Autos: 100-Year-Old Love Affair Rolls On
The next time you find yourself reduced to a still life in rush-hour traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway . . . or you’re circling in a holding pattern in Westwood, waiting for the semiyearly occurrence of an available parking space . . . or you suddenly have the sun blocked out by an 18-wheeler behind you on the Golden State . . . well . . . think of yourself as a guest at a big outdoor birthday party.
Surprise! This is the 100th anniversary of the horseless carriage with the infernal, internal combustion engine--the automobile.
Despite what you might think, the machine was not invented in downtown Los Angeles beneath the sacred Four-Level Interchange. Rather, Munich, Germany, gets the credit--or blame, according to your point of view.
It was there, on Jan. 29, 1886, that Carl Benz received a patent on the three-wheeled Benz Motor Car. (Benz also registered history’s first automobile crash, slamming into a brick wall when he forgot to steer his machine during a public showing; fortunately, he was near his house so he didn’t require the services of a tow-horse.)
An exhibit featuring a copy of Benz’s first jalopy (undented) and other antique Mercedes-Benzes is on display at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. Otherwise, the anniversary will pass pretty much unnoticed in Los Angeles (alias Autopia), which seems odd given this city’s almost mystical identification with the automobile.
Author John Weaver once wrote that “a visiting English architectural critic, taking his cue from intellectuals who study Italian in order to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so he could ‘read Los Angeles in the original.’ ”
Nevertheless, there’ll be no giant birthday cake lighted up by street flares at Century and Aviation boulevards, the busiest intersection in the city. No congratulatory notes on the freeway message boards, garbled though they might be. And no mention of J. Philip Erie, whose gasoline-powered chariot was the first to gasp and sputter through the streets of Los Angeles.
L.A.’s First Driver:
At 2 a.m. on May 30, 1897, Erie, described in newspapers as “a wealthy New York civil engineer and inventor,” rolled his “gasolene carriage” out of a downtown garage, cranked it up and set sail. Half a dozen friends and associates hopped aboard.
Reports differ on the quality of the ride. The Sunday Herald said the vehicle “barely moved along” and wheezed a lot. But The Times, in a piece headlined “Without Horses,” said the vehicle crossed the “awful Sixth Street pavement . . . smoothly” and Main Street’s “chuckholes innumerable without any trouble.”
The Times added: “This innocent-looking, black tallyho has about 25 miles an hour concealed in its vitals.” It wouldn’t be long, the article predicted, “before a factory is established in Los Angeles for the manufacture of motor wagons.”
Erie had chosen an early hour for the test run so that few horses would be present to take jealous exception. (None did.) But few humans were about either. Erie promised a later public demonstration once the car was repaired (its overheated cylinder heads had cracked). In the meantime, Ex-Mayor William H. Workman posed for a photo in it.
But the machine never ran again. Erie’s funding dried up--the car had cost $30,000 to manufacture--and within a year or so, he was calling himself a “mining inventor.” Soon thereafter he disappeared from the streets of Los Angeles.
“Your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor own an Oldsmobile. Count them as they go by--24 sold last week!” said a 1903 newspaper ad.
Today, 5 million cars are officially registered within Los Angeles County. So much for the California Railroad Commission’s optimistic pronouncement in 1919 that the county’s automobile population had reached the “saturation point”--at 100,000.
The oldest driver in the county currently is Emerson Olds Houser, 100, of Pasadena. He bought his first automobile in 1919, even though he didn’t know how to drive. “The man who sold me the car taught me,” Houser, a retired minister, recalled recently. The dealer taught him well. Houser has had one moving violation in 66 years.
Some of the youngest drivers--though they’re not allowed on streets--zip about in miniature versions of luxury cars. A Wilshire dealer offers models ranging from a threee-horsepower, 90-pound Mercedes ($2,500) to an 11-horsepower Ferrari with leather interior and disc brakes ($12,900). “We got one Mercedes that a 10-year-old kid rolled trying to take a corner,” says Mike Lisciandro of Royal Coach Craft garage in Van Nuys. “I think he was going about 15 (m.p.h.). Luckily he wasn’t hurt but the car’s body was cracked. The bill was around $800.”
“Jericho--The Motor Car Signal of a Gentleman--Warns Without Offense” (1908 ad for a car horn).
Local Automotive Milestones:
In the early 1900s, Los Angeles motorists were told that 8 m.p.h.--the first speed limit in residential districts--was a law they could live with. Drivers had to slow down to 6 m.p.h. in business districts and 4 m.p.h. at intersections.
The first local used-car ad (1906): “1905 Stevens Runabout (used only one week).”
The first gas station sprang up on the corner of Wilshire and La Brea boulevards in 1909. It was, historian David Clark says, “a farm wagon with a gas tank on top.” An attendant poured the stuff into the fuel tank at 10 cents a gallon. Before that, motorists bought gas in five-gallon cans at country stores.
