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| I like sunsets so I put one here. |
It's Earth Day again. I remember the first one in 1970.
I was in high school at South Torrance High in Torrance, California. It was the 11th grade. Smog was real in those days. From where I lived you could no longer see the big Union Bank building a mile away. Brown air. Even I could see that it was getting worse.
Anyway, back to the first Earth Day. We all sat on the lawn while people wearing gas masks talked about the air quality, talked about life tomorrow, talked about nothing I remember, sitting here 50 years later. I do remember that the weather was nice....
My family moved up to the SF Bay area that Summer. I did my final year (graduated in '71) at a high school in Marin county. It was some time before I made it back to SoCal.
Fast forward 10 years. I'm in the Coast Guard doing a water temperature patrol down that way in a (HU-16E) airplane. We're coming back from San Diego, heading for San Fran along the coast. I sat in the radio man's seat to fix a sandwich from the box lunch. I look up and see this brown wall in the distance. It's well out to sea, it's the Los Angeles smog. After I fix the sandwich I look up and we are in the brown...
Jump forward another 20 years after that and I'm driving down in the LA area. Son of a gun, there are mountains all around Los Angeles! It really looks good!
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| This is from the Santa Monica pier a year or so ago. It's the only picture of mine that I can find that shows mountains in the distance in the SoCal area. |
I had been in that area from the summer of 1966 until the summer of 1970 and I was not aware that there were mountains!
It took awhile, but the California smog rules did what they were supposed to do. I was (and still am) impressed!
With the world closed down I guess a lot of people all over are getting to see what their world looks like when the pollution has had some time to settle out.
Being from up in Maine during that time we didn't have the smog issues, but I remember one summer heading down to Boston for a Red Sox game and the driver saying look at how dark it is down towards the city and it stinks down here. Then all of us looking out the window and going "wow" that must be the smog that everyone talks about. I don't remember much else about that day, except that Mickey Mantle scored the winning run against my Red Sox and that we were all glad to be back where the air didn't smell funny.
ReplyDelete"Back where the air didn't smell funny" says it all!
DeleteYou have a good memory of events Rob. I do not recall any of the Earth Days prior to the last ten years.
ReplyDeleteThe one positive if you can find a positive in this pandemic is that with shelter-in-place mandates it has given the earth a chance to take a breather and recuparate...we can see things that we were previously oblivious to such a mountains, clear lakes, and skies among a few.
Take care.
That was the only Earth Day I do remember :-)
ReplyDeleteI would be nice for everyone to see the world clean & decide to to do their part to keep it that way.