Ex-Mayor’s Book Chronicles Early History of San Fernando

As mayor of San Fernando in the early 1950s, Derward P. (Dode) Loomis had a hand in making city history. Thirty years later, he has recorded the city’s early history in a book.

Published last month, “San Fernando Retrospective: The First Fifty Years” is crammed with details of the city’s formative years and illustrated with hundreds of sepia photographs that show crusty-looking, mustachioed men, Indians and mission padres.

The 148-page book begins with the city’s founding by State Sen. Charles Maclay in 1874 and stops with the boom year of 1925.

Loomis records how early settler Robert Maclay Widney said he felt when he first arrived in San Fernando in 1868: “I stopped my horse breast-high in wild mustard . . . and gazed at the great, wide, empty valley--no buildings but the Mission and no sign of life except a few cattle grazing.”

Later, E. F. Beale built a toll station at the entrance to the San Fernando Pass and profited greatly from the traffic that flowed through the only road north from Los Angeles.

The Porter Land and Water Co. sold small plots of land in 1888 for $50 to $225 an acre, and Japanese workers labored each year to work on the harvest in the San Fernando Valley’s many olive and citrus groves.

San Fernando anticipated Prohibition by many years, according to Loomis. In the 1880s, Emily Vose, a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, was instrumental in banning saloons, which “had become a plague” in the city, the author noted.

The 75-year-old Loomis, who has lived in the city almost 50 years, is acquainted with many of San Fernando’s pioneer families, which helped him gain access to private archives and family scrapbooks. Several banks, libraries and historical societies, including the city-run Lopez Adobe, also yielded important photos of the city’s early days.

“Our history is the oldest one in the Valley,” Loomis said. “There was a place for this book, and I was confident it should be done.”

Looking back on the experience, however, Loomis said he did not realize it would take as much effort as it did.

“I certainly wouldn’t do a sequel,” he joked.

Loomis got the idea for the book when he visited his grandchildren in Pittsford, N.Y., and saw a book on the history of that small Upstate New York town.

So, at an age when most people are enjoying retirement, Loomis began poring over yellowed photo collections, century-old public records and obscure master’s theses.

Every day for a year, Loomis trudged to downtown San Fernando from his quiet home on a broad, tree-lined street. Holed up in a friend’s office suite, Loomis wrote his book.

He also began to look for San Fernando residents who were interested in forming a nonprofit corporation to pay the printing costs. Loomis found 13 takers, including a former publisher of the local newspaper, a former city attorney and descendants of pioneer families.

One who joined the company’s board of directors was Vera Porter, daughter-in-law of George K. Porter, a prominent early citizen.

She helped to locate old photographs and contributed many more from her family’s collection.

“It was very difficult to get pictures prior to 1926,” she said. “So many people are gone or have moved away.”

But the nonprofit company, San Fernando Heritage Inc., eventually located many photographs for the book. At a cost of $25 each, the book has sold 500 of its 1,000 numbered copies and has already paid for itself, Loomis said.

Although Loomis is not a writer by profession, neither is he a stranger to the craft. In 1980, he compiled a small history of St. Simon’s Episcopal Church in San Fernando, which was founded in 1913.

But for most of his adult life, Loomis, who grew up in a small Nebraska town, was a banker.

He worked as a teller when John Dillinger roamed the Midwest robbing banks. In those days, his bank discouraged would-be robbers by placing tellers in awkward contraptions called “bandit barriers,” Loomis recalled.

Encased in bulletproof glass with high-voltage wires above him and a set of pipes below that could spew out disabling gas at the push of a button, Loomis took deposits and counted out coins during the Depression.

He also met his future wife, Thora, 71, who also was a teller.

Move to California

The bank eventually discarded the bandit barriers as being too cumbersome, Loomis recalled. And Loomis shed his Nebraska roots and moved with Thora to California.

After working at a number of banks for several years, Loomis started San Fernando Valley Bank, now Trans World Bank, with four entrepreneurs. Later, he sold his share of the business and served as president of four other banks.

In 1948, Loomis was asked to run for the San Fernando City Council by several prominent citizens. He was elected mayor in 1952 and served until 1954.

“He was a very strong individual, and he had a large backing in the citizenry,” remembered Edwin Kidder, 66, a lifelong San Fernando resident who formerly ran an insurance and real estate company.

Loomis said his stint as mayor came at a time when San Fernando was embarking on the most turbulent era in its political history.

Gambling Controversy

Three councilmen had just been recalled from office, a political machine was threatening to take over San Fernando and rumors were flying that gambling soon would be legalized in the city, Kidder recalled.

Longtime residents agree that Loomis played a dominant role in opposing the gambling, and San Fernando remained free of card casinos.

His stint as mayor “was a time of strenuous political upheaval,” Loomis said. “But it was a fantastic two years.”

After he left office, Loomis continued to be active in community and professional groups. In his den, plaques and certificates attest to this involvement, as do framed pictures of Loomis with former Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown.

“Look, look at this,” Loomis said, opening the book and pointing to a banner strung across a San Fernando street by competing merchants in 1913. The banner reads: “This Way to Van Nuys.”

“San Fernando was a thriving commercial center then,” Loomis said. “The Van Nuys businessmen, envious of San Fernando’s popularity, surreptitiously came over to the city and strung a banner up across Porter Avenue at Brand Boulevard, hoping to divert some of the traffic to their business district. But the City Council made them take it down,” he added.

Loomis closed the book and mused.

“San Fernando was perhaps a city fitting to my personality and background,” he said. “I don’t know that I would have been able to accomplish the same things somewhere else.”