O, HAPPY DAYS!

In “When We Were Very Young,” by Charles Perry (Feb. 4), one sentence (“The city lumbered into action and maintained some Quonset huts left over from the war as cheap public housing”) does not even begin to tell about the amount of housing furnished to war workers, returning veterans and low-income families by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. This agency was born in 1938, shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a statement concerning the one-third of a nation that he saw as “ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished.”

Housing Authority files have many photographs taken during the late 1930s and early 1940s, documenting the construction of temporary housing, including trailer homes and Quonset huts. Hundreds of units of permanent housing also were constructed, for those working at the shipyards, the plane factories and other defense industries in the Los Angeles area.

The Quonset-hut development was called Rodger Young Village in honor of a young veteran of World War II. Later, an auditorium was built in Los Angeles, also in his honor. Many of the GIs who were stationed in California, or who passed through on their way to the South Pacific or Japan, liked what they saw here and returned after war’s end.

JOSEPH F. GELLETICH, ACTING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOUSING AUTHORITY, Los Angeles