The first female drivers began to appear regularly in 1912, when electric starters replaced the unwieldy crank.
The first driving instructor to crash: “While showing another man how to run an automobile, F. A. Christ . . . overturned his machine and injured himself as well as the student,” The Times reported on April 30, 1915. “. . . The machine suddenly capsized when Mr. Christ attempted to turn it out of (an electric) car track.”
The first traffic light was switched on in 1930 at the corner of Figueroa and Adams boulevards in a ceremony outside the headquarters of the Automobile Club of Southern California. Which came first? Red or green? History does not say.
The first freeway, the Pasadena Cycleway, was built in 1897 for bicycles. The popularity of the automobile soon put it out of use. The next freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now the Pasadena), opened in 1940 for automobiles. Freeways now stretch for 525 county miles (though they have their quirks: An eastbound motorist on the Ventura Freeway still cannot make a transition to the northbound Hollywood Freeway).
The first man to drive from Long Beach to Catalina Island was Howie Singer, who made the jaunt in a bit more than eight hours in his Amphicar in 1978. No one has tried to break his record.
San Francisco columnist Herb Caen’s description of the average Angeleno: “A well-preserved, middle-aged, middle-class two-door Chevrolet sedan.”
Of course, that was before foreign imports arrived.
Things People Do While Driving on the Freeway:
Exercise: The book “Commuter Calisthenics” outlines more than 70 routines, including seat-belt sit-ups.
Play a musical instrument: Trumpet and guitar players and a maraca-shaker have been sighted behind the wheel on local freeways by Times reporters--along with a ventriloquist talking to a dummy (the ventriloquist was driving).
Shop for a mate: Members of the recently organized Freeway Singles Club exhibit stickers bearing their serial numbers and club address.
Things People Can’t Do in A Car:
Shop for groceries: The Phone In-Drive Thru Market opened in West Los Angeles in 1983 and went broke within a year.
Park next to their seat at a baseball game: Although sportscaster Bud Furillo recalls, “When (late Dodger owner) Walter O’Malley was building Dodger Stadium, he mentioned to me that he’d built the club level so people could drive right in and park behind their seats. But the Fire Department said no. Could you imagine the fumes? I guess if he’d gotten the OK, there’d be spaces for compact cars. . . .”
Social Costs:
About 95% of those traveling in Los Angeles use private vehicles; more than 70% of the cars carry only the driver. About one-third of the surface area downtown is used for parking. The city Department of Transportation warns that, unless changes are made, downtown streets could be regularly gridlocked by 1990.
A possible preview: On Nov. 1, 1983, a rainy night, during a period when the 3rd Street tunnel was closed for construction, one of the city’s worst downtown jams occurred: Travel times of 30 minutes per block were not uncommon. Buses ran two hours and more late.
Death and injuries--about 1,200 people are killed every year in car wrecks in the county--are, of course, another price exacted by the automobile.
And then there’s smog, a word coined in Pittsburgh in the 1940s to describe the union of smoke and fog but made infamous by Los Angeles. As early as 1943, The Times reported in a story entitled “City Hunting for Source of ‘Gas Attack’ ” that the “entire downtown area (was) engulfed by a low-hanging cloud of acrid smoke.”
At least 50% of Southern California’s air pollution is attributed to the automobile (the figure rises when related causes, such as refineries, are included).
A study by the President’s Council on Environmental Quality in 1982 found that Los Angeles’ air was the dirtiest in the nation. Some studies have suggested a link between smog and cancer. Studies have shown that high levels of ozone can diminish citrus and grape crop yields by as much as 50%, as well as damage trees.
Jokes about smog don’t help the city’s tourist trade, either. Asked before the 1984 Olympics how he would train for a run through the Southland, marathoner Alberto Salazar of Oregon said, “I’ll start the car in the garage and run in there.”
Frisco Burger, a Downey hamburger drive-in, revived the custom of skating female carhops last year--with one twist. A male carhop provides “security on skates.”
The Freeway as Delivery Room:
There are no available statistics on the number of people born (or, for that matter, conceived) in automobiles. However, Sgt. Bill Starnes of the California Highway Patrol is believed to hold the county record for most roadway births assisted in: seven.
“It puts a smile on your face,” said Starnes, “especially when you see so many other people injured or killed or in some other kind of trouble.”
Starnes, who has moved inside to an administrative job, always carried a gallon of fresh water when he roamed the streets.
Once, he was writing a traffic ticket on the Pomona Freeway when another car pulled up with a pregnant woman inside. “About 15 minutes later I laid the baby on her mommy’s stomach and went back to finish writing the ticket,” he said. “I apologized for the delay, but the guy said it was one ticket he didn’t mind receiving.”
