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| Play Community Builders |
| Long Beach is a large and diverse community. It has a large urban university, an international port, tourist serving hotels and a convention center, water sports and recreatiion petroleum production and refining facilities, aerospace and other manufacturing and industrial plants as well as commercial offices and retail stores. Still, however, it's overshadowed by its larger neighbor, Los Angeles, and popularly known as the "Sea coast of Iowa." So the people who built the city are a diverse group and those whose interviews are included in this series reflect that. Many of them talk about growing up in Long Beach when it was a small town with agricultural fields around its edges, including on top of Signal Hill. They describe the surf before the breakwater was completed. And then oil was discovered on Signal Hill and everything changed. Bob Hoffmaster, for example, worked at the port for many years and talks about its development. Virginia Reid Moore describes growing up in a family that ran an oil company. Don Thomas talks about growing up in north Long Beach and Don Utter describes growing up and becoming a teacher in Long Beach. The interviews in this series were collected in a variety of ways. The largest number were collected as part of a project to study the impact of the discovery of oil on the development of Long Beach. Others were conducted by students as part of class assignments at CSULB. Still others were simply done by people interested in their subjects. Together, they provide a complex picture of the Long Beach community the narrators helped to build. |
| Play Petroleum Entrepreneurs |
| The development of southern California oil fields in the 1920s attracted people from all over the country who were hoping to strike it rich. Although most of them didn't, some became successful by supplying equipment to drillers, buying and selling petroleum products and drilling wells for speculators. Many oil service and equipment companies opened in Signal Hill, one of the richest oil fields in the area. From there, they served local clients as well as those in surrounding areas. As wells on Signal Hill began producing oil and processing plants were located nearby, drilling continued and speculators explored the extent and depth of the underground oil pools. The owners of some of the oil related companies also invested in real estate and oil wells while others experimented with new technological ideas. These innovations led to the development of an efficient oil well survey device and improved fishing tools. Some of the interviews in this series were conducted as part of a project to study the impact of oil discovery on the development of Long Beach. Others were done as part of a project to document the history of Signal Hill. The experiences of these nine narrators illustrate the variety of people who came to participate in the oil boom that began in the 1920s. Some of them, such as James Herley, Robert Jones, E. D.Mitchell and Thomas Rowan, followed their fathers into the business. Some, such as Bo Cockriel, drilled oil wells on their own account while others, such as Sol Alexander, invested in producing wells. Still others sold services and supplies to drillers, producers and refiners. Robert Jones' company, for example, rented fishing tools and H. John Eastman's company surveyed oil well holes. James Ray sold lubricants not only to other oil operators but to car owners as well and Earl Beebe headed the Signal Hill Chamber of Commerce which sought to represent the interests of people who worked in the oil patch. |
| Play Responses to Subsidence and the Tidelands Controversy |
| In the late 1930s, oil was discovered under Long Beach harbor. Its production helped Long Beach recover from the Depression and provided revenue to support expansion and modernization of the harbor as well as enriching individuals who owned land in the area. As a result when land near the oil field began to sink, those who were profiting from pumping the oil out from under the land resisted any suggestion that there could be a link between oil production and subsidence. They hired experts to defend their position. As the subsidence continued, those whose property was damaged by the sinking, but who were not benefiting from the oil production, hired experts to determine what was really causing the sinking. While the controversy continued, the land kept sinking. It sunk like a big bowl and the bottom of the bowl was more than 25 feet below its previous elevation. Some warned that if the sinking continued, the ocean might inundate the city. The Navy Shipyard was near the bottom of the bowl and the Navy didn't own the mineral rights of the Shipyard so they were suffering damage but receiving no benefit so in 1958 the Navy sued all of the oil operators. Although the suit was never litigated or settled, it helped to convince many people that a proposed solution, pumping water into the fault blocks where the oil had been taken out, should be implemented. And that solution stopped the sinking. The production of oil from under the harbor led geologists to explore the area under the tidelands and submerged lands off Long Beach and oil was discovered to be there as well. This discovery led to a struggle between the city, to whom the state had granted the tidelands in 1911, and the state and federal governments over control of the oil revenue. Eventually the state and city were forced to divide the money. Interviews with four individuals provide different perspectives on the issues of subsidence and ownership of the tidelands. They were conducted as part of a project to study the impact of the discovery of oil on the development of Long Beach. Robert Irvin lobbied for the Harbor Department to encourage legislators to support its ownership of the tidelands and submerged lands. Charles Vickers worked for the Harbor Department, surveyed lands under which oil was discovered and helped to manage the harbor's growth using the oil revenue. Irvin worked with Darrell Neighbors on the "Hard Core" committee that fought to stop subsidence. And Jan Law conceived and conducted the experiments to demonstrate that subsidence was caused by oil production. All of them were active, in one way or another, in the campaign to win public support for their activities. |
| Play Signal Hill |
