A Return to Colton : Smog--It Chased the Young Away

When I left this town nearly 20 years ago, I vowed never to return. Well, maybe for visits to my family, but not in any permanent sense.

Something turned bitter in Colton, or in me, after the sky turned brown. It didn’t matter which. All I knew was that Colton, a feisty, blue-collar community on the sunburned lip of the desert east of Los Angeles, had become to me a symbol of the ugliest side of America’s economic boom after World War II.

That boom gave my parents the ability to purchase a modest tract house when tract houses were not scorned but instead were considered stucco-covered symbols of success. Our neighborhood was filled with kids such as me, sons and daughters of laborers, and we had no trouble getting up a football or basketball game. Our only difficulty was having to pause, coughing and wheezing, after running too hard.

The smog drifting east from Los Angeles’ freeways and factories, which had been getting worse since the 1950s, eventually destroyed the wind-swept, edge-of-the-desert beauty of this place. About the time I left Colton in the early 1970s, smog alerts became so frequent that Little League games were delayed or canceled, and parks and public swimming pools closed.

Crops yellowed, and in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains stately Ponderosa Pines lost their needles and, weakened by smog, were killed by insects.

Return Visit

I was not alone in my departure. San Bernardino Mayor W. R. Holcomb said a “very significant” number of young people fled, citing air pollution as their reason.

I went back earlier this year, having recently returned to Southern California after years of living in other parts of the country, to see how my hometown had stood up to life in some of the nation’s foulest air. And to the changed circumstances of post-industrial America.

Smog, I discovered, was not all that had been working against Colton. A downsized West Coast version of a broad-shouldered Midwestern town, Colton, I knew, had suffered from some of the same problems that sent the Rust Belt into a tailspin a decade ago. The 1983 closure of Kaiser Steel’s Fontana mill put hundreds of steelworkers who lived in Colton out of work. The steel mill that employed my father in San Bernardino closed three years later.

On the other hand, some things had improved since I and my friends had fled town. The protracted battle over smog controls on automobiles had produced tangible results. Ozone levels have fallen. There hasn’t been a second-stage smog alert in four years and some Coltonites said their eyes no longer water painfully on returning home from vacations.

But the air in the South Coast Air Basin still is the worst in the country. And it remains so murky in Colton that former Mayor Mel Fuchs, who himself has left town for better air in Orange County, said that “when I go there, it is depressing to me. When that area was nice and clean, it was a beautiful area. But smog hurt it really badly.”

Still, after years of economic stagnation--and despite the smog--the area is growing again. The population is up to 35,000, 50% more than when I left in the early 1970s.

This is mainly the result of people from Los Angeles and Orange counties flooding in to buy cheaper housing. New four-bedroom homes can be had for $110,000--cheap by Southern California standards--out on the old sand dunes where my friend Alan Bray used to hunt jack rabbits with a bow and arrow, hitting nothing but trees and tumbleweeds. The first new elementary school in 23 years was just built.

The newcomers are different from earlier generations of Latinos and Anglos, who worked on the railroad, at the steel foundry or in the nearby cement plant, and shopped downtown. Then, downtown Colton was an unassuming tree-lined street on which stood Helman’s Department Store and the old library.

Now, the new residents typically commute long distances to work and shop, and both Helman’s and the library have moved into new buildings.

David Helman, a former classmate of mine and co-owner of his family’s store, worries about how many Mervyn’s stores have moved within 20 miles because the new residents don’t feel obligated to shop close to home. He now specializes in sweat suits and sporting goods. Things have changed, he agreed, “But I’m still here.”

Office buildings and specialty restaurants are sprouting in the old melon fields of the 1,200-acre Cooley ranch, down by the dry Santa Ana River. I went for my first hayride on the ranch and when I was in high school the rural road running by the property was the site of clandestine midnight auto races. I drove down the road but couldn’t even picture the spot where a friend blew his engine one night and fretted over what he would tell his dad.

Dortha Cooley denied a rumor I had heard that smog damaged their crops so badly that the Cooleys were forced to quit farming. She said taxes got too high and forced them to sell. But the smog was certainly bad, she acknowledged. If a heavy, smog-laden fog bore down on the fields when the watermelon crop was setting, the melons would blacken and fall off the vine.

As for the alfalfa: “As the sun warmed up on a smoggy day you could see the leaves turn yellow,” said Stanley Cooley, Dortha’s husband.

