A Slice of History--Montebello Life Magazine

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.