CALIFORNIA: Bowron’s Boom Town

At the end of one of his 14-hour work days last week, the mayor of Los Angeles trudged up the 135 steps to his house on a hill high above the Hollywood Bowl. Below him was one of the great man-made sights in America: the lights of Los Angeles, stretching as far as the eye could reach. Fletcher Bowron’s eyes gave the familiar scene an instant’s glance. Inside his old Spanish-style house, his eyes moistened as he opened a red leather book and read a sheaf of letters in his praise. He had had an unusual day. It was his tenth anniversary as mayor. Civic leaders had honored him at a big luncheon.

Pudgy, petulant Fletcher Bowron was not accustomed to admiration and praise. He had lived up to the prophecy he made when he was elected: “I feel certain that I will prove an unpopular mayor.” He had angered almost every important group in town—labor, the newspapers, the merchants, the oilmen, the building trades. He had feuded bitterly with his isman City Council. A reformer with a Calvinist’s crusading zeal, he has driven corruption out of City Hall and the Police Department.

“No one seems to like him except the voters,” was a political byword in Los Angeles. Mayor Bowron, a slow and cautious man, had guided—but seldom led—his city through its most phenomenal decade of growth and development.

In the eight years since the 1940 census, Los Angeles had absorbed a population roughly equal to that of Cincinnati’s (455,610). It now claims a population of 1,904,725. It had passed Detroit and is pressing close to Philadelphia. Every month about 10,000 more people move in, to stay. Now the city was in the midst of another vast and significant change. To its agricultural and mineral wealth it was adding a solid industrial base. It now ranks first in four industries: aircraft, motion pictures oil-well equipment, sportswear manufacture. It is second in two: automobile assembly and tire production.

For 61-year-old Mayor Bowron, a chronic worrier, this has merely meant more problems to worry about, e.g., how to get more houses, more schools, more water, more express highways. Says he of his sprawling city’s increasing bigness: “I hated to see it come, but here it is.”