Posts by Mike McPhate

In the late 1980s, Jay Ohrberg had a dream. One of Hollywood’s top car customizers, he had built KITT from “Knight Rider,” Herbie from “Herbie the Love Bug,” and the “Back to the Future” DeLorean. Now he aimed for a place in the record books with the longest car ever built, a Cadillac limousine that stretched 100 feet,…

In the early 1990s, a California professor stunned the scientific community by reviving 45-million-year-old yeast — and using it to make beer. Raul Cano, a microbiologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, found the spores in the gut of an ancient bee encased in tropical amber and spread it on a growth medium to see…

In the 1950s, Angelenos would sometimes see two “sunrises” — one from the sun and another from atomic bomb tests in the Nevada desert. Between 1951 and 1962, 100 detonations were conducted above ground at the site northwest of Las Vegas, some so brilliant that they could be seen from points across the California coast. People…

In 1970, Sérgio Mendes, a Brazilian musician, employed a shaggy-haired young carpenter (above right) to build a music studio in his backyard in Encino. The worker was an aspiring actor, but had taught himself carpentry to support his young family. At the time, there was little to suggest that Harrison Ford, then 28, was destined…

In 1970, Sérgio Mendes, a Brazilian musician, employed a shaggy-haired young carpenter to build a music studio in his backyard in Encino. The worker was an aspiring actor, but had taught himself carpentry to support his young family. That’s him on the right below.  At the time, there was little to suggest that Harrison Ford,…

During a visit in 1931, Albert Einstein became so enamored by California that he spent three consecutive winters here. The shaggy-haired genius was initially lured to Caltech in Pasadena by Arthur Fleming, a lumber baron and president of the university’s board of trustees. His arrival in San Diego after 30 days at sea was a spectacle,…

The Western States ultramarathon, a yearly act of insanity in the northern Sierra Nevada, began in the 1950s as an endurance horse ride in which competitors had to traverse the equivalent of nearly four marathons along murderous terrain from Lake Tahoe to the foothills town of Auburn in less than 24 hours. Then in 1974, a shaggy-haired…

Pictured below is Judith Love Cohen, a pioneering aerospace engineer, posing with a satellite at Space Technology Laboratories in Redondo Beach in 1959. Gifted in math from a young age, Cohen recalled a high school counselor once telling her, “You know, Judy, I think you ought to go to a nice finishing school and learn to be…

Believe it or not, the hassle of parallel parking was solved more than 80 years ago. In 1938, an energetic Bay Area lumberman named Brooks Walker patented a device that would drop a wheel perpendicular to the others from the trunk of a car, allowing it to swivel in and out of tight parking spaces.…

Christopher Hall’s photos of parked cars around San Francisco seem drawn from some dreamy bygone era. But the scenes — a moody 1960s Ford Mustang parked outside a warehouse, a Rolls Royce in front of “Don Ramon’s” Mexican restaurant — were captured squarely in the age of Twitter and Facebook. They are not staged. Hall,…

Edward Carter, a war hero who loved his country more than it loved him, was born in Los Angeles in May 1916, a son of missionaries, a Black father and an Indian mother who gave the boy a worldly upbringing. He spent much of his childhood in India and China, where he learned to speak…

In May of 1908, a mere handshake landed a man in Alcatraz. William Buwalda’s trouble began when he attended a lecture on patriotism in San Francisco by the anarchist Emma Goldman. After her remarks, Buwalda, an Army private in uniform, walked to the stage and shook Goldman’s hand. The gesture, according to witnesses, electrified the…

When the Bay Area sculptor Michael Heizer saw a 340-ton boulder at a quarry outside Riverside, he phoned Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Heizer said it was the most beautiful rock he’d ever seen, proposing that it be displayed at the museum. Govan loved the idea. After five…

The bark of one of California’s biggest sequoias was once displayed in the shape of a tree for the amusement of Londoners. Fortune seekers lured to California by the Gold Rush discovered another opportunity in the grandeur of the Sierra’s ancient redwoods. In 1854, they peeled 90 tons of the shaggy bark from a 2,500-year-old…

A California airline used to operate a fleet of planes with smiley faces on their noses. They called them the Grinningbirds. Pacific Southwest Airlines, based in San Diego, was the first large discount carrier in the U.S., growing into an industry leader of intrastate flight in the 1960s and 1970s and paving the way for…

A single pine in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Palm trees adorned with strange red beacons. A trio of cacti with green hues that seem just a little bit off. Since the 1990s, disguised cell phone towers have become a staple of America’s urban environment. Unlike power and landline companies, cell phone providers cannot…

Every day over Los Angeles, small planes circle the skies dropping sterilized male flies to combat invasive Mediterranean fruit flies. You can see their symmetrical flight patterns in flight trackers, like the one depicted below. In the 1980s, when Medfly outbreaks threatened California’s agricultural industry, officials authorized widespread aerial spraying of malathion. The insecticide shattered the…

In 1938, Sanora Babb, a struggling journalist from Oklahoma, found a job with the Farm Security Administration helping Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley. She traveled with her supervisor, Tom Collins, from camp to camp, checking in on migrants and taking detailed notes about their lives. She was amazed by their resilience: “How brave…