Above, yes, it's William Peter Blatty, author of "The Exorcist," writing about the Middle East. In fact, he was in the U.S. Foreign Service and stationed in Beirut ... Below, attempts to control air pollution in California ... Mamie Eisenhower visits her mother (this is Page 1 news?) ... Republican senators want President Eisenhower to do more to address unemployment ... And Ingrid Berman and Lars Schmidt plan a little getaway. 
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Oct. 10, 1957
Greg Armento, history librarian at Cal State Long Beach, dropped me a
note about early uses of "smog" in The Times. He noted that on March 29, 1914, The
Times said: "[Kokomo Times:] The esteemed Weather Bureau has sprung a
new
one. It is the word 'smog,' and it means smoke and fog. The bureau
explains
that very frequently there are times when this mixture is
apparent in the
atmosphere, and it considers the new word a great
little idea.
"Very
well, 'smog' let it be. But why end there? Let's call a mixture of
snow and
mud 'smud.' A mixture of snow and soot 'snoot,' and a mixture
of snow and
hail 'snail.' Thus we might have a weather forecast:
"Snail today,
turning to snoot tonight; tomorrow smoggy with smud."
Of course Proquest is a wonderful tool for such research on language.
And with just a bit of digging, we can find even earlier references to
smog. A July 30, 1905, article in the Chicago Daily Tribune credits the
word to Dr. Des Voeux of London's Coal Smoke Abatement Society.
According to the wire service article from the New York Herald, Des
Voeux proposed the word at a public health congress held in London to
discuss the city's polluted air. According the article, Des Voeux said
the name of London should be changed to "Smog" because the air was so
dirty.
"If the obsolete kitchen fire were abolished there would be less smog,"
the article says. "In fact, Des Voeux professed to be able to detect
three distinct diurnal smogs--breakfast, lunch and dinner smogs." His
novel solution was to use the London underground as a gigantic exhaust
system to pump out pollution and bring in fresh air.
Des Voeux is sometimes given credit for coining the term, but alas, as
soon as we crown him with this accomplishment, we must snatch it away,
for there are even earlier usages.
A Jan. 19, 1893, article in the Los Angeles Times credits an unidentified "witty English writer":
"The fact that the death rate of
London has recently almost doubled, going to over thirty in the
thousand, is sufficient attestation of the evil effects of the dense,
black fog which hung over that city for six consecutive days not long
ago.
These visitations, which a witty English writer once designated by the
name "smog," represent a condition of the atmosphere when it is
saturated with moisture and charged with soot and the fumes of sulfur
and carbonic acid gas from the chimneys and smokestacks of the great
city. It has long been known that they are harbingers of disease.
Not long ago, a story writer of the grewsome school published a
sketch in which he had all the people of London suffocated in one of
these fogs, with the exception of one man who made his escape by using
a Yankee device for manufacturing ozone."
As interesting as all this may be, the waxing and waning popularity of
the "N-word" in The Times over the years is a far more fascinating and
relevant pursuit. I hope to write more about the "N-word" in a later
post, for it went in and out of fashion regularly, nearly disappearing from
the paper during World War I and vanishing for several years during World War II.
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 Sept. 27, 1957
I never thought the time would come when I would write an ode to a single-chamber incinerator but here I am, doing it. Well, not exactly an ode but maybe a panegyric or at least a paean.
After Monday, householders can no longer burn, not even on unsmoggy mornings or calm evenings.
By official edict, the backyard incinerator has become a villain, convicted of contributing to the delinquency of smog and sentenced to death.
I don't know about other people but I shall miss carrying the kitchen wastebasket daily to the ugly but inoffensive furnace and putting a match to the contents.
There was a sense of accomplishment in seeing a mess of crumpled paper and junk mail addressed to "Occupant" being reduced to ashes.
I always gave it the full treatment. As a confirmed fire watcher, I stayed with the incinerator in fair weather and foul to make sure it burned clean and didn't smoke up the neighborhood.
But henceforth all the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate around the house must be submitted to municipal collectors.
Only one problem remains--what to do with the darned old thing.
QUOTE AND UNQUOTE--A lady asked the pianist in the bar of an Altadena restaurant if he "knew anything by Jules Verne" and, reports Bill Morgan, he caught on quickly and obliged with "Around the World"... The Ubiquitous Reporter, as an anonymous postcarder identifies himself, reports hearing this first-row echo in a burlesque house: "Hold everything, Novita, until I wipe my glasses!"
 DID YOU NOTICE the ad on the back page of Life showing a college couple saying "Winston tastes good" and a passing prof finishing the sentence, "AS a cigarette should"?
