Only a Question of Time?

It was the most persistent smog in Los Angeles history; the yellow-grey pall had hung over the city for more than two weeks, shutting off the sunshine, befouling the famed Southern California air and stinging the eyes of outraged thousands. Angelenos were not only appalled but furious. Pasadena property owners howled for the heads of the county board of supervisors, demanded that smog-producing industries be shut down.

None of this prevented Los Angeles' hundreds of publicity-minded folk from gleefully using the smog for their own purposes. Singer Jo Stafford arrived in town carrying two caged canaries, cracked: "It's an old miner's trick; if the canaries die I go back to New York."

Visitor Ogden Nash whipped out a short commemorative verse:

/ do not love Louse Angeles, I came here all agog. To find myself a lone D.P., Invisible in smog.

The effect of all this suggested a dangerous possibility: smog would soon be so valuable to the publicity men, radio gag writers and others who now make their living off jokes about Los Angeles' dry river bed and rare snowstorms, that support of antismog ordinances would be regarded as proof of disloyalty to the local way of life. After that it would be only a question of time before Los Angeles began boasting "Bigger Smogs than Pittsburgh" and movie stars took to wearing miners' lamps instead of dark glasses and sunshine was apologetically dismissed as "unusual weather."

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