| Oil was discovered on Signal Hill, north of the City of Long Beach, in 1921. Soon more wells were brought it and the field spread into the City. As more people moved into the area to work on the wells and the developments that followed them, people in pre-existing neighborhoods worried that the field's spread might bring out of control wells, smelly sump holes and dangerous equipment near their homes. In response, Long Beach adopted regulations that limited oil development. Even as the City incorporated outlying neighborhoods that filled with the homes of oil workers and those in related industries, people on top of the hill, near the center of petroleum development, resisted. And in 1926 they incorporated their own City of Signal Hill which is completely surrounded by the City of Long Beach. Since 1926 its residents have elected their own city council and adopted their own laws. Their relationship with Long Beach remained complex as they, for example, established their own police and fire departments, but remained part of the Long Beach school district. Sometimes they have welcomed businesses that were not allowed in Long Beach but recently, as they face the need to clean up the pollution left behind by oil producers they, like Long Beach developers, have had to follow federal guidelines. Most of these interviews were conducted in the 1989 and 1991 by Kaye Briegel under contract to the City of Signal Hill. Briegel also conducted a few of them earlier as part of the CSULB project to study the Impact of the Discovery of Oil on the Development of Long Beach. Colleen Fliedner, working as a student assistant on that project, arranged for Jonathan Booth to interview himself in 1982. |
| Play Terminal Island Issei/Nisei |
| When the Los Angeles Terminal Railroad connected the city to the coastal communities of Long Beach and San Pedro in the 1890s, Rattlesnake Island, the narrow strip of land in the channel across from San Pedro became linked to Los Angeles and was renamed Terminal Island. A lively recreational area known as Brighton Beach soon developed in one part of the island and thrived until its demise in the late 1910s, when dredging deposits caused the water to recede. A small group of Japanese fishermen had established an abalone cooperative on the island earlier, in 1901, but it was not until 1906-1907 that the Japanese fishing village of Terminal Island took shape. The first twenty houses were built on pilings along the shore of the main channel. Within a year or two, approximately 600 more Japanese arrived. They were mainly men, one-fourth of whom came from Taiji, a small fishing village in Wakayama prefecture. By the 1930s, the Japanese community located in the Fish Harbor area of Terminal Island had grown to over 2,000. Most of the men were fishermen, and many of their wives and daughters worked in the canneries. The residents felt a distinct sense of belonging to a unique community with its own cultural, economic and recreational activities. It was torn asunder, however, at the outbreak of World War II. In February 1942, the community was given forty-eight hours to evacuate and most of its members were placed in concentration camps. During the war, the company housing and commercial buildings which had served the Japanese American community were bulldozed to make way for the expanding canneries. The only remnant of the community was a school building that became part of the Marine Corps Reserve Training Center. The first interviews in this series were conducted with former Terminal Island residents in 1973-1975 by students in an Asian American Studies class, under the supervision of Franklin Odo. Many of the students came from families that had been former residents of Terminal Island. Because the students did not have formal training in oral history, the interviews they conducted are sketchy and scant on personal details. Nevertheless, they provide valuable insights into this unique community. In 1979, two students with oral history training conducted longer, autobiographical interviews. Some were conducted in Japanese with Issei women; others with Nisei were in English. Additionally, one interview was conducted with an Anglo-European woman union organizer who worked in the canneries with the Japanese women. Only the interviews in English are presently available. Two additional, more comprehensive interviews were conducted in November and December of 2001. One was with one of the former 1970s narrators whose initial interview was very brief and suffered from poor audio quality; the other was designed to get more details about growing up as a girl on Terminal Island. |
| Play The Development of California State University, Long Beach |
| South Los Angeles-Orange County State College opened in a Long Beach apartment building in 1949. It was planned to serve the expanding suburbs in the area. First, however, it trained teachers for the schools in those suburbs even as it moved to a permanent campus and began to occupy permanent buildings. As its faculty grew they brought their university training and experiences to Long Beach and transformed the school first into California State College and then into California State University, Long Beach. The transformation from a small teachers college into a large urban university has not been without controversies. There were struggles among administrators, faculty, students and the state legislature over how to choose the faculty and curriculum. But along the way, the university trained teachers, engineers, scientists, nurses, computer programers and poets. The eight narrators in this group were among the CSULB's pioneers. Irving Ahlquist was the campus first history professor and Richard Wilde soon joined him. Raymond Lindgren was also a history professor, who came to campus in 1961 to be Dean of the College and, under the administration of Carl McIntosh, help to set the school on its way to orderly governance. Isabel Patterson, William O'Neill and Marvin Haney were early students. Patterson went on to build the Isabel Patterson Child Care Center on the campus, O'Neill returned to teach in the education program in the 1960s and Haney was an early volunteer, booster and Alumni Association member. Some of these interviews were conducted in the 1970s when Sherna Berger Gluck first came to campus and trained university students, faculty and staff to begin interviews to document the school's development. Others were conducted in the 1980s by Kaye Briegel and Ann Andriesse who were also involved in other oral history projects. |