Chapter 3: Suburban pioneers

Although advertisements for new suburbs emphasized that “Everyone – non-veteran and veteran alike – can have an FHA home,” not all potential buyers were welcome in the new suburbs of Los Angeles County, including Lakewood. Restrictions on homeowners were written into nearly every deed issued in the county's tract-house suburbs. Real estate advertisements in the Long Beach Press Telegram and the Los Angeles Times highlighted "restricted" developments and pointed out which tracts were "the white spots" of development. The implication was obvious; racial restrictions were the norm throughout Southern California.

Lakewood Park sold the idea of a suburban way of life.

Even though a Supreme Court ruling in 1948 had prohibited local governments from enforcing the racially restrictive covenants that were routinely included in property deeds throughout Los Angeles County, the court’s ruling did not actually abolish racially-based housing discrimination.

The practice of steering buyers into racially defined neighborhoods with the assistance of federal housing officials continued throughout Los Angeles County into the mid-1960s.

In resisting sales to non-white buyers, developers in the new suburbs of Los Angeles County were acting on the belief that racially mixed communities would not retain their resale value, putting federally-backed loans at risk. In fact, the FHA routinely refused to guarantee loans to buyers of existing homes in a racially mixed neighborhood.

The FHA's technical bulletin "Planning Profitable Neighborhoods," issued in 1938, recommended that builders should aim at creating homogeneous markets segregated by race and socioeconomic level. Banks adopted this standard when making loans to buyers.

Steering buyers was common. Woodrow W. Smith was a Lakewood Park sales manager in 1950. “I had the responsibility of making certain that the applicants were not going to be people who would be objected to by their neighbors,” he told historian Allison Baker in 1996. “And when (Black buyers) would come ... they used to turn them over to me. And I'd sit down and talk to them. I'd say, ‘It may not be in your best interest, so you better think about it carefully before you make this decision. I can't prevent you and I won't, but you'd better think about it.'"

Black, Latino, and Asian homebuyers heard a version of this warning from sellers in almost every suburban development in Southern California.

Jewish buyers, who had also been the subject of housing discrimination elsewhere in Southern California, were more fortunate in Lakewood Park. Jewish buyers were welcome. In 1955, a reporter for the Long Beach Press Telegram estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 Jewish families made Lakewood their home.

Lakewood today is not the Lakewood Park of 1950. Lakewood in the 1990s was described is one of the most diversifying cities in California, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Today, the families of Lakewood are as mixed in their ethnicity as any community in Los Angeles County, a diversity that city leaders consider a significant community value. Lakewood voters elected their first Latino council member, Joe Esquivel, in 1990. Esquivel later served five terms as Lakewood’s mayor. They elected their first Asian council member, Ariel Pe, in 2020. Also in 2020, Vicki L. Stuckey became the city's first Black council member.

In 2020 according to the Census Bureau, Lakewood’s population was roughly 33 percent Hispanic, 19 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 9 percent Black, and 34 percent white/non-Hispanic.

"Visualize the advantages your family will enjoy with the ownership of your own home in Lakewood,” read one Lakewood Park advertisement. Prospective homebuyers could actually see the advantages by touring model Lakewood homes guided by young athletes from Long Beach Junior College (one of them, Wayne Piercy, would later become Lakewood's mayor).

The model homes were furnished and decorated by the May Company department store and the Aaron Schultz furniture store in all the latest color schemes and styles, including Maple, Traditional, Modern, and Provincial.

Lakewood Park's model homes in 1950 highlighted how adaptable these small houses could be.

“Not a bit like the usual ‘tract’ house we’ve seen,” another advertisement proclaimed. Lakewood’s homes were “architect-designed” by Paul Duncan, AIA, with 13 basic floor plans in the first phase of development and four variations of each, offering homebuyers 52 different treatments, for which there were 39 color combinations. All front doors, however, were painted red.

In anticipation of the baby boom, said the Long Beach Press-Telegram, two of the bedrooms in the three-bedroom modes got respective coats of pink and blue paint.

