Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 1940s, 1930s, 1920s
[p. 131] "Within the next decade, Los Angeles became the air travel capital of the United States. In early 1927 Maddux Air Lines, in which Cecil B. DeMille held controlling interest, inaugurated twelve-passenger Ford Tri-Motor service to San Diego, Baja California, and Phoenix. By the end of 1928, five Los Angeles-based passenger companies-Western Air Express, Maddux, Standard Air Lines of California, Pickwick Airways, and Transcontinental Air Transport-were connecting Los Angeles [to the West Coast] . . . On 25 October 1930 Transcontinental Air Transport inaugurated service between Los Angeles and New York, with part of the journey by railway. By . . . 1929, the combined aviation industry in Southern California-manufacturing, freight, mail and passenger flight-approached a billion dollars in cumulative value. Los Angeles County alone had fifty-five airports and landing fields, together with twenty-seven accredited aviation schools with more than 1,500 students of aviation and aviation mechanics. Southern California handled 30 percent of all airmail traffic in the United States and had three thousand of the four thousand licensed pilots in the country.
[p. 131] There were twelve airplane factories in Southern California . . . [p. 132] [including the Ryan Aeronautical Company of San Diego which built the Spirit of St. Louis for Lindbergh, a sometime Southern California mail pilot.]
[p. 132] "The distance and load capacity of the Spirit of St. Louis had more than peacetime implications. Throughout the 1920s General Giulio Douhet of Italy and Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell of the United States were advocating the high-level precision bombing of long-range military targets.
" . . .
[p. 145] "Henry J. Kaiser [1882- ], as he always called himself, was largely a product of self invention. Born and raised in upstate New York, he turned to photography as a teenager, then moved west to the state of Washington, where he got into the roadpaving business, there and in Cuba. Not that Kaiser initially knew anything about paving roads, or about photography for that matter; he merely threw himself into a pursuit and learned it through practice. Road-paving on a large scale in Cuba in the 1920s trained Kaiser in the management of men and equipment.
" . . .
[p. 301] "If one were to send to Central Casting for someone to embody the Folks of Southern California in all their hope, glory, and occasional grotesquerie, then John B. Tenny [1898- ] might very well turn up on the set. But then again, Tenny himself-hard-drinking, paranoid, dyspeptic-could have been played by W.C. Fields in one of the actor's grouchier moods. Born in St. Louis, Tenney arrived in Los Angeles as a boy of ten in 1908 with his parents as they joined the great migration of Folks to the Southland. During the war, he fought with the American Expeditionary Force in France. Upon his return, Tenney, a pianist, formed the Majestic Orchestra and spent the first half of the 1920s driving from dance hall to dance hall throughout the southern tier of the state. When bookings in the better dance halls or hotels were lacking, the Majestic played places like the Owl in Mexicali. Situated across the border from Calexico, Mexicali functioned as a funnel for Mexican farm workers passing to and from the Imperial Valley. In January 1923 Tenney and the Majestic Orchestra were playing the Imperial Dance Hall in Mexicali. For some weeks previously, Tenney had been fiddling with a tune in his mind, a modified waltz. A regular at the Imperial was a woman named Rose, who ran a boardinghouse for railroad men in Brawley, which is to put the best possible interpretation upon the establishment. Rose would come into the Imperial after midnight, already a bit drunk, and was wont to break into tears, especially when Tenney and the Majestic played the waltz tune Tenney had composed. Seeing Rose in tears one night, Tenney was inspired to attach lyrics to his melody. He later described Mexicali Rose as a tribute to all beautiful, black-eyed señoritas. Like the Ramona myth, Mexicali Rose, took on a life of its own. Two movies were made, and the sheet music sold steadily throughout Tenney's lifetime. Mexicali Rose became one of the most recorded songs in the history of Tin Pan Alley. Banal, sentimental, touched with spurious Hispanic romance, the song embodied the hopes and dreams of the Folks as they settled into their new identity as Southern Californians."