Pier Collapse Gave Budding Newspaperman His Chance

Long before Cinco de Mayo and the Chinese New Year infiltrated California’s civic calendar, newcomers to the state celebrated their roots in annual gatherings such as the Iowa Picnic and Empire Day.

On May 24, 1913, a few thousand English and Canadian expats converged for Empire Day, which honored both Queen Victoria’s birthday and the soldiers who had died for the British Empire. More would die before the day was done. And a newspaperman would be born.

On that particular Saturday, British loyalists gathered in Pasadena, Santa Monica and other cities, including Long Beach, where they crowded onto the double decks of the municipal Pine Avenue Pier. Celebrators were waiting for the pier auditorium’s doors to open at noon.

Mrs. J.A. Amson was working in her husband’s photography studio on the boardwalk just before lunch that day. She went outside to watch the crowd and listen to the band strike up “God Save the King.”

“There were several hundred people around the entrance.... tapping their feet in time to the music ... all pushing forward to be the first to enter [the auditorium],” she told a Times reporter who covered the event.

Amid the strains of the tune she heard loud creaks, then an ominous snap.

Forty feet of the pier collapsed, plunging hundreds of people into a chasm 25 feet deep.

“Those below [on the lower deck] must have simply suffocated, if their lives were not instantly crushed out by the weight of those above them,” Amson said.

Police and ambulances from around the county raced to the wreckage. (Some medical workers and Los Angeles police officers had to take the train, a 75-minute trip.) They hastily set up a makeshift hospital on the beach and roped off the pier and auditorium.

Rescue workers and bystanders dug through the rubble for the struggling, gasping injured and the dead. Seemingly endless numbers of bodies were hoisted with ropes to stretchers and blankets.

Each time someone was pulled out alive, a cheer went up from thousands of bystanders. The crowd fell silent when volunteers extricated a body.

“A lad of 10 years was seen to pass away in his mother’s arms as she was raising a glass of brandy to his lips,” wrote a reporter with the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “A broken-hearted father carried the limp and almost lifeless form of his 14-month-old baby.... His wife lay on the beach with her life crushed out. A mother saw her little boy smile and die ... a half hour after he had stood with her and cheered.”

Mrs. R.D. Lyons lay dying in the sand, her chest crushed. She was crying for her children, a girl of 3 and a boy of 7, who had been playing farther down the pier. A bystander found them unhurt and rushed them to her side. Lyons died with her children in her arms.

Nearly 50 men, women and children were killed that day, and more than 200 were injured.

Like Thornton Wilder’s tale of disparate lives united in death by a bridge collapse in his 1927 novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” any number of lives collided and came out of the Empire Day tragedy shattered -- or thanking Providence for a lucky break.

One of the latter was a young Canadian named Jim Richardson, who had recently moved to Los Angeles with his parents and family. He wanted to become a newspaperman but wasn’t having much luck.

In his 1954 autobiography, “For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor,” Richardson wrote of the weeks before the tragedy: “I was lonely and miserable. I had applied for work at the desk of every city editor in Los Angeles and had received a uniform reply -- ‘No openings.’ I wondered how I would ever get a chance on a Los Angeles paper.”

Because the Richardsons were Canadian, and strangers in a new country, they headed for the Empire Day celebration. He would become a hero, then fulfill his ambition.

“There was a moment of dreadful silence before we heard screams -- surprised, horrible screams,” he wrote about that awful day. “We saw the broken legs of a little girl protruding from the mass and a man whose head was turned completely around.... “

Richardson and his brother helped rescue victims. They were carrying a dead man away from the heap when the realization struck him.

“It’s a story!” he remembered thinking. “It’s a hell of a story. I dropped my end of the body and ran for a telephone.”

He called the Evening Herald, which had rejected him weeks earlier. “I was sweating and trembling and the blood of the dead man was on my hands when I got through to the City Desk with the flash of what had happened.”

In the days before cellphones, journalists were dependent on pay phones, and Richardson refused to share. Despite the entreaties of desperate survivors and other newsmen, he hung on, fighting off competitors. The Evening Herald scooped the city’s other five dailies by 30 minutes -- which was then an eternity in the newspaper biz. The Herald hired him as a reporter for $7.50 a week.

It’s unclear if his phone monopoly delayed emergency response.

The lawsuits that followed the disaster almost broke the city of Long Beach. The state Supreme Court found the city negligent for the rotted wooden pier pilings. There were 175 damage suits totaling $3.5 million -- more than $43 million in today’s dollars.

Just days before the disaster, a photographer who owned a business on the pier -- Mrs. Amson’s husband -- had informed a city building inspector that the pier was sagging in spots, where water collected. But the inspector either looked the other way or failed to act promptly.

Strict new construction rules resulted from the tragedy, including a requirement that buildings and piers have more stairway exits and better support, such as larger wooden girders.

Long Beach floated bonds to defray victims’ damage suits, which were settled in 1918 for $400,000 -- about as much as the entire Long Beach school budget that year.

The Long Beach Pike, Southern California’s first seaside amusement park, was shut for the duration of the crisis. The entire pier was closed for two years.

City officials advocated tearing it down, but residents rallied, raising thousands of dollars to repair the popular landmark. The pier reopened in 1915 and remained for 16 years.

In 1931, it was torn down and replaced with the horseshoe-shaped Rainbow Pier, which itself was later torn down for redevelopment.

Richardson went on to report the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and other news over the decades, and eventually became city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner.

But his newspapering skills were not enough to endear him to colleagues, who considered him a bully. He came to be known as “the last of the terrible men.”

Richardson wrote about his struggles with liquor and his unstable personal and professional life, as well as the years it took to kick his drinking habit.

Richardson was “the worst kind of drunk -- a reformed one,” wrote Times columnist Jack Smith years later. “Richardson was humorless and tyrannical, but a good city editor.”

By the 1950s, as Canadian and British immigrants’ numbers declined, Empire Day celebrations slipped into history.