Buyers also were attracted to the selection of “luxury features” available, including a cedar shingle roof, “extra thick hardwood floors,” “a charming bay window,” “beautifully detailed trim-shutters, trellised porches, handsome doors,” “scientifically-determined storage space,” and “landscaped front and side lawns,” complete with a tree planted in the parkway in front of the house.

(Years later, Lakewood city officials wished that the tree planted in front of each house had been chosen with more care. Those trees, planted for quick growth, later cost the city millions of dollars in street, sidewalk, curb, and gutter repairs when their root systems outgrew the parkway.)

“Scientific” planning was a major selling point for the new community. Even the idea of parkway panels separating residential streets from major highways was described as part of the city’s “scientific plan.”

The kitchens in Lakewood houses featured stainless steel counters and a double sink with a Waste King Pulverator, making Lakewood “the largest planned garbage-free community in America.”

Ruth Houston recalled her excitement as a child when her family moved into their three-bedroom home. It was a huge improvement over their home in rural Illinois, where a family of eight had crowded into a two-bedroom house with no indoor plumbing. Their new Lakewood home was roomy and bright, with a big patio window, a kitchen outfitted with cabinets, and a “nice white, pretty bathtub and shower.”

Street lights and sidewalks, paid for Lakewood Park, were major selling points for some buyers.

But their home didn’t have a telephone, at least initially. The Long Beach Press Telegram reported in 1950 that the local phone company, facing a huge backlog, had filled the gap in Lakewood by installing outdoor pay phones on poles at some corner houses. A homeowner who agreed to have a pay phone on the front lawn was paid one cent for every five-cent call made from the phone.

Postal service was equally scarce. With no home mail delivery, early Lakewood residents had to travel to the post office on Village Road near Carson Street to collect their mail.

The new neighborhoods also lacked bus service. Owning a car was practically a requirement for living in Lakewood.

Lakewood also didn’t have enough classrooms for the 10,000 new students the Long Beach Unified School District expected to enroll by the end of 1952. Some schools were already on double session by the end of the school year in 1951. The 1960 census showed that 20 percent of married women in the labor force in Lakewood had children under six years old.

Life magazine published a photograph in 1953 that was supposed to be a typical day in booming Lakewood, with a moving van in every driveway and each family’s belongings on their front lawn. In reality, it was a staged publicity photograph. As Lakewood Park Corporation publicist Rochlen recounted, new residents "were moving in at the rate of 60 families a day. So to symbolize that, we got 60 moving vans up and on the street and told people just to come out and put out a few pieces of furniture on the lawn.”

Lakewood’s first residents were said to be “pioneers on the new suburban frontier.” Tom and Janet MacHale remembered when “Dairy Valley (present-day Cerritos) was all cows and (Lakewood was) the end of the line; there were no freeways.”

Nearby hog farms and dairies made suburban Lakewood seem semi-rural.

Pungent smells from the nearby dairies and hog farms wafted through Lakewood Park neighborhoods, especially on damp mornings. Some residents could hear cows mooing. Jackrabbits, possums, snakes, and even foxes were a common sight in the unbuilt tracts east of the new construction.

“We had toads in our backyard, and every time we’d go out there to dig along the wall, there’d be all these toads,” recalled one resident. “And once, I got out of the car and came up the walk and I stepped on something and it turned out to be a toad.” (Video: Lakewood's suburban pioneers)

June Tweedy recounted that, in her women’s sorority, one girl from back east “just loved that smell (of dairies) ... And here we all were with our eyes watering!” Betty Dilly referred to the dust in the air as “horrendous.” And John Rae described his new neighborhood as “pretty barren.”

The new homeowners of Lakewood Park were not exactly middle-class by most measures. A 1955 report noted that more than 25 percent of the Lakewood work force was employed in workshops and in fieldwork as foremen or mechanics. The 1960 census showed that 58.7 percent of male Lakewood workers had blue-collar jobs and that most residents 25 years of age and over had less than a high school education, with only 38.6 percent having completed high school.