The most obvious change in town, aside from the new houses, is the reduction of Slover Mountain, which as children we nicknamed Cement Mountain. Once a craggy landmark just outside the city limits, today it resembles a broken molar after decades of quarrying by a cement company.

Years of Digging

As a child, I knew the mountain was being ground up. I got used to hearing explosions up there and to seeing trucks crawling over it. But it was still disconcerting to drive up close and see it in its present state.

“Mt. Slover always had a kind of mystical presence to me. It was a symbol of life and death,” said Dennis Zane, a childhood friend from Colton who now is mayor of Santa Monica. “I remember thinking that once it gets down to the ground, the community would die.”

But the community had not died and I found few in town who mourned the mountain. The cement plant provided jobs and the mountain wasn’t good for much “setting up there covered with greasewood and cactus,” said Donald McIntosh, 95, a former coach after whom a gym at the high school is named.

This working man’s practicality can be traced to Colton’s founding in 1887 on a seemingly worthless sandy plain at the foot of a limestone mountain named for Isaac Slover, a trapper who lived up there and died at the age of 81 in a fight with a grizzly bear. It became a raw, industrial town seemingly always in competition with its bigger neighbor, San Bernardino, or just Berdoo, which in my mother’s high school years they translated as “Bird Doo.”

The rivalry between the towns goes back to the 1880s, when the Southern Pacific Railroad, one of Colton’s most important industries, hired Wyatt’s brother Virgil Earp to stop the California Southern trains out of San Bernardino from crossing the SP tracks in Colton.

Virgil, fresh from the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., guarded the track for a year with a shotgun until Gov. Robert Waterman, whom old Colton residents still damn as a “San Bernardino man,” showed up with a court order and an armed band out of San Bernardino. Virgil put down his gun.

Move From Oklahoma

My grandfather, C. L. Pinson, arrived from the Oklahoma dust bowl in 1932 and opened a service station in south Colton. As a child a quarter century later, Colton to me was a place of orchards and parched beauty. I remember hot, dry summers hunting horned toads in endless fields covered with sagebrush and mustard.

One of our proudest moments came in 1954, when a city team came in second at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. One of the saddest occurred in 1964, when the star of that team, Kenny Hubbs, who had gone on to play second base for the Chicago Cubs, died in a plane crash.

A Los Angeles television news crew drove out past the grapevines to do a story about the death of the small-town sports star. I forget what they said about Kenny. What I remember is how the reporter introduced our town to his viewers as “a gas stop off the freeway” on the way to Palm Springs.

But if Los Angeles had just discovered--and just as quickly dismissed--us, we knew all about Los Angeles. Neon-lit and sophisticated, it was made more exotic by my grandfather’s warnings when he would take me to a Dodger game that drivers there were so mean “they’ll run ya right off’n the road.”

Los Angeles also was the place that we blamed for poisoning our town. Of course, L.A. had no more malice for us than a shoe has for an ant. By nature and by circumstance, Los Angeles was bred to be a smog factory. Weather conditions in summer created a layer of warm air that acted as a lid on pollution created by the explosive growth in the Los Angeles Basin in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Because coastal breezes blew the pollution inland, Los Angeles’ problem inevitably became our problem. In fact, because it takes several hours for the hydrocarbons and nitrogen dioxides emitted by cars to fully react to form ozone, by the time the wall of pollution pooled up over us at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, the levels were particularly high.

High Ozone Levels

In 1973, average ozone levels measured in San Bernardino surpassed Pasadena, an early smog victim. The comparison with downtown Los Angeles was even more dramatic. In 1977, Los Angeles had three first-stage smog alerts, while San Bernardino had 70 first-stage alerts and one second-stage alert.

Also, our valley suffered from the highest levels of particulates in the L.A. Basin. These are tiny bits of dust and other matter emitted by industries, or formed from chemical reactions that transformed gaseous pollutants into solids. While people think of ozone when they think of smog, ozone is invisible. Particulates help form the ugly, thick haze that transformed the setting sun into a bloated, sickly yellow star.

Bill Sessa, spokesman for the state Air Resources Board, remembers going on a tour of the San Bernardino Valley one June day in the mid-’70s. “The air was the color of mahogany on a desk,” he said.

