At Home in the Ozone : The Livin’s Easy in Glendora . . . But Not the Breathin’

Let’s sing to

Glorious Glendora,

The Foothills’ fondest pride.

Nestled ‘neath the mountains

That rise on ev’ry side.

There is much to recommend Glendora. Songwriter Henry Scott Rubel, in his 1937 anthem, was moved by its natural beauty. Today, Glendorans routinely offer testimonials about good schools, a low crime rate, strong property values and the quiet virtues of village life on the fringe of Los Angeles County’s urban sprawl.

“People are very close,” says Judi Simonelli, a City Hall secretary and resident for 23 years. “Everyone knows each other. There are concerts in the park on Sundays. It’s family-oriented, like a little Midwestern town.”

One thing that does not recommend Glendora is the air. It may be a great place to live, but it is a bad place to breathe. Glendora, a city of 47,000, is the ozone capital of the United States.

Some summer days, you can’t see the San Gabriel Mountains that rise only two miles from City Hall, but that is just smog in general. Ozone--technically, three molecules of oxygen linked together--is the invisible part of smog. That’s the good news. The bad news is that ozone is the most ornery element of smog--stuff that irritates the throat and lungs, damages agriculture and, over time, even corrodes rubber and metal.

Los Angeles as a whole cooks up more ozone than other place in the world, especially in the summer and early autumn. The westerly ocean breezes tend to push it toward Glendora, where it is trapped by the mountains that inspired Rubel.

That is why Glendora has recorded 564 first-stage smog alerts (levels exceeding .20 parts per million) since the South Coast Air Quality Management District set up a monitoring station here in mid-1981. For seven straight years the city has ranked first in the number of smog alerts, with neighboring Azusa frequently ranking second.

Here in ozone central, an unusually cool summer with lingering morning clouds have made 1989 a relatively good year. AQMD officials last week reported that Glendora had only three first-stage alerts in August, compared to 14 in August, 1988. This year, the town had a total of 27 alerts as of Sept. 1, compared to 41 at the same point last year.

To some degree, official Glendora seems to have a sense of denial about ozone. For just one example, a page in the phone book sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce dutifully describes “sunny summer highs in the mid-90s,” average annual precipitation of 21.9 inches and relative humidity of 40% to 45%. There is no mention of smog.

Not that Glendorans are fooled. It’s just that ozone, as one resident explained, is “a sore subject.”

“I love the Santa Anas,” Judi Simonelli says of the hot winds that occasionally come off the desert. “It blows it back where it came from.”

Let’s sing to

Glorious Glendora,

Where I would live and die.

Where trees in bloom waft their perfume

Beneath an azure sky.

“Quite a nice little town” is how 72-year-old Bill Torrance describes Glendora. He is lunching on fish and chips at the counter of the Dutch Coffee Shop on Glendora Avenue, a street about as Small Town as greater Los Angeles gets. It is lined with little shops and trees trimmed like cones, and a banner strung across this Main Street promotes the Sunday concerts in Finkbiner Park, named for former Mayor Joe Finkbiner.

Torrance lived here more than 30 years before bronchitis prompted him to move out to Spring Valley Lake a couple of years back. Now he drives 140 miles each day to work at Sierra Auto Body, a family business. Torrance blames a career amid paint fumes and cinders for his breathing problems, but the smog doesn’t help.

“When it’s bad you can feel it in your lungs. You just don’t have the energy,” he says. “When it’s clear people just seem to brighten up.”

The door opens and two women enter the air-conditioned coffee shop. Torrance knows them. “Nice gals,” he says. “They work at the bank.”

Mary and Grace are on their lunch break, and if the subject is Glendora’s smog, they’d rather not give their last names.

Mary has grown children--a daughter in San Diego, a son in Morro Bay--and she’s heard an earful. “Whenever they come here, it’s ‘How do you live here, mother?’ They grew up here! They went to school here!”

The smog “drives me nuts,” Mary says. “It’s terrible. It gets into my sinuses, and eyes get puffy.”

A resident for 30 years, Mary says she would move but for the fact that she and her husband own apartments. The income is good, but she says they’d take a financial beating if they tried to sell and relocate.

Grace, a Glendoran for 17 years, says the smog really doesn’t bother her. Her husband, she says, has trouble breathing while doing yard work.

Five days a week, Grace says, her husband commutes 50 miles to El Segundo. Still, they’d rather live in Glendora. The smog is a small price, Grace says, for living in a place that is “quiet and peaceful.”

Let’s sing to

Glorious Glendora,

Where gold shines in the trees.

If you search for sunshine, health and joy

Glendora has all these.

Staff members of the Environmental Protection Agency, reviewing more than 200 smog studies, concluded in 1986 that the relationship between acute, short-term and long-term effects of ozone exposure is not well established. Preliminary results suggest that repeated exposures to high levels of ozone may have some irreversible effects.

At UCLA, smog expert Dr. Henry Gong Jr. says research has shown that ozone at the smog-alert level will in most people cause such symptoms as a dry cough, wheezing, tightness in the chest, shortness of breath, headache and nausea.

A five-year field study that compared 1,100 nonsmoking Glendorans to residents of the less-polluted high desert community of Lancaster suggested some effects from long-term exposure. It determined that the Glendorans in general had lower lung capacity to begin with, that Glendora children’s lung capacity grew more slowly, and adults’ declined more rapidly.

The study has been described as having “methodological pitfalls,” but, as Fortune magazine noted, it “strongly suggests ozone is bad stuff.”

While the researchers pursue their documentation, Glendorans approach the question of how inhaling ozone affects human life as well-credentialed empiricists.

“After I go swimming in a pool, I have trouble breathing,” reports Marcie Gornall, 11-year-old operator of a lemonade stand.

“When it’s hot and smoggy, it’s hard to do PE,” agrees her partner, 10-year-old Carrie Gustafsen.

Ozone, Glendorans will tell you, typically is not a problem until the early afternoon. During an alert, some of Glendora’s schools fly a simple black flag with the word “smog.” Physical education and other outdoor activities are moved indoors.

On Friday, the award-winning Glendora High School Tartan Marching Band and Auxiliaries were practicing on a day that looked pretty bad but didn’t rate a black flag. Glendora’s Class of 1957 for some reason adopted a Scottish theme; today, the highly disciplined band is led by bagpipers who toodle “Scotland the Brave.”

The woodwind section was tuning up in the shade of a tree. The flute and piccolo players acknowledged that it’s tough to play woodwinds on a smoggy day.

“One time we were marching on the field, and we were just dying,” recalled 16-year-old Elizabeth Osborne.

They agreed, however, that except for the obvious, Glendora is a fine town.

“It’s a good place to raise kids,” said Celeste Meza, 16. “I’m probably going to stay here.”