Let us not assume the Winston people finally yielded to the grammarians, outraged by "like" used until now. More likely, they decided to make the most of the teapot tempest over the grammatical error as a further, good-humored exploitation pitch.
SPEAKING OF words, the Hayward Hotel coffee shop has a sign, "Slunch," apparently a contraction of supper and lunch and not to be confused with "Brunch," breakfast and lunch. "Slunch" is specifically interpreted on the sign to mean a coffee break. If we get any more of them, under whatever name, we'll be snacking about every hour on the hour.
IT'S TOO LATE to do anything about it, with the deadline for the Dodger decision Sunday, but Jim Miller of Whittier wonders why the city executives didn't do as the Inglewood City Council did when the question of a racetrack came up. A postal card vote was taken, all registered voters receiving them. The people voted for the track.
AT RANDOM--Culver City Cully says one of the bad features of the five-day week is that the Sunday drivers are also out on Saturday... Pat Disberry tells of the motorist who came upon a woman standing beside a small foreign car and asked, "Had an accident?" "No," she replied acidly, "I always turn it over on its back when I have to change a tire"... A restaurant on Hill Street near 7th which recently closed has its windows soaped pending new occupancy. And then the other day a sign was posted on it, "Another downtown L.A. improvement."
Sept. 27, 1957
Los Angeles
This one's special. It was taken by Delmar Watson of the famous Watson brothers and features Pop Watson.
Former Mirror reporter Cliff Dektar recalls:
The "burying" of the incinerator was interesting....It did wreck those who
made and sold backyard incinerators. On Western, east side, just south of Santa
Monica Blvd., was Safety Incinerator... which had a building which looked
liked their product which had a patented screen on top.
Aug. 1, 1957
Los Angeles
Maybe it's heat, maybe it's the smog (what would be a Stage 3 alert
today), but The Times is full of odd crime news.
A rabid
2-year-old fox terrier mix went on a rampage starting at Wilshire
Boulevard and Western Avenue, biting five people before a police
officer shot it to death.
Stanley Papin, 49, a painter living at 9620 Anza Ave., Inglewood,
followed the dog after being bitten on his right hand until Officer
George Audet killed the animal.
Papin and four others were treated for dog bites at Central Receiving
Hospital, including Ray Ratliff, 18, who left before being told that
the dog was rabid so he didn't know he would need to undergo the Pasteur treatment.
Ratliff began hitchhiking to Sacramento, but returned to San Pedro
after being picked up by a driver, a Good Samaritan who told him he
should return to Los Angeles for treatment.
Speaking of Good Samaritans, three people were in custody after 11-year-old Wayne Halford, a Times paperboy living at 3425 Military Ave.,
noticed them burglarizing a house and drew a picture of their
car--including the license number: HCW 864. Police arrested Keith
Nelson, 19; Johnny Godinez, 22; and Barbara A. Pope, 18, and recovered
$2,000 in stolen jewelry.
Market owner Paul Gertz was not so fortunate during a holdup of his store at 436 S. Atlantic.
Gertz told police that four customers were so distracted by a gorgeous
woman shopping at the store that they didn't notice the robbery and
couldn't provide descriptions to police.
Bonus fact: The first rabies case in California was reported in Los Angeles in 1898.
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July 16, 1957
Los Angeles
At a field lab in the Santa Susana Mountains, an
experimental nuclear reactor has begun generating electricity for San Fernando Valley housewives, thanks to our friend,
Mr. Atom, the Mirror says.
Housewives "wouldn't know it if it sparked before their eyes, for
electricity is electricity the world around," the Mirror says. "It's
just that the source of the heat which generates the juice is
different." The reactor "marked a peacetime application of a terrifying
scientific fact--that when you split an atom, a lot of power, a lot of
heat is generated."
After explaining how a nuclear reactor works, the Mirror noted: "The
small amount of uranium in the reactor will last three years!"
Of course, it's impossible today to say "Santa Susana Field Lab" without adding "Superfund site," a subject far too complex for this humble blog.
But let's take a look the Sodium Reactor Experiment that began in 1957.
Before it was deactivated in 1966 and eventually dismantled at an
expense of $13 million (more than twice its original cost), the reactor
suffered a meltdown in 1959 that released 260 to 459 times the
radioactivity spilled at Three Mile Island.
Oops.
According to a story from 1979, when officials of Atomics
International--a division of Rockwell International--acknowledged the
20-year-old meltdown, "13 of the reactor's 43 uranium fuel rods
ruptured or suffered some degree of melting in the July 13, 1959,
accident."
