Smogtown by Jacobs Chip;Kelly William

Author:Jacobs, Chip;Kelly, William
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2011-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

L.A.’s mind-rattling skies also fanned health and policy effects like a crop duster, as questions of physiology segued to misgivings about geography. Downwind position, another Smogtown hallmark, was economic malignancy for one desert resort city about one hundred miles east of downtown. In the 1950s and 1960s, Palm Springs and the surrounding scrubbrush communities were playgrounds for suntan junkies and the reclusively rich. Like prewar L.A., Palm Springs’ fortunes rested on its bankable sunshine and therapeutic heat. Old Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra, reinforced that cachet by moving there in 1967—specifically to escape his hometown’s lung-burning air. Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Debbie Reynolds, and Chuck Connors maintained vacation homes in the area, as well. Even so, getaway homes can disappoint if they are not distant enough from a source of misery, and that was the rub in Palm Springs. Though separated from it by a vast desert, it still was too close to the L.A. smog machine. Hence, the migrating fumes made it feel more like clobbered Pasadena, where auto exhausts and plant gases amassed from cities miles away, than a getaway, white-shoes oasis packed with celebrities.

The people of Riverside County, on whose western edge Palm Springs sits, breathed adverse levels of L.A.-pumped pollution for more than half of 1962, a doubling of the previous year’s levels. 38 It got worse for the region long belittled, Palm Springs the exception, as a barren, poor-man’s Los Angeles. (Today it’s reshaped itself into a growing, cheaper alternative thick with tract-home developments and wideopen recreation.) The San Gorgonio Pass back then streamed the clotted air into Palm Springs like a funnel. The city attorney snatched a different metaphor, comparing the fumebank to a “gun pointed right at the heart” of the city. Too many whiffs of it and there goes tourism bucks, the town’s lifeblood. One resident, chastening authorities as a radicalized professor might, said continued inaction by Palm Springs City Hall made it “accessories to murder.” Why wasn’t it bird-dogging its L.A. counterparts for relief? If that wasn’t bad enough, one scientist pointed out that Southland air pollution was creeping into Arizona almost daily now. 39 San Diego city leaders asked not to be ignored, either. Forty percent of the aerial jetsam its citizens were inhaling was “made-in L.A.” 40

Other out-of-towners needed no warnings. Athletes visiting Southern California during the worst months always were seemingly eager to leave, clutching their return tickets in amazement of how anybody could live in L.A. full time. The University of Illinois football team, out for the 1963 Rose Bowl in Pasadena, sucked tanked oxygen. 41 When Hollywood smog clocked the Detroit Lions, they scampered to a practice field in breezy Santa Monica. The Minnesota Vikings, in California for a 1965 game against the L.A. Rams, wished they’d stayed cloistered inside their hotel. “Everyone was gagging,” Vikings coach Norm Van Brocklin said of his team’s workout. “Just look at my eyes.” The headline was raw: “L.A. Too Smoggy, Vikes Too Groggy.” 42 And so it went, Southern

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