Los Angeles wants no dudes, loafers and paupers; people who have no
means and trust to luck, cheap politicians, failures, bummers, scrubs,
impecunious clerks, bookkeepers, lawyers, doctors. We need workers!
Hustlers! Men of brains, brawn and guts! Men who have a little capital
and a good deal of energy—first-class men! Goatee aflutter, walrus mustache aquiver, Colonel Harrison Gray Otis,
48, late of the Union Army and—in 1886—editor of the Los Angeles
Times , fired his editorial cannon ball into the
boom-frantic town by the Pacific. To the pueblo settlement seething
with rainbow chasers, this shot barked out a gruff prophecy:
thenceforward, the Times and her guardians would man the lanyard of Los
Angeles' destiny. Today—only 71 years later—Los Angeles groans in the echo of that cry.
A once meager patch of sand in Southern California, its rubber-band
boundaries stretch past a natural basin rimmed by mountains, flow over
the hilltops and peaks into the valleys and deserts beyond, nudge the
very Pacific beaches. Satellites & Earaches. The “city,” essentially, is no more; its
455-sq.-mi. area with 2,000,000 inhabitants is only a mother country,
and its satellites sprawl around its perimeter for 4,853 sq. mi.—more
than three times the size of Rhode Island—overreaching Los Angeles
County, enveloping adjacent Orange County to the south. It is the
nation's fastest-growing megalopolis, with a population
exceeding that of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah
and Nevada combined. And, like an energized amoeba, it is bewilderingly
fertile. Nourished by a generous soil and a benign climate, this open-toed,
pastel empire last week beat with a great hum-thrumming vitality. On
Wilshire Boulevard, rivet guns prattled into the fresh steel of new
office buildings. The reiterated whop of the hammered nail rang out in
a 6,000-house development on San Fernando farmland, in a 17,000-house
subdivision in the tawny hills 40 miles to the southwest in Palos
Verdes—and wherever bulldozers sliced down citrus groves to make room
for more. From the swarms of workers in electronics and aircraft plants
came one big, tumultuous earache. And millions of nerves throbbed with
the nightmare of 3,000,000 cars cascading over 204 miles of multilaned freeways.
Added to this was the arrival in Los Angeles last week of 4,200 popeyed
newcomers . Like the ever-moving,
ever-changing populace that moved aside to make room for them, the new
Angelenos eagerly got set to join the scurrying rhythms and busy
polyphony: to work more change, to make more moves, more money, new
houses, new businesses—and to crowd out of the way of next week's
horde of 4,200. Monolith & Catalyst. In this bouncing scenery, the one unchanging force
is the Los Angeles Times. Each morning it drops with a thick,
self-assured plop on 462,257 doorsteps from Anaheim to Azusa,* like a
faintly welcome striped-pants uncle . Neither a
great newspaper nor a poor one, the Times, from its downtown limestone
monolith, serves as an unshakable herald, chronicling the region with
loving detail, goading Angelenos toward the megalopolitan destiny
ordained by Harrison Otis.
