Oilmen Upset About New County Seal

Giant derricks bray loudly outside Curley’s Cafe as the oilmen of Signal Hill ponder the questions of the day.

At this institution in the heart of what a century ago was the nation’s richest oil field, question No. 1 is: Who will get stuck with the breakfast tab? And question No. 2 is: What bonehead decided to strip the county seal of its oil derricks?

“You got to be kidding me. This is important history they want to lose,” scoffs Robert Lee, 80, as he heads out to his 10-acre oil field near a Signal Hill golf course.

Much civic hubbub has ensued since the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors opted to have the county seal redrawn to avoid a threatened lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU contends that a cross on the seal’s mission suggested government promotion of a religion, so the county commissioned an artist whose latest revision will come before the Board of Supervisors this week.

Although most of the controversy over the new seal has been about the removal of the cross, it’s another change that has this corner of Los Angeles County upset.

At the far right corner of the seal, officials have removed the three derricks, meant to symbolize the vast oil fields of Signal Hill and Long Beach. In its place is an image of the Hollywood Bowl above several stars; an homage to the entertainment industry.

To the folks at Curley’s and elsewhere in onetime oil country, the new seal is an unforgivable slight and just one more sign that the industry they devoted their lives to is quickly fading from memory.

Over the last two decades, many of the last remaining pumping fields have yielded to development. Signal Hill -- once so covered with derricks that it was nicknamed “Porcupine Hill” -- is rapidly sprouting upscale homes.

“In my city, that history of oil is really important, especially to the old-timers,” said Signal Hill Mayor Erin Ward, who plans to protest the proposed change when the Board of Supervisors takes the matter up Tuesday.

“The oil wells aren’t the problem, and I don’t think they should get rid of the cross either. But while they’re at it, they’re going to modernize the seal and take out most of the history in my opinion.”

Besides Curley’s, one of the bigger bastions of oil old-timers is the Petroleum Club of Long Beach, where there was indignation aplenty about the potential loss of the black gold legacy from the county’s seal.

Members still clink highball glasses in red-leather booths and dance in the ballroom as they did in oil’s 1950s and ‘60s heyday. Over the last generation, membership has declined as it ages and the petroleum industry changes and moves to cheaper operations abroad.

Nobody is a stranger here amid the suits with Chevron or Standard Oil tie clasps, observed Richard Cazaras, who started working for Chevron as a filling station attendant and spent 44 years rising in the corporation. He and his wife, Ernestine, of Seal Beach are considered younger members.

Of the seal’s missing three oil derricks, Cazaras and several oil men said they couldn’t believe county officials want to wipe out history, either religion or oil’s role in the region’s development.

“Ludicrous,” said Bob Potthast, 79, who worked for Shell Oil in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio before relocating in 1955 to Southern California. He worked for Southern Pacific Pipeline, which he called the first company to pipe finished products such as gasoline and jet fuel out of the state for the government and all the big oil firms.

“The missions and the oil helped create whole cities,” Potthast said as friends arrived for the group birthday dinner. “It’s the history here. What are they going to do next, rename Los Angeles and Santa Barbara because they mean angels and saints? I guess they can cancel Christmas and Santa Claus next.”

“I say leave it alone,” growled Bob Corlett, a manufacturer’s representative who sells to the petroleum industry.

Behind him along the length of the chandeliered ballroom is a mural of Signal Hill in its oil-producing heyday of 1925.

In 1921, a single well called Alamitos No. 1 gushed such a geyser of crude that it drew 15,000 spectators on its first day, a scene vividly captured by Upton Sinclair in his book “Oil!” The well at Hill Street and Temple Avenue was on 1,400 acres -- of mostly independent operators -- that swiftly became the world’s richest oil field.

It also turned Los Angeles County into the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, according to “Los Angeles A-Z: An Encyclopedia of Los Angeles” by Leonard and Gail Pitt, published in 1997.

Author and lifelong Lakewood resident D.J. Waldie observed that California had no coal that fueled industrialization elsewhere in the nation.

“There wouldn’t be an industrialized L.A. today if there hadn’t been oil wells and natural gas fields of Central and Southern California in the first half of the 20th century,” Waldie said. “In the 1950s and 1960s, L.A. County was the most productive industrialized region in the country. We wouldn’t be here today without the oil fields that provided a cheap source of fuel for that.”

Although oil’s significance to the region dates to when Native Americans used its tar residue to waterproof plank boats, it also later literally dictated the shape of Signal Hill and Long Beach, and profoundly affected what they are today, historians say.

As oil was discovered, Signal Hill and Long Beach would try to beat the other to annexing the land, making it subject to barrel taxes. In 1924, Signal Hill was so tired of the taxation and annexation, it consulted the state, which concluded that incorporation was the only way to protect oil producers from Long Beach’s barrel tax. So it did.

The annexation of land where oil was struck has resulted in Signal Hill’s jigsaw border, and its 2.2 square miles sits like a doughnut hole inside Long Beach, California’s fifth-largest city.

Other cities can thank oil for bankrolling their development if not actually driving it. The original strikes were the Doheny family’s oil fields north and west of downtown Los Angeles, then came oil in Santa Fe Springs, Whittier and Huntington Beach, said Waldie, whose most recent book, “Where We Are Now: Notes From Los Angeles,” was published this year.

To feed Signal Hill’s roughnecks and other laborers in the oil fields, Curley’s opened in 1932 at a different location. So significant was the workforce in oil that Curley lore has it that an early owner routinely cashed up to $45,000 in payroll checks a day, and one night topped $118,000 -- all because the roustabouts would need to dine and spend somewhere.

A block away from the new million-dollar hilltop mansions that share slopes with dozens of the city’s remaining 500 to 600 active oil wells, Curley’s Cafe embraces it’s petro past and present, it’s roughnecks and well owners like Bob Lee.

“Honey,” Lee said, his native Oklahoma oozing like black gold, “I love oil, and I’ve had 14 wells here on the hill. Got just one operating right now.... I make about $39 a barrel.”

He and his oil men friends had tossed around the particular math of oil gravity as it affects price per barrel, but shrugged off the gritless matter of changing a county seal that will mostly grace government vehicles and civic paperwork. “That’s just a mistake,” Lee said, “and you know it’s gonna cost us.”