A Gusher of Memories : History: Exhibit of aerial photographs, maps and scrapbook snapshots explores the coastal oil and housing boom of The Roaring ‘20s.

The Roaring ‘20s, the days when wildcat oil wells and beachfront homes began to spring up side by side in Playa del Rey, will be revisited at Loyola Marymount University this week.

A display of old aerial photographs, historical maps, and scrapbooks of snapshots and newspaper clippings, put together by the Westchester-Playa del Rey Historical Society, will hark back to the boom days of the area. A special appearance by Miss Ocean Park of 1929 is also planned at Thursday’s program.

“A Blast Into the Past--the Historic Twenties” recalls an era when Playa del Rey was transformed from an isolated beach community into an oil boom town, said Mary Thomson, a society board member and spokeswoman for the historical society.

Smitten by black gold fever in the late 1920s through mid-’30s, owners of lots just big enough for a house drilled as many as three and four oil wells on their property. The only problem was that everyone else was doing the same, from Venice to the hillsides of Playa del Rey and Westchester, she said.

There was no permit process or environmental control to mitigate the drilling frenzy, and the number of wells went unabated because people thought that by drilling more wells they would get more oil, Thomson said. The housing market boomed with the oil boom. Homes competed with a forest of oil derricks and holding tanks for an ocean view.

But there wasn’t enough oil in the Venice oil field for everyone to make money. Many companies tapping into the oil pool went out of business, leaving uncapped wells and no records of where the wells had been.

The housing and oil boom got its start in the early ‘20s when the Dickinson & Gillespie Corp. bought much of the land on the hillside and began preparing it for house lots in 1924. The developer poured concrete streets where there had been dirt paths, installed underground utilities and brought in palm trees from Santa Monica, said Bob Krauch, a local history buff and society board member.

The company set up picnic grounds under a shaded eucalyptus grove for prospective buyers and sold lots for $200 to $500, calling the area Palisades del Rey.

Pillars made of hand-cut granite from Utah and topped with bright red geraniums were erected as beacons to the subdivision. Longtime residents remember a number of these markers, but only two cornerstones remain, marking the intersection of Culver Boulevard and Vista Del Mar.

During the real estate boom, underground utilities such as sewer lines were such a novelty that the developer took photographs of Miss Ocean Park posing in a bathing suit in front of an elaborate model showing a cross section of a lot with the paved road and the underground utilities.

Beatrice Dillworth, who at age 19 won the Miss Ocean Park title of 1929, toured the country, promoting silent films and the new “talkies.”

Dillworth, who is still a Playa del Rey resident, will appear at the show this week and share her scrapbook, Krauch said.

The peek into yesteryear begins with a reception at 6:30 p.m., and a video, titled “Water and Oil/What’s the Mix?” will be shown at 7:30 p.m. The free program is at Murphy Recital Hall at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester. Information: (310) 645-9242.