Good, well-paying jobs were near at hand in the city's early years. According to a 1955 labor report, 3.2 percent of Lakewood's workforce was employed in Lakewood, 38 percent in Long Beach, and 12.2 percent in Los Angeles. Only 1.3 percent were employed more than fifteen miles from home; 22.5 percent worked ten to fifteen miles away.

New residents, like these square dancers, joined in creating a sense of community.

A surprisingly large percentage of women worked to support their family. Women took jobs out of financial necessity. Wayne Piercy recalled that his wife worked while he held two jobs, so that the family could afford a home in 1956.

Men's work in Lakewood reflected the ups and downs of a defense-based economy. John Rae, an engineer at Douglas, recalled that he had been laid off four times over a forty-year period. In 1951, shortly after Rae and his family moved into their Lakewood home, a six­-week strike at Douglas began. Rae had to find work helping contractors remodel homes in order to pay his mortgage.

Many residents encountered other hardships living on the new suburban frontier. Birdie Levy recalled that Lakewood was prone to flooding. “We had an extremely heavy rainfall about the second or third year that we lived here,” Levy noted. The rain was so bad that Levy’s friend came down the street in a boat. “He paddled all the way down, and the water covered (the street) from curb to curb!”

Bud Rynerson, the husband of future city council member and mayor Jackie Rynerson, also remembered the difficulties and frustrations that he and his wife experienced. “When we moved in, we had no lawns, we had no planting of any kind, and we were relatively poor, having just purchased a house,” he told CityTV. “Our backyard and front yard are all adobe (soil), and that’s tough stuff to dig. I decided the way to break through this hard surface was to rent a power auger ... I stuck this power auger down in the hole that I had dug and I turned the power auger on and pshooo! I went around and around in a circle and the auger didn’t move at all.” That was Rynerson’s last experience with gardening with a power auger.

Lawns and gardens and backyard fences brought neighbors together, helping one another as new families settled in. In the process, they began to form a sense of community.

Lakewood's young families were building new lives as well as a new community.

June Tweedy detailed the camaraderie that emerged as neighbors built fences. “Everybody was moving in and there was nothing but dirt out here. (The developers) planted the front lawns, but they didn’t plant the back lawns. There weren’t any fences up, so there were dogs, there were cats, there were kids running all over. But everybody sort of went together with their neighbors … and put up a fence; and then we went with the neighbors behind us, and we went halves on the fence. The people next door were just a young couple; they didn’t have a penny to spare, so they couldn’t go in on the fence, so we said we’d put that part of the fence up. And then everybody started putting in their yards and their lawns and it was fun.”

Margie Lehner Armstrong also recalled the generosity of her new neighbors. One of the men in her neighborhood, who worked in construction, supplied his neighbors with used bricks to build flower planters. Each night, the men of the neighborhood gathered to clean the old bricks and then helped each other build the planters.

Meanwhile, Tom and Janet MacHale remembered their neighborhood’s budding social life. “We socialized quite a bit. Everybody went back and forth and talked about their gardens and their yard.”

As residents got to know one another, they discovered how much they had in common, despite their differences in background and beliefs. They were mostly young families (the average age of the men was 32 and 26 for women). Most homeowners had one child and another on the way.

“Everybody was in the same boat,” recalled Janet MacHale. “We were all struggling to get the house and furnishings together.” Jackie Rynerson remembered the excitement of founding a new community. “We were full of hope with the war behind us, and it was like starting a new life.”

By early 1952, at least 45 civic, religious, fraternal, and service organizations (including school PTAs) had been organized by residents in Lakewood and the adjacent Lakewood Village.

New residents quickly became neighbors, sharing the labor to build fences and put in lawns.

Bob and Barbara Brent remembered that “We were all about the same age, most, if not all, had young children and we were all financially challenged! But we had faith in our future and looked forward to making a good life for our children and ourselves. It didn’t take long to get acquainted with our neighbors, help each other out with child care, weekends spent sharing cost and labor to put up fences, plant lawns, gardens, and flowers. We formed friendships and our children formed friendships, some to last a lifetime.”

