Councilman’s Last Sales to End Colorful Era

Mixing politics and business has always made good sense for longtime Lomita City Council member and store owner Hal Hall.

About equally as sensible has been the art of mixing paints, something Hall has done at his Lomita Paint Store for 27 years.

Within the next few months, however, Hall, 78, intends to have less paint and more politics in his life. He’s closing up shop, an old-fashioned one-man storefront long a fixture on Narbonne Avenue.

The closing signals the finale for a more than 40-year-old tradition of Hall family businesses in Lomita.

‘Irascible Old Guy’

A balding, outspoken Oregon native, Hall’s blue eyes twinkle behind his glasses when he describes himself as an “irascible old guy who talks too much.” True to form, he is not reticent in describing why he’s leaving the paint business.

The reason, in a word, is technology.

Not that technology is leaving Hall behind. Rather, Hall is closing the store because he decided not to invest $895 in a sophisticated paint mixing machine that’s necessary to produce the ultra-modern colors in the newest Dutch Boy Paints, the major line he carries.

Soon, the sample paint colors whose regal-sounding names are posted on his store walls--names like golden eagle, Spanish moss, heather, sapphire and sprout--will go “the way of the prairie schooner,” Hall said.

“When they changed their color scheme this time, I gave up,” Hall said.

His efforts to sell the business intact brought few offers. He expects that the doors will close for the last time in a few months, after what’s left over of the remaining merchandise “can fit into the back of my station wagon,” he said.

On a recent, slow-paced afternoon, between ringing up sales on an old-fashioned cash register dating from the 1930s, Hall remembered his family’s odyssey from barnyard to merchandising. After living on farms in Oregon and Canada, Hall’s family migrated to California and abandoned farming for the first family business, a dime store in Long Beach.

As a young man, Hall moved to Lomita.

“I remember the dusty streets when I first came here, and I thought, ‘Why in the world would anyone want to open a store here?’ ” Hall recalled. First impressions aside, Hall soon opened a store in Lomita, and with Cecile, his wife of 57 years, raised his four children there and became an active participant in the town’s growth.

Hall’s paint store became a popular meeting place where residents could not only pay their utility bills--a service provided to get customers into the store--but where they could talk politics. Despite his interest in the political scene, it was not until 1973 that he was elected to the City Council.

The store was “a collection point for people coming in and voicing their complaints and asking questions,” said Bob Zinsmeister, manager of the Lomita Chamber of Commerce.

‘Going to Be Missed’

“Rather than sending their payments in to the utility office, they’d go to Hall’s paint store to pay bills and to get in a few words of discussion on things and to pass the time of day,” Zinsmeister said. “It’s going to be missed.”

The neighborly atmosphere has made doing business in Lomita pleasant, Hall said, with one glaring exception.

In 1984, he shot and killed a robber who pointed a toy gun at him and took $25 from the store’s cash register.

“He pointed it at the side of my head and laid me on the floor,” Hall recalled. “I got up with a gun and shot him.”

Hall, shaken but unhurt, was back to business the next day.

Despite that incident, Hall was still vehement last year in opposing an ordinance in Lomita that would have outlawed using a toy gun in a threatening manner.

“It’s not right to take toy guns away from little kids,” Hall said during the council discussion at the time. “This is just one more law aimed at restricting personal freedom.”

Following his lead, the council refused a request by the County Board of Supervisors to make it a misdemeanor to brandish a toy gun in an angry or threatening way.

As a council member, Hall is outspoken on issues of personal freedom, Lomita Mayor Harold Croyts said.

“If it’s something that tweaks him a little bit, like having excessive regulations on personal property or excessive government that he feels limits people’s rights, he’s inclined to speak out on those,” Croyts said.

For now, Hall is still mixing paints, but by summer’s end, he said, he will devote more time to his hobby, collecting coins. He has offered to teach a continuing education course in numismatics in the Torrance Unified School District.

And with his extra free time, Hall said, “I will pay a little more attention to city business, just from boredom, probably.”