Smoglandia: We haven’t always been smoggy, but we’re built that way

It’s late July in 1943. Over the radio, Bing Crosby is crooning, Bob Hope is joking, and news of the war — against Hitler, against Japan — keeps sizzling and crackling across the dial.

But here in Southern California, something more is in the air: a dense, motionless tsunami of something foul and inexplicable. Grown men are crying and mopping their eyes. Women’s throats are sore, and their eyes are an unflattering shade of red.

For hours, sometimes days, even, people can’t see more than a few feet ahead of them. Cops directing traffic can’t tell whether the stoplights are red or green, and neither can the drivers.

Remember that in 1943, we were at war. Just the year before, in February 1942, a Japanese submarine had shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, and the very next night, L.A. was ordered into a blackout. Jittery Angelenos sat in the dark, rattled by sounds of sirens and antiaircraft fire. That turned out to be just a citywide case of nerves.

It wasn’t the Japanese this time, either. That choking siege in July was the worst but not the first attack by an enemy that Los Angeles would be fighting long after World War II was over.

Smog.

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

Back in ’43, L.A. didn’t really have a name for it. “Smog” is a turn-of-the-century portmanteau word mashing together “smoke” and “fog” to describe the sooty, sulfurous air of the London of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.

But as we would find out, our smog — photochemical smog — made the air taste like poison and look like something you’d put out with the garbage. And its recipe was a killer combo of the two things we love so much: cars, and sunlight.

For a long time, we wouldn’t realize how much damage it was doing. Smog compromised the health of kids and the sickly and the elderly. It changed the look of movies. It chewed through rubber tires and engine hoses. It wiped out billions in agricultural crops, killing off whole fields of spinach in a half-day. It messed with our glamorous aviation industry; once, it skewed the odds at a beauty pageant because the planes flying contestants in from around Southern California to the Glendale airport couldn’t land in the smog.

Smog is why, even today, when you put gas in your tank, there’s that rubber condom thingamajig around the gas nozzle, to keep gas fumes from turning into pollution … and it’s also why you pay more for that gas.

“Smoglandia” — another mashing of words — is big, bigger than the borders of any city or county here. And smog isn’t gone, not by a long shot, but — with regulation and technology and psychology — we have beaten it to something of a standstill.

If you weren’t here 30 or 40 years ago, you don’t remember a time when a gray-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 solve the what-is-it and who-done-it of smog but until then, the fabled Wonder City of the West was left wondering what the hell was happening to it.

“Weep some more, my lady” appeared to be Los Angeles’ theme song in February 1953 due to smog.

(R.L. Oliver / Los Angeles Times)

The role of topography in L.A’.s smog

You’ve heard these words without maybe giving them another thought: the Los Angeles basin. Basin. Our beautiful encircling topography of mountains and hills is a bowl ready-made by ancient plate tectonics to be filled with smoke and smog.

We started to do that about 13,500 years ago, when humans showed up here in considerable numbers. There is evidence that these early Angelenos used fire as a tool — to protect themselves from the huge Ice Age wolves and fanged cats whose fossils fill the La Brea Tar Pits, and to burn and clear land for growing and to drive game.

Then hit the fast-forward button, all the way to October 1542, when sailors aboard a Spanish ship captained by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo laid eyes on the coast of L.A. The ship’s log summary made note of “a large bay, which they named ‘the Bay of the Smokes,’ on account of the many smokes they saw there.”

In truth, ever since we’ve built towns and cities, we’ve made smog — whatever you call it.

The ancient Romans burned so much wood and other fuel — for cooking, for agriculture and industry, even for the vestal virgins’ eternal flame — that modern scientists conclude it would have lowered the climate of Europe by as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius, or, as the Romans would say, point-V degrees.

L.A.’s smog changed just about everything around us — even the crystalline light that the Chamber of Commerce bragged about, that enticed people to come here.

In 1931, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein was spending his first winter at Caltech, and he wrote to a friend, “Here in Pasadena, it is like Paradise. Always sunshine and clear air …”

The day the light in L.A. changed forever

Ten years later, the air around Pasadena was telling a different story. Helen Pashgian is a renowned artist, a pioneer 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 that pre-smog air, and she’s one of the few Angelenos who can recall the pre-smog era, when the air was limpid, and even from 20 miles inland or more, you really could see to Catalina, and the mountains looked as clear as if they were just at the end of your street.

And to her artist’s eye, that magical light was pure and brilliant in … “a certain kind of cool light.” She was in elementary school when the war began, and Los Angeles sprouted factories for the war effort and, as we would soon learn, a manufacturer of ugly air.

“We would see a line of this yellowish, pinkish haze,” Pashgian remembered. “We’d never seen that before. And everyone noticed it.”

The Altadena schoolgirl was witnessing the Big Bang of L.A. smog.

And this new air, “I think there was a smell to it … it just smelled dead.”

For so many decades, people who moved to L.A. had come for its beauties. Now they were coming for the war work, in defense plants and factories.

And then, this horrific, mysterious smog shows up. The country was at war with enemies it could see — soldiers, tanks, bombers — but where could L.A. put up a fight against an enemy it couldn’t identify?

Identifying a source for the smog

It looked first to an old frenemy, the oil business.

To understand what happened, you have to recognize the marriage of convenience between L.A. and the oil business. You probably know it already — you’ve seen oil pumpjacks laboring away in nutty places, like on the La Cienega Boulevard shortcut through Baldwin Hills to the airport.

That all got started on Nov. 4, 1892, when a hopeful Angeleno named Edward Doheny took a eucalyptus log and sharpened it like a No. 2 pencil, and went chonking away at a patch of dirt in Echo Park — and struck oil.

Well, you couldn’t stop the drilling after that. Between downtown and Venice Beach, thousands of homeowners uprooted their orange trees and put oil derricks right in their backyards. Signal Hill near Long Beach was pin-cushioned with so many oil rigs that one writer said it looked like “an aroused porcupine.”

But the oil biz, with its lakes and streams of spilled oil, also made some Angelenos sick. And now, to fuel the war effort, the big smokestacks on those big oil refineries were sending out big black plumes of gunk — and that had to be creating the smog, right?

Chip Jacobs knows the story well. A few years back, he co-wrote a book called “Smogtown, the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.”

There was, he said, “a lot of negativity against the oil companies and refiners … and they felt scapegoated for air pollution before we’d even done any chemical analysis because the natural public inclination was, well, it must be the black smoke we’re seeing coming out of a refiner, or it must be out of a factory.”

Official L.A., anxious to mollify angry and frightened Angelenos, dropped the hammer on a plant near downtown L.A. It manufactured butadiene, a chemical needed to make artificial rubber, because the world’s natural rubber supply was mostly in the hands of the enemy.

The plant was shut down for a time, but just like a murder mystery where the killings continue after the suspect is behind bars, the smog just kept on coming. And L.A. still had a mess on its hands.

All of L.A. believed, and official L.A. passionately hoped, that once the war was over and all those smokestacks shut down, the smog would vanish too. But the war ended, and the smog didn’t, and L.A. wiped its weepy red eyes and demanded some solutions, dammit. The brown, greasy, bleach-flavored clouds were taking something with them, something of the paradise spirit. The economy, the outdoors, our culture, and our pride in this place — the plague of smog didn’t just change our character, it became a character in our lives, and a miserable one too.

And then someone rode in with some answers — not a man in a white hat, like a movie hero, but a man in a white lab coat.