For June Tweedy, what was most memorable was developing those relationships. “We just got acquainted with everybody on a first-name basis, and we were all friendly and borrowing things from each other. Everyone was about the same age when we came out. There was about a ten-year span from say their early 20s to their early 30s. And the kids were all about the same age, and we were all buying our homes at the same time. And every street was like that.”

Tweedy and other original residents noted that many people got to know each other through their children. “When the kids went to school and got acquainted, that’s when (parents) got acquainted, because I didn’t know people on the other side of Woodruff,” said Tweedy. “But then all of a sudden when (Tweedy’s daughter Robin) started school, she made friends with Chris and we became real good friends with her folks.”

Jackie Rynerson echoed the same experience with her children. “The children were the ones who sort of got you acquainted. Because this was all brand new. Because it was such a big effort. And it was all these new people ... everybody was busy trying to get acquainted, just even taking care of their children, working out their transportation – most of us only had one car.”

The booming youth population led Lakewood mothers into politics almost as soon as new families moved in. After several children were struck by cars on the way to school, concerned mothers staged protest demonstrations to pressure county officials to give their neighborhoods crossing guards and traffic signals.

Parents also banded together to provide safer places for their sons and daughters to play. Lakewood’s drainage ditches were unfenced, park sites were unimproved, and Lakewood’s youth often played in the streets.

The Lakewood Taxpayers Association and the Lakewood Park, Recreation and Parkway District coordinated efforts to deal with these neighborhood concerns. Both organizations represented Lakewood’s early efforts at organized civic activism.

The Lakewood Taxpayers Association (LTA) was founded by Lakewood Village residents in late 1947. When attorney John Todd arrived in 1949, he found that the LTA was the most active civic group in his family’s new neighborhood.

LTA projects included lowering the cost of street lighting, closing hog farms, improving traffic safety, and developing a county zoning ordinance for Lakewood.

One of the first campaigns for civic activists targeted Lakewood’s open drainage ditches. Ruth Smith recalled how dangerous the ditches were. “You’d have to worry if there was a flood,” she said. “If there was rain, you’d have to drag (the kids) out of there.” In response, the LTA launched a “Make Our Ditch Safe for Kids” campaig in 1951. The open ditch issue would continue to play a role in the anti-annexation campaign two years later, as revealed in a pamphlet entitled “What about the ditches?”

700 mothers in 1953 protested plans by Long Beach to open a "prison farm" on the edge of unincorporated Lakewood.

Residents were concerned about the lack of supervised parks in Lakewood. The Lakewood Park Corporation had set aside park sites, but had neither developed them nor deeded them to the county.

Lakewood residents also worried about Long Beach’s proposal to build an “honor farm” to house minor offenders near the Carson Park unit of new Lakewood homes. An army of 700 Lakewood mothers and their children picketed Long Beach City Hall in 1953 with signs reading “Our kids don’t want to grow up with a jail!”

Despite the protests, the Long Beach City Council allowed the detention facility to be built, but the issue provided anti-annexationists with an example of Long Beach's indifference to local issues in Lakewood.

In writing his memoir of Lakewood’s development and incorporation, former City Attorney John Todd recalled that Long Beach early on had designs on the Lakewood area. “In July of 1951,” Todd wrote, “a rumor arose that (Long Beach) had adopted a master plan of parks, commencing at the ocean and continuing up the San Gabriel River channel to Carson Street, then along Carson Street in the so-called 'shotgun strip' now known as Heartwell Park. Also included in this maze would be the Lakewood Golf Course as a Long Beach recreational facility.”

The golf course in those years was the focus of another troubling issue. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors proposed an ordinance in 1952 to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages at county golf courses, but a study of the no-alcohol plan showed that the Lakewood golf course would not be financially viable without liquor sales.

John Todd, then a young attorney, joined his neighbors in advocating public improvements for the new Lakewood community.

