How Southland became nation's dairy queen in an earlier era

Got milk?

- PATT MORRISON

AN ADOHR dairy truck is featured on a postcard of Los Angeles, circa 1931.

(Collection of Patt Morrison)

If you'd asked that question around Southern California even into the 1950s, the answer would have been a big full-dairy-fat “yes,” pails and gallons and maybe even acre-feet of milk.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, hundreds of thousands of cows were living on hundreds of small dairy farms cast across the broad plain of what is now crowded with homes, streets, businesses and freeways.

Dutch, French, Portuguese and Belgian families each kept a few, a dozen or a couple of hundred milk cows on land that’s now too expensive even to keep chickens. The Lescoulies’ cows were in Venice; a Mr. Martin kept his on Primrose Avenue in Hollywood, where the early farmhouse was lately priced at about $2 million.

These little farms sold their milk to dairies that bore wonderful names like Calla Lily, in Glendale, Golden Poppy, in Downey, Santa Monica Dairy, in Venice, and Baldy View dairy, in Whittier.

Within a few decades, in southeast Los Angeles County, cows outnumbered people by as much as 30 to 1. The place we now know as Cerritos was once named “Dairy Valley” and was home to not quite 3,500 people and 100,000 cows. The community we know as Cypress was, until 1956, called “Dairy City.”

A few of those dairy operations survive today.

Why bring our dairy history up now?

Because both President Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are on a dairy kick. They've stood the longtime food pyramid on its pointy head, instead promoting lots of meat and whole milk foods over a healthier diet grounded in whole grains and vegetables.