Taking a Drive Down a Congested Memory Lane

Steve Courso’s remembrance of things past, at 80, has stirred memories in other Angelenos. Mostly they have vindicated his memories as on the mark, except that the Paramount Theater was at 6th and Hill, not 5th.

Another error was my own. Gilmore Stadium was not, as I recalled, the home of the Hollywood Stars. Gilmore Stadium, at Fairfax and Beverly, was the site of midget automobile racing and football games (the Los Angeles Bulldogs, Loyola University); the home of the Hollywood stars was Gilmore Field , east of the stadium near Pan Pacific Auditorium.

Several readers verify that I was right in remembering that double-decker buses ran on Wilshire Boulevard; but Courso was also evidently right that they ran on Sunset as well.

M. L. Snellen remembers being on the upper deck of a bus that stopped for a traffic light at Wilshire and Vermont. In the street alongside the bus he saw Cary Grant at the wheel of a custom Phantom Corsair. “With his customary extroverted charm he waved at us.”

“You’re right,” says Allan Paul of Costa Mesa. “The double-decker buses did run on Wilshire, but on Sunset too. Both routes gave the topside rider not just a wonderful view but an unforgettable perspective.”

Numerous readers have offered answers to my question, “Who was responsible for dismantling the Red Cars?” The consensus is that the Pacific Electric interurban system of Big Red Cars was cynically trashed by General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tires to promote the sale of their products.

There certainly is evidence to support that theory. Alf B. Nielsen sends a page from the American Heritage History of Railroads in America. It notes that PE operated 1,164 miles of track serving more than 50 Southern California communities when GM and Standard Oil, through a subsidiary, bought the system, “scrapped its electric cars, tore down its power transmission lines, uprooted the tracks, and placed GM diesel buses fueled by Standard Oil on Los Angeles city streets. Los Angeles’ quiet, pollution-free, electric train system was totally destroyed.”

David I. Lippert sends a Times editorial of May 10, 1979, written by my former colleague Phil Kerby, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Kerby observed that “a willing society that prized mobility and the family bus above all else made it possible, but the motorization of America was not preordained.”

He cited a five-year study (published by a Senate committee) whose conclusion was that “GM and its auto industry allies severed Los Angeles’ regional rail links and then motorized its downtown heart.”

General Motors replied that the Red Cars were doomed by “the personal preferences of the people,” but in Chicago a federal jury convicted GM, Standard Oil, Firestone and others of conspiring to replace electric transportation with buses.”

According to the Washington Post, GM rampaged over America, destroying rail transit systems in 45 cities. It quoted the 102-page study prepared for the Senate: “Largely as a result (of the conspiracy) Los Angeles is today an ecological wasteland. The palm trees are dying of petrochemical smog; the orange groves have been paved over by 300 miles of freeways; the air is a septic tank into which 4 million cars, half of them built by General Motors, pump 13,000 tons of pollutants daily. . . .” (Those figures of course are out of date.)

A revisionist view was offered in The Times on Sept. 13, 1987, by Scott L. Bottles, a historian and banker. Bottles conceded that GM and its affiliates bought up and scrapped numerous rail transit systems and replaced them with diesel buses; but he argued that the people were dissatisfied with the rail service and that the local company had decided four years earlier to replace the electric cars with buses.

As GM had, he blamed Angelenos’ love of their automobiles as the reason for the change. He said “motorists had to fight the railways for the right to use city streets.” It was the automobile, he said, not the interurban system, that created a decentralized Los Angeles. Unfortunately, he allowed, “decentralization and the auto would engender new problems.”

He concluded that Angelenos “freely adopted the automobile as their major means of transportation” long before GM and its co-conspirators made the automobile’s primacy inescapable.

So we did it to ourselves, with a little help from our corporate friends.

But I wish we could still ride the Big Red Cars all day Sunday for $1.