Smoglandia: We haven't always been smoggy, but we're built that way

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It’s late July in 1943.Over the radio, Bing Crosby is crooning, Bob Hope is joking, and news of the war — against Hitler, against Japan — keeps sizzling and crackling across the dial.But here in Southern California, something more is in the air: a dense, motionless tsunami of something foul and inexplicable.

Grown men are crying and mopping their eyes.Women’s throats are sore, and their eyes are an unflattering shade of red.For hours, sometimes days, even, people can’t see more than a few feet ahead of them.

Cops directing traffic can’t tell whether the stoplights are red or green, and neither can the drivers.Remember that in 1943, we were at war.Just the year before, in February 1942, a Japanese submarine had shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, and the very next night, L.A.

was ordered into a blackout.Jittery Angelenos sat in the dark, rattled by sounds of sirens and antiaircraft fire.

That turned out to be just a citywide case of nerves.It wasn’t the Japanese this time, either.That choking siege in July was the worst but not the first attack by an enemy that Los Angeles would be fighting long after World War II was over.Smog.Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.’s historic battle with smog.Back in ’43, L.A.

didn’t really have a name for it.“Smog” is a turn-of-the-century portmanteau word mashing together “smoke” and “fog” to describe the sooty, sulfurous air of the London of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.But as we would find out, our smog — photochemical smog — made the air taste like poison and look like something you’d put out with the garbage.

And its recipe was a killer combo of the two things we love so much: cars and sunlight.For a long time, we wouldn’t realize how much damage it was doing.Smog compromised the health of kids and the sickly and the elderly.

It changed the look of movies.It chewed through rubber ...