Capturing memories of a bygone Lomita on videotape.

Julia Marie Steigh remembers a Lomita without a sheriff’s station, park, library or even a city charter.

Over the years, adding those elements to Lomita changed the small South Bay city, the 74-year-old resident said.

“The only thing that bothers me about all the changes is we have so much traffic,” she said. “But my husband and I love Lomita and hope to stay here always.”

Steigh recounted 67 years of life in Lomita at a recent meeting of the Lomita Historical Society. Her testimony was captured on videotape and will become part of an oral history of Lomita as seen through the eyes of its longtime residents.

Historical Society President Cindy Beiro said she plans to edit several interviews together into one videotape when she gets enough material for a two-hour tape. She also plans to get footage of historical sites in Lomita, putting together a presentation that is easy to watch and accessible to the public.

“We are capturing history for the future of our town,” she said. “When people look at these tapes 50 years from now, it’s going to blow their minds.”

Beiro got the idea while watching 50-year-old footage of the building of Kiwanis Hall in Lomita. The film was incorporated into a video presentation on the history of the Lomita-Harbor City Kiwanis Club and showed men in plaid shirts and baggy overalls building the hall by hand, against a backdrop of open lots and streets lined with with old Fords.

“I looked at this video of how it was 50 years ago, and I thought it was unbelievably intriguing. It lives when it’s videotaped. People might not take the time to read about history. But with video, you might have a better attention span.”

Although gathering oral histories is nothing new to historical societies, the use of videotape is just now becoming established, according to Terri Schorzman, program manager of a video history project at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

“We are just starting to look at how we can use videotape as historical documentation,” she said. “I think it’s a great way to capture a community and how it developed. You can reach out to a lot of people, because people are so tuned in to visual media anyway.”

City historians in Torrance, Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach have embarked on oral history projects using audiotape and are planning to make use of videotape in the future. The city of Carson, Harbor College and UCLA also have collections of oral histories on audiotape.

But videotapes are far more expensive to produce than audiotapes, Schorzman said. There is practically no limit to how much a city can invest in equipment and staff to produce archival or broadcast-quality images.

Beiro is offsetting the cost by using talented volunteers to film and produce the videotapes. The city of Hermosa Beach is trying to line up journalism and film students to record its oral history.

Steigh was the fourth person to be interviewed by the society. Two former mayors and a community leader were also videotaped.

Jim Cole, a former mayor and journalist, recalled his days at Narbonne High School before it was relocated to Harbor City. The building at the Lomita site became Alexander Fleming Junior High.

One of his most vivid memories is of a day during World War II when a P-38 fighter circled the school and crashed a block away.

“It was the first time war was brought to Lomita,” he said. “It crashed in a victory garden right between two houses. We all ran over there.”

He also recounted how Lomita was once a sprawling unincorporated community, stretching west to the sea, and south over the Palos Verdes Peninsula to where Marineland used to be. Neighboring cities began annexing portions of the community and finally drove the city to incorporate in 1964.

“We want details that were never presented in writing,” Beiro said. “We have the fact that it snowed in Lomita one year, and when boats floated down the streets” during a flood.

Cole addressed that 1948 snowstorm. “Our greatest thrill was throwing snowballs at the teachers as they rode to school,” he recalled.

According to Beiro, Steigh was so nervous about the interview that she asked that members not be notified of the meeting. Beiro decided to videotape the interview herself, so her cameraman would not fluster Steigh with directions.

“The women are so shy,” Beiro said. “The men will get up there and just go on and on.”

The ordeal over, Steigh let out a sigh of relief and accepted congratulations, along with a slice of cake. She told society members how the first mayor of Lomita rode to high school on a horse.

“I was always afraid of horses,” she said. “And he used to chase me up and down the street with that darn horse.”