MR. CALIFORNIA

MEET THE MAN WHO PUT THE STATE ON THE MAP AS THE LEADER IN THE FIGHT AGAINST VEHICLE EMISSIONS.

- BRETT BERK

FRANK LANTERMAN grew up in a family obsessed with air. His forebear Jacob Lanterman had come to the Crescenta Valley, north of Los Angeles, in the late 19th century as part of a wave of European Americans from the Upper Midwest who traveled to the Verdugo Mountains, literally in search of a healthier atmosphere.

"His grandfather came here from Michigan with his family because of some tubercular issues," says Julie Yamashita, the archivist at the Lanterman House, a museum in Frank's childhood home in La Cañada Flintridge, near Pasadena. "That was something very common here. They would come for the air and the healing powers of the California sun."

In 1915, Frank's father, Dr. Roy Lanterman, hired L.A. architect Arthur Haley to adapt his innovative practice of designing naturally ventilated urban apartments and office buildings to a single-family country house. The result, El Retiro, was a Craftsman-style cement home organized around air circulation. Lanterman's family was equally obsessed with the automobile. "They had a three-car garage in 1915 before most people even had one car," Yamashita says. Being fans of all things circulatory, the Lantermans preferred steam power over electric or internal combustion, maintaining a 1922 Stanley for decades. Frank and his brother, Lloyd, even patented oddball steam-power technologies.