned flat-out that smog damages human organs. Three years later, its doctors reported seeing a “smog syndrome.” Their patients were moving away because of the smog, and the doctors were telling them to go. Breathing problems, heart problems, allergies, respiratory cancers — MDs realized smog had a heavy hand in them all.

It is unclear if “smog” has ever been listed on a death certificate in Los Angeles, but in the smoggy autumn of 1954, three infants, each 3 months old and living as far apart from one another as Hollywood and Van Nuys and San Pedro, died of breathing problems within 45 minutes of each other.

Kids and their developing lungs were especially vulnerable. In August 1969, a dozen smog warnings in six weeks moved high school football practices and games from afternoon into the early morning or early evening. Esper Keiser, the head coach at Claremont High School, said he was fine with the rescheduling. Otherwise, he said “we’d be playing with fire if we didn’t comply. We’d feel pretty bad if a boy keeled over. I can hear them coughing and hacking.”

Jane Fonda, the renowned actor and political crusader, has made air quality a target of her protests. Some 93% of the world’s children, she said, live in polluted air, and pollution hits home with her own kids, and the asthma that disproportionately afflicts L.A.’s kids. “I know what that’s like, because my son Troy had terrible asthma. Oh, it’s so terrible to have to sit in a hospital with your child in a tent, [watching them] struggling to be able to breathe.”

The biggest smog source is identified

The discovery by the Caltech scientist, Haagy, profoundly altered the future of public health, of California, of cars, and of L.A.’s self-image and identity. But not without a fight.

America in the 1950s was car-mad, and L.A. was the throbbing engine of the auto erotic. Amateur racers, pimped-out coupes, woodies and ragtops, sedate sedans and souped-up hot rods, all shared the brand-new, wide-open freeways and boulevards. We were out there havin’ fun in the warm California sun.

And here’s this Dutch scientist in a lab coat telling us that our cars were the problem, that there may be a shiny grill and hood ornament up front, but it was all noxious exhaust crap in the back.

Did we reward him for this stupendous, life-altering, lifesaving discovery?

Did we make him grand marshal of the Rose Parade? Did he win a Nobel Prize? No. This man practically saved Southern California from itself, and we didn’t even name a freeway off-ramp in his honor.

For his was a hard message, and not always a welcome one. Later, Haagy described it: “I had a lot of trouble getting people to accept this. They said it was absolute nonsense, and the auto industry had the opinion that it was all none of my damn business.”

In 1960, more than 7 million polluting cars, trucks and motorcycles were on California’s roads. Human nature being what it is, the complicated sprawl of L.A. being what it is, Southern Californians were not about to stop driving their cars. So the cars themselves would have to change.

And that set the biggest car market in the nation on a collision course, with Detroit, and with Washington, D.C. It was a smash-up felt around the nation.