A Slice of History--Montebello Life Magazine
By Alejandro Morales
From his
birth until 15 years of age, Frank Baltazar lived in a company town, where a
corporation provided its employees onsite housing, an elementary school,
grocery store, church, post office, baseball team, movie-theater, private
sheriff and even an orchestra.
The
sprawling town—whose peak population has been estimated at 3,000 in the late
1920s—didn’t produce steel in Pennsylvania, coal in West Virginia or cars in
Michigan.
It
manufactured bricks in an area that now encompasses south Montebello and parts
of the City of Commerce.
For the
first half of the 20th century, Simons Brickyard produced up to 600,000 clay
bricks daily, making the claim to be the world’s most productive brickyard.
“I didn’t
have any worries,” said Baltazar, now 75 and living in La Puente. “Was I happy
living there? Was it fun living there? Yes, it was. I never heard anyone
complain about the company.”
In 1905,
Walter Simons bought clay-rich property near what is now South Vail Avenue and
the Santa Ana Freeway for his expanding brickyard empire. Business skyrocketed
after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, as the crippled city needed
millions of bricks for rebuilding. Simons shipped 3,800 tons of product to San
Francisco that year.
To meet the
demand for labor, the company recruited Mexican immigrants, advertising that
life at the brickyard was more stable than what was happening during their
homeland’s revolution.
Simons
eventually employed about 600 workers, most of them Latinos. The company set up
housing for their workers, with single men living communally and families in
two- or four-bedroom homes. Rents started at $1 per month.
Baltazar
remembers that in the 1940s he paid his family’s month rent of $4 at the
company office at the corner of Sycamore Street and South Vail Avenue.
He describes
life in the company town as protected from the outside world, including the
kind of bigotry that afflicted the nation at the time.
“There was a
lot of racism back then, but we didn’t feel it as kids,” said Baltazar, who
writes online about his childhood at Simons (simonsbrickyard.blogspot.com).
“From kindergarten to my 6th grade graduation, the student body [at the company
school] was 100% Latino. I didn’t see another skin color until I went to junior
high.”
Baltazar
also has fond memories of the summers at Simons, when he helped his father
transport the bricks by mule-pulled carts and also delivered home-cooked
breakfasts to the factory in a wagon he made. (The workday started at 4 a.m.,
with a “lunch” break at 7 a.m.)
The company
reported an employee turnover rate of just 2 percent a month, leading some to
marvel: If there ever was an industrial Utopia it is Simons.
But the
Depression and World War II slowed the brickyard’s production, and in 1952, the
widespread use of concrete in new construction led to the closing of Simons.
Simons
family gave $6,000 to each of the 19 remaining families to help them move out
of the company town.
“We were one
of the last families to leave the brickyard,” Baltazar said.
To find out
more about Simons Brickyard and the company town, check out the Montebello
Historical Society’s recently published “Return to Simons,” a 52-page
commemorative book available for $34.95. For more information visit
www.montebellohistoricalsociety.org.
