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Last week, for all the forced-draft accomplishments of the years since V-J day, the city and its satellite towns were still grappling with a multiplicity of problems. The prosaic business of supplying new homes with gas, sewage lines and electricity had taken on the breathless urgency of a serum flight to Nome. Under Bowron's administration 50 miles of cast-iron water mains had been laid every month to keep up with the city's mushrooming growth. Los Angeles had built 34 new schools in ten years and still needed "a new one every Monday morning." Though the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. had installed 416,338 telephones since V-J day, it was 41,405 orders behind last week.
Los Angeles still had a vast supply of its most precious and vital commodity—water. It drew 255 million gallons a day from the Owens River. With its adjoining towns it sucked too million gallons through a 392-mile aqueduct from the Colorado River; despite the bitter interstate dispute between California and Arizona over the river's output, Los Angeles expected to tap the Colorado more freely in the future.
But in common with the rest of arid Southern California, Los Angeles lusted for more. Its County Board of Supervisors eyed the ocean—it suggested a prize of a million dollars for the man who could provide a process for distilling sea water cheaply enough to make its use practical. It got letters from prison inmates, housewives, inventors, crackpots, from all over the country, from Holland, India, England, Australia and half a dozen other foreign lands.
None of them gave the right answer. But Angelenos were sure that the problem —and all the rest of the city's problems—would be solved in good time. They had to be. City planners expect a population of 6,000,000 in greater Los Angeles by 1970. Less cautious citizens call the planners pikers, are certain that the city will eventually be the biggest in the world. And after that? Undoubtedly, its boosters mused, it would have another boom.