“In 1952, I appeared before the Board of Supervisors,” Todd later wrote, “and argued against the county ordinance. Herb Legg, our representative on the Board of Supervisors, supported our position. The battle before the board was deep and bitter. Prohibitionists and other groups were joining the battle. If the sale of liquor was prohibited at the country club, the golf course was virtually doomed …”

The residents of Lakewood Village feared the unprofitable golf course would inevitably be subdivided for house lots. “Supervisor Legg’s deputy, George Turner, called a meeting at the country club. I was present, as were Lee Hollopeter, Ed Walker, and Arvo Van Alystyne of the County Counsel’s office.”

Todd and the others agreed that the county-run Lakewood Park, Recreation and Parkway District, which included only neighborhoods south of Carson Street, should be extended to include all of Lakewood and be governed by its own board of directors elected by the residents of the expanded district. Once an independent district had been created, the county could transfer the Lakewood golf course and clubhouse to the Lakewood district. Liquor sales wouldn’t be an issue any more.

According to Todd, “Active in the battle in those days to preserve the golf course, in addition to Walker and me, were Hollopeter, then manager of the Lakewood Water Company; Gene Nebeker, an energetic real estate broker and member of the Lakewood Jaycees; Clark Searle of the Lakewood Taxpayers Association; Peter Nitrini, manager of the May Company and representative of the Lakewood business people; and Don Nelson, a vice president of People’s Bank and representative of the Chamber of Commerce.”

The group’s strategy succeeded in having all of Lakewood annexed to the Lakewood Park, Recreation and Parkway District, and the Board of Supervisors set a special election to elect a governing board. Gene Nebeker, Donald W. Nelson, Ken Phillips, Charles Wright, and Todd were among the candidates, who decided to run as a slate.

The creation of an independent park and recreation district in 1953 was Lakewood's first experience of self-government.

“This was Lakewood’s first election battle,” Todd wrote. “The contest became hot and heavy. Two groups developed. One group – the slate that included Nebeker, Nelson, Phillips, Wright, and me – supported the proposition of expansion and development of the Lakewood Park, Recreation and Parkway District in order to maintain the Lakewood area and ultimately prevent loss of the golf course. Another group comprised of such local leaders as Attorney Robert W. Devitt and Ruth H. Bach, was devoted to the proposition of obtaining a majority on the board of directors so that the district could be dissolved as the first step toward ultimate annexation of all of the Lakewood area by the city of Long Beach.”

On March 3, 1953, the voters determined by a majority of 1,920 votes that the district should be self-governing and have its own board of directors. The voters elected Ruth H. Bach, Donald W. Nelson, Robert W. Devitt, Charles Wright, and John Todd to the district board.

“The Lakewood Enterprise edition on March 5, 1953 reported this event,” Todd’s memoir continues. “The front page of this paper also reflected the stormy times that then existed in Lakewood. Across the page were editorials and articles pertaining to Lakewood residents’ fight against annexation to Long Beach. This was the atmosphere in which Lakewood’s first real self-governing experiment came to life. Many of us who were concerned about the possibility or feasibility of Lakewood’s ultimate incorporation probably failed to see the trend emerging.”

Ironically, after the creation of the Lakewood Park, Recreation and Parkway District, the need to take the golf course clubhouse out of the hands of the Board of Supervisors never developed. A change in the board's membership resulted in a return to the board’s long-standing policy of permitting the sale of alcoholic beverages at county courses.

The recreation district worked with the Lakewood Water and Power Company to create "tot lot" playgrounds at the company's water well sites.

Todd was pleased to have been elected the first president of the Lakewood Park, Recreation and Parkway District. “During the time I served on the board, we succeeded in having most of the parkway panels in the Lakewood area developed with sprinklers, grass, and trees. In addition, we developed a tot lot program consisting of recreational facilities on eleven Lakewood Water and Power Company well sites. This proposal had been made by Hollopeter, and was so successful that he had a motion picture film made of the development and its use of the water well sites.” (Watch Investing in Young Lakewood)

The district’s projects included weekend recreation programs at ten of Lakewood's elementary school playgrounds and plans to purchase of three undeveloped park sites.