Dark Days in La-La Land

IT IS well known that Los Angeles was a formidable frontier until it was civilized by Walter O'Malley. O'Malley was one of those rare pioneers. Where others saw semiarid desert populated by Chumash Indians -- Los Angeles was then little more than a bedroom suburb of the Mojave -- he saw season attendance of three million and the elimination of rainouts. He planted groves of orange trees, dropped hints among all of his friends about the possibility of a film business, suggested the birth of an aerospace industry (Mr. Northrup to O'Malley in their now-famous meeting: "Aerospace? Explain!") and relocated thousands...