Roundup: December 11, 2013

Almansor Court – 700 S. Almansor, Alhambra, CA.
Social Hour: 5:00PM
Dinner: 6:00PM

This is our annual Holiday event with Cherries Jubilee dessert!

Speaker: Stuart A. Forsyth
Subject:  “Cajon at War—The San Bernardino Bomb Plant”

Click here to view photos from the event.

Just three months and two days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Western Stove Co. of Culver City was operating a newly built plant for the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service just northwest of San Bernardino.

What did they make in this top-secret plant, and where did the railroads and the U.S. Navy ship its product?

What did the Day & Night Water Heater Company of Monrovia have to do with this operation? And what did all of this have to do with the most expensive weapon the United States developed and deployed during World War II (no, not the atomic bomb) and that weapon’s role in bringing the war with Japan to an end?

Stuart A. Forsyth will answer these questions this evening with a thoroughly researched, beautifully illustrated and fascinatingly presented talk on the little-known history of this particular Southland contribution to the American victory in World War II.

Stuart retired as Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Bar Association and now runs his own consulting practice for lawyers and judges as The Legal Futurist. He has had a life-long interest in the railroads of Southern California and World War II. He has served as Secretary and Chairman of the Pacific Coast Chapter of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society and was one of the founders of the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento. He has been researching the Cajon Pass area for more than half a century, and this evening’s talk is one of the fruits of that labor.

Click here to view photos from the event.

Larry L. Boerio 
Deputy Sheriff