A suburbanized city

Bill Henry at CBS studios, circa 1940

The Automobile Club of Southern California encouraged the development of new freeways by conducting traffic surveys and producing publications centered on automobile travel and tourism. Henry served as editor of the club’s membership magazine, Touring Topics (renamed Westways) from 1920-1926.

This TV-Radio Life article on Henry exemplifies the mid-20th century suburban ideal of Southern California. Henry moved to a 5-acre ranch with an orange grove in the San Fernando Valley in the late 1940s with his wife Corinne, which they referred to as the “By the Way Ranch.”

The 1950s-1970s witnessed a widespread suburbanization of Los Angeles, fueled in part by the popularization of automobiles and the construction of several major highways leading out of the city. Historian Eric Avlia describes the freeways of the 1950s as a symbol of a “new Los Angeles,” emerging from the Second World War as a place in which residents were free to move away from urban areas that were perceived as overcrowded and dangerous to new developments in surrounding suburbs (Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 217). Growing faster than the city, La County population rose from about 2.8 million in 1940 to 7 million in 1970 (Popular, 29).