Broadcasting Telecasting (Jan-Mar 1956)

LOS ANGELES BY NIGHT: The view from Mt. Wilson takes in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Hollywood and over 40 other cities and towns clustered in one of the nation's most startling and fastest growing metropolitan areas. a producer of electronic items and more significantly is considered by many as approaching first place nationally as a center of research and development. It is expanding here at double the national rate and 450 firms comprise about 70% of the total of the entire West in this field. Electronics employment has multiplied three-dozen times in the last 15 years and has total employment of about 70,000 with annual payroll in excess of $280 million. Its biggest challenge is making "thinking" machines for aircraft, missiles, industry and business. Don Larson, general manager of the West Coast Electronic Mfrs. Assn., could describe the growth in but one word, "fantastic." It is no longer news that Henry Kaiser gave Los Angeles industry a big boost toward meeting war production demands when he secured a $96 million loan from the government in 1942 to built blast furnaces at Fontana, just east of Los Angeles in San Bernardino County. Kaiser describes it as the biggest and the only fully-integrated mill in the state. Coal comes from Utah and ore from deposits in the state. Bethlehem Pacific Coast Steel Corp. and U. S. Steel have continuously expanded their mills and fabricating plants. Bethlehem also operates a major shipbuilding division at Terminal Island. U. S. Steel and eight of its operating divisions and subsidiaries maintain seven plants, two warehouses, a pier for ships and 10 offices in Los Angeles. Its 5,000 workers earn an annual $26 million payroll. Its biggest operation is Consolidated Western Steel Division, which fabricated and supplied steel for major buildings, freeways and the rotating steel dome that caps the Mt. Palomar observatory, housing the world's largest telescope. Another major division is Columbia Geneva, which operates a 164-acre plant at Torrance with four 60-ton open hearth blast furnaces and mammoth rolling mills. First heat of steel was tapped here in 1916. The diversity of firms and their products in this field is great. It ranges from Crosby Enterprises' development of magnetic tape recording for color and black-and-white television to specialized instruments like Beck man Instrument's devices for measuring acidity or color. Other familiar Los Angeles area names include Altec Lansing Corp., Beverly Hills; Califone Corp., Hollywood; Chromatic Television Labs., Emeryville; Hoffman Electronics Corp., Los Angeles; Lear Inc., Santa Monica; Magnavox Research Labs, Los Angeles; Packard Bell Co., RCA, Sprague Electric Co., Stanford Research Institute's Southern California Division, Sylvania Electric Products Inc. and Triad Transformer Corp. Harvey Aluminum, one of the leading independent producers of aluminum extrusions and press forgings, installed new press facilities last year at its Torrance plant to make what it described as the largest independent facility of its kind. To meet expanding product needs, Harvey is constructing a huge aluminum ore reduction plant in Oregon, to be completed next year. In all, the primary metals industry in metropolitan Los Angeles employs 24,000 workers with a weekly payroll of $2.2 million. Hollywood is a geographic area surrounding the well-known intersection of Hollywood and Vine Sts. But it also is a concept, an image in the public mind. Hollywood is movies, radio, television, whose producers now are scattered throughout greater Los Angeles. Annual production investment for films of all types, including television, is estimated at $600 million with an ever growing proportion tv. Some 250 firms are making films for television with annual value of more than $100 million. There are 5,000 more people working in the film production field today than in 1950, attributed in principal to the growth of films for tv. The industry's 37,500 workers receive the highest average weekly wage ($129.30) of any in the state. Based on the schedules of three television networks, an estimated total of 1,474 hours of film will be distributed electronically from Hollywood this year along with a total of 1,294 hours of live shows. A growing hunk of the latter is in color. ABC, CBS, Mutual and NBC have their big radio facilities in the area around Hollywood's Sunset Blvd. and Vine St., but tele vision has moved elsewhere. ABC-TV in 1949 took over the old Vitagraph lot at Prospect and Talmadge just east of Hollywood, while CBS-TV built its modern Television City three years ago to the southwest adjoining Farmer's Market. It ultimately will be a west coast Rockefeller Center, according to the architects. NBC-TV's studios principally are located in Burbank, near Warner Bros., and the network currently is making a $6 million expansion of its Color City there. Facilities for color tv production will be doubled in time for the fall season. Movie majors are scattered like the host of smaller production firms and allied companies. Paramount, RKO and Columbia are still in the Hollywood district. M-G-M and Hal Roach are at Culver City, Universal at Universal City and Warner Bros, and Disney at Burbank. Allied Artists last fall announced plans to build the first new major production lot since the 1930s. It will spend $6.5 million for at least 10 sound stages at a site expected to be in the San Fernando Valley. Tractor-trailers heaped with shiny new automobiles crawl up and down Los Angeles freeways. They are distributing the big flows from production lines of Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and Studebaker. Ford's Lincoln-Mercury Division is expanding, hav-.-. ing acquired 200 acres for a new plant. GM's Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac assembly division is at South Gate and its Chevrolet line is in Van Nuys. Studebaker is at Vernon. These firms and allied industries employ 24,400 in the area with weekly payrolls about $2.5 million. Imports of foreign made cars hit $15 million last year as dealers sought to satisfy another Southern California delight — sports cars. No figures were available for sales of berets. It takes a lot of gas and oil to make these cars go. Angelenos drove 17 billion miles last year, burning up 5 million gallons a day. But Los Angeles has the oil industry to meet the demand and then some. The big names — Standard Oil, Tide Water, Shell, Texas Co., General Petroleum, Richfield, Union Oil — have extensive extracting, refining or distributing facilities here and are the major contributors to the oil and natural gas industry's total weekly payroll of over $3 million. The metropolitan area produces over 130 million barrels of oil annually, worth in excess of $340 million. Capacity of refineries in the Los Angeles area is over 700,000 barrels daily. Food products, including canning of fish and packing of fruits and vegetables, is an ever-growing industry in the Los Angeles area. Among the biggest employers are Armour & Co., California Consumers Corp., Continental Baking Co., Glove Mills Division of Pillsbury Mills, National Biscuit Co., Luer Packing Co., Swift & Co. and Van Camp Sea Food Co. Los Angeles leads the nation in fish landings and canning, chiefly tuna. Van Camp cans under the Chicken o' the Sea label. Other chief canners at Terminal Island include Star Kist Foods, Westgate-California Tuna Canning Co., California Marine Curing & Packing Co. and Franco-Italian. Los Angeles is national headquarters for Page 86 • January SO, 1956 Broadcasting • Telecasting