Although technical publications had discussed the incident for years, the meltdown was never reported in the news media.
"It was a messy accident, but I'm not aware of any evidence that it endangered the public," Theodore B. Taylor of the President's Commission on Three Mile Island, said in 1979. "It was nothing like Three Mile Island."
(I'm assuming Taylor was not referring to the magnitude of the release but the fact that the spill occurred at a remote site rather than in a populated area).
Briefly, the reactor's coolant system became clogged due to a leak, the
fuel rods overheated and spilled a "massive" amount of radioactive
fission products, The Times said in 1979.
"Despite numerous indications that something was wrong inside," The
Times said, "Atomics International continued to run the reactor at low
power for two weeks after the accident, shutting it down July 26, 1959.
Many original documents on Santa Susana Field Lab are available here.
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June 28, 1957
Rehabilitation can come in curious ways. Let a man who occasionally
checks in here tell his story of self-appraisal and reinstatement in
society.
One day he picked up a book, "Blood on the Boards," by William Campbell Gault, and read:
"Slopping through life with no discipline, no goal! And they find
themselves 40 and empty, and go looking for what they missed in a
bottle."
The words hit him, he says, with the impact of a sledge hammer. Nothing had ever made such an impression on him.
He stopped and reread them. He has reread them many times. He has made copies of them.
At the time he asked himself two questions:
"What have I lost that is so important to me?" "What do I want?"
Both answers came within seconds.
"I am now well on my way to achieving what I desire to do," he says,
"and recovering what I lost. And I haven't had a drink from that moment
to this."
IN THE MAIL Monday
an employee at Gibraltar Savings & Loan Association of Beverly
Hills came upon an envelope containing $5,000 in $100 bills with no
clue to the identity of the sender.
On Wednesday, a customer appeared, claimed the money and directed that it be deposited in a savings account.
He explained he'd been in an all-night poker game and had been filling
full houses and inside straights like crazy. At the height of his run
of luck he'd stepped outside, stuffed his winnings in an envelope and
mailed it to Gibraltar, then returned to the game.
Will all gamblers who wish they'd done the same at one time or another please bow their heads in reverence to the man who did.
MISCELLANY -- Note on
the bulletin board at the Valley Elementary District Board of Education
office: "I pledge allegiance to the City of Los Angeles and to the smog
under which it stands. One city, invisible, with eye drops and cough
drops for all."
June 27, 1957
Los Angeles
Everybody knows that Los Angeles suffered terrible smog in the 1950s,
but without statistics, all we have are stories and photos of toxic
clouds obscuring the landscape.
In
fact, for the unfortunate people living in Los Angeles in 1957, what was
deemed a Stage 1 alert (0.5 parts per million of ozone) would be a
Stage 3 alert today. (In a Stage 2 or Stage 3 alert today, all non-emergency driving is discouraged and schoolchildren are banned from outdoor activities).
Now
for the really ghastly facts: In 1957, a Stage 2 alert was 1 ppm and a Stage 3 alert was 1.5 ppm. The Mirror notes
that no Stage 2 or 3 alerts had ever been issued, but that in a Stage 3
alert, the governor was authorized to declare a state of emergency.
One of the most polluted days in Los Angeles history was Sept. 13,
1955, when the city reached 0.9 ppm of ozone in Vernon and 0.85
ppm downtown.
Dr. Clarence Mills of the University of Cincinnati said: "The Los
Angeles situation is so severe and so fraught with health dangers that
any pollution control program should be put on compulsory basis." Mills
urged that a Stage 1 alert be issued at 0.2 ppm, which
is, in fact, the current level. Using that figure, Los Angeles had four
Stage 1 alerts in the first six months of 1957.
When someone told Mills that his lower figure would have Los Angeles
County at a Stage 1 alert for most of the year, he replied: "That's the
way it should be."
The California Air Resources Board link is here.
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June 22, 1957
By now, presumably, people who voted for the $40,000,000 bond issue to
extend the city's park and recreation system and expand the zoo know
that $2,000,000 of the money will go for roads into Chavez Ravine,
where someday the Brooklyn Dodgers may have a ballpark.
Apparently many of them didn't know it on election day.
In fact, they were unaware of this allocation until the matter came
before the City Council this week and was steam-rollered through there
too.
Suddenly, indignation has taken hold.
