Hello, The sign for the downtown tall building is Proctor and Gamble. When we were little kids to the time my wife and I had moved away, the P&G complex was a bustling place. The Long Beach Harbor area version was located on a waterside edge property near the ocean. Our dad used to take us on Sunday drives down to the harbor and different areas near the ocean. Our Westside of Long Beach house was just a few miles away. One of the main streets in our neighborhood came to its dead end at the huge factory building in the harbor area. Procter & Gamble workers pack bars of Ivory soap as it comes off the assembly line. Photo courtesy Long Beach Public Library. “The Procter & Gamble plant expanded over the years, with major additions built in 1938, 1949, 1950 and 1963. The ‘63 addition was the construction of a 207,000-square-foot warehouse which would accommodate product distribution to 11 Western states. The warehouse, which stretched 750 feet along West Seventh Street, brought the plant’s total area to 29 acres.” “Things were going great for Procter & Gamble as the years passed in the 1980s, with scores of new products developed by the company in the intervening years—Crest toothpaste, Cascade dishwashing soap, Cheer, Head & Shoulders shampoo and scores of others—and as its technology grew more sophisticated and its reach grew worldwide, it found Long Beach of no further use and announced rather suddenly that it would cease operations here in 1988.” Jnaki There were two things we definitely remember. One was where we lived in the Westside of Long Beach. We had an industrial area close by, hot rod shops, boat building fiberglass spraying companies nearby, finally the Procter and Gamble factory a block or two away. So, growing up we always had “odors” coming toward our house every afternoon. The west winds off of the ocean were notorious for that region. (We learned about the area many years later in our sailing adventures in the San Pedro basin, called “Hurricane Gulch.”) The direction of the afternoon winds always blew toward our house, elementary school and our everyday play areas. The smell of fiberglass, resin, burning rubber, and of course, the strong smell of soap permeated our noses while we played everyday. Even in our school, on the playground and in classes. The soap smell came from the Procter and Gamble factory. Th other smells came from the hot rod shops, the boat building and later in our teenage years, a surfboard finishing factory where my good friend from high school worked and ran the place. Oh, yes, one other smell was the Coca Cola Factory that was our favorite as little kids. Since they gave out free samples every time we visited the factory and watched the bottles moving along the tracks. It was the “bad” portion of the factory that stored the gooey dark brown liquid that makes up the Coca Cola taste, when mixed in with the bubbly water. Not that we saw in the bottles on the store shelves, but in the actual factory mixing lines when the tours were available. It was the most terrible smell and we could identify it as it whiffed past our neighborhood. I learned about the gooey liquid when I worked in a carnival booth and was responsible for changing the gooey liquid bottles to the dispenser hose connections. One spill and it was awful in that booth for hours. YRMV The second thing was when I was in need of a summer job as a teen, I was told by a neighbor that Procter and Gamble was hiring at the factory. So, dressed to impress, I went for an interview. Obviously, I did not get hired, but almost suffocated by the smell of the soap fumes from the parking lot all the way into the building and interview room. I was lucky I did not faint or go unconscious. I never knew how those workers could stand the “soapy” smells every day of the 8 hour jobs.
The Jalopy Journal
