PHOTOS: It was May 22, 2:00 p.m., I'm 9 years old, waiting on a Thursday afternoon for the school day to end. I've lived my whole— short —life in Lakewood, a new suburb incorporated in 1954. There are square miles of the same kind of neighborhood in every direction.
I rode my bike to school and will ride it back. After school, I'll watch black-and-white "Popeye" cartoons with their bewildering 1930s cultural references. People say I live in suburbia, where the routines of family life are everything and nothing ever happens.
The history of oil complicates those clichés. Oil from fields in a wide band from Newport Beach though Long Beach to the Baldwin Hills powered the industrialization of Los Angeles and transformed the city in the 1920s. Even in 1958, the region's oil fields are among the most productive on the West Coast.