A woman writes:
"I can't figure the voters. Maybe they live in boxcars and pay no
taxes. Maybe their kids can pick up the tab. My husband and I sweat
blood to get our house paid for. But, oh boy, we've got to have more
taxes, no matter how unjustified, just so the politicians can take a
bow on bringing major league baseball to Los Angeles. I feel like a
dancing bear with a ring through my nose."
Another letter:
"That was a real sneaky job, letting the taxpayers foot part of the
bill to bring the Brooklyn Dodgers, a private, moneymaking enterprise,
to Los Angeles."
Another:
"No one has asked my opinion about the baseball situation in L.A. But here it is: Dodgers go home!"
ONE OF THE big problems of the day is what's going to happen to backyard incinerators when they're outlawed.
The other day, G.B., a Hollywood apartment dweller, put the question to the landlady:
"I'm going to leave it exactly as it is," she said firmly. "About the
time I'd get it torn down the Supreme Court will declare the law
unconstitutional. I figure the people who make incinerators aren't
going to give up without a fight. They'll take their case to the
highest court in the land."
Paul V. Coates
Confidential File
April 10, 1957
And it is a comparatively new word in the American vocabulary.
The 1953 Webster in my office defines smog as "a fog made heavier and darker by the smoke of a city."
But already it's an outdated definition.
Because every day we're learning more about it--it's moving that fast.
It has reached a point today where "smog" jokes here have lost their funny flavor.
And technically worded newspaper articles--with a hundred accused causes and a thousand questionable cures--have become painfully required reading to the man on the street.
He's read quotes, optimistic and pessimistic, from doctors, manufacturers, incinerator salesmen and weather experts.
And he, if he's anything like me, must get a little confused by all the double talk and plain nonsense being circulated. I did, however, read a couple stories in the past week which sounded authentic.
 One quoted Dr. Francis M. Pottenger Jr., chairman of the county medical association's smog committee.
The other quoted Dr. Leroy E. Burney, our nation's surgeon general.
BREATH OF DEATH
If these two men know what they're talking about--and I assume they do--their remarks add up to a singularly terrifying story.
Dr. Pottenger revealed the results of a county medical association survey stating that more than 90% of 1,181 surveyed doctors have detected symptoms of a smog complex in their patients here.
He said 40.7% of the doctors stated that they had recommended to certain patients that they leave the so-called smog belt.
These statistics are unpleasant but the doctor's next comment was thoroughly frightening.
He said that physicians closely associated with neoplastic (cancer) diseases were overwhelmingly of the opinion that air pollution contributes to malignancies.
In the simplest, most awful terms, that means smog causes cancer.
This is the belief of pathologists (83%) X-ray men (81%) and physicians specializing in cancer treatment (80%).
An appalling conclusion such as that would immediately make you think that we're running out of time.
That we have to mobilize the forces of scientific research to end the menace in our atmosphere. That we have to do it quick. And that we have to do it at any cost.
But yesterday, Dr. Burney's statement was released to the press.
If the people of Los Angeles think they can get rid of smog, he implied, they're just kidding themselves.
He added that in his opinion there was no immediate hope of even partial relief.
And when you tally those two stories up, they equal this:
"If you want to live a few years longer, get out of town."
The surgeon general's direct quote, from a letter to congressman Joe Holt, was:
"To be realistic, the people of Los Angeles should be candidly informed that there is no practical way to eliminate smog. There is little probability of alleviation in the immediate future."
WHY GIVE UP?
These are cold-blooded words.
The only hope we have is in continued research until we find the antidote for this posion. But the good doctor seems to suggest that we give up trying to hard and reconcile ourselves to existing in a filthy haze. I think it's a lousy suggestion. If we take it, if we give up the battle against smog, then the findings of the county medical association's committee are too awesome to contemplate.
Note: Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, an Ohio physician, moved to Monrovia after his wife developed tuberculosis and he dedicated his life to finding a cure after she died in 1898. He founded the Pottenger Sanatorium and was president of the American College of Physicians. He died in 1961 at the age of 91.
His son, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger Jr., who also worked at the sanatorium, died in 1967 at the age of 65. Shortly before his death, he wrote a letter to The Times advocating electric autos. Email me
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Larry Harnisch. The leading Black Dahlia expert and a collaborator in the 1947project, Harnisch has been a copy editor at The Times since 1988. He has appeared on many TV shows discussing the Dahlia case, notably "James Ellroy's Feast of Death."
Join him for a spin through old Los Angeles in the Mirror's radio car. Keep your eyes open for Mickey Cohen and Tempest Storm. It's quite a ride.
The reporter's badge belonged to Sid Hughes (1908-1958), legendary reporter who worked at nearly every newspaper in Los Angeles.