There was a heated political debate at one time over whether Los Angeles smog was in fact migrating east. But O. C. Taylor, acting director of the Statewide Air Pollution Research Center at UC Riverside, now says it is clear that “the biggest part of it came from Los Angeles and Orange counties.”

“In some ways we were annexed by smog,” Zane said.

That isn’t to say we bore no blame for our problems. A 1970 report by the San Bernardino County Air Pollution Control District said Kaiser Steel, the biggest industrial polluter in the state at the time, released 47.49 tons of pollutants daily. San Bernardino County’s automobiles emitted more than 1,000 tons of pollutants each day, according to the report.

Offbeat Attacks

Inventors drew up imaginative plans to get rid of the hated smog. Taylor said one proposed erecting giant fans in the mountains to blow out the pollution. An engineering study showed it would take all the electricity produced by Hoover Dam in a week to run the fans for one day.

Another man brought to the research center a model of flexible pipe he proposed to attach to the smokestacks of all stationary pollution sources in Los Angeles. The emissions would be captured and disposed of through a maze of tubes. Noting the drawing power of such a funnel system would be enormous, Taylor asked the inventor how he planned to keep people from being sucked into it. “He hadn’t thought of that,” Taylor said.

Unable to work magic on the pollution in Colton, some of us left. I disliked going back even for visits. Friends gone on to bigger houses in other, cleaner, towns began referring to the area derisively as “the armpit of the world.”

There was the arrogance of youth in that, the belief that we had left our small-town upbringing and lack of sophistication far behind. But the phrase also described our anger over the change we witnessed in the once-beautiful valley.

Those who stayed coped. At its peak, ozone levels in the valley were measured as high as 0.65 parts per million, far above a reading that would trigger a Stage III smog alert today, and high enough to kill weak and elderly people, according to some medical experts.

Colton recreation officials called the Fire Department each day to check the smog level before allowing children’s athletic programs to take place. Stiles recalls having to cancel Little League contests just before game time, with parents in the stands and players in uniform. “We just shut the game off. The coaches didn’t appreciate that at all,” he said.

Predictable Shutdowns

The steel foundry where my father worked called employees in to work early during the summer to fill as many orders as possible before the afternoon alert forced them to shut down. On July 19, 1972, a milestone of sorts was reached when a San Bernardino district postal official decided there was nothing in the postman’s motto about ignoring rain, sleet and snow that said anything about smog. The official said mail carriers would be recalled from their rounds during smog alerts to protect their health.

The next day, however, his superiors sent his idea to the dead letter file, saying it is vital to continue deliveries “in times of crisis.”

Today, because of pollution controls on automobiles and industries, the problem has eased somewhat. But smog remains an omnipresent problem in the summer and fall. In 1986, first-stage alert ozone levels were exceeded on 41 days in San Bernardino.

“I find it a lot more depressing than a mountain no longer being there,” merchant Helman said. “When I can smell the smog and feel it, it’s almost nightmarish when you consider the smog can be so bad that people can’t play outside. What is the cost of progress when you can’t even go outside and enjoy the warm sunshine?”

“What concerns us is our kids. Is it going to shorten our life span?” asked Mayor Frank Gonzales.

Many things had changed in Colton since the days when you could smell citrus all over town and when you could see Santa Catalina Island from the San Bernardino Mountains. But a community is more than a collection of buildings and farmland.

Social Events

I found as I talked to people who had stayed in town that some things had not changed. Social life for many still revolves around Colton High School’s Yellowjacket football team, the neighborhood and the family, just as it did when I was a child.

It is still a small town. And in some ways it is the same small town. It weathered the shutdown of Kaiser Steel and today most people are employed, though the blue-collar jobs no longer pay what they once did. “We are economically sound,” Helman said. “We may be economically poor,” he added, but the streets get resurfaced and the city is self-sufficient.

Gonzales is taking Colton in an activist direction. He engineered the annexation of several square miles of land along the city boundaries and recently struck a blow for civic pride when he negotiated the return of historic Agua Mansa Cemetery, where many of the area’s original settlers are buried. Somehow, this symbol of the community’s past had been allowed to fall into the hands of neighboring Rialto.

And, just as before, people in town remain hopeful that something can be done about the smog. Even the recent improvement in air quality, however, may be reversed due to growth. The Air Resources Board says people in California are driving 65% more miles than a decade ago.

On the once-breezy local freeways, it is now “almost a parking lot at times,” Taylor said