Hollywood to Honolulu: the story of the Los Angeles Steamship Company (Glencannon Press)


The Roaring 20s saw many institutions fall by the way side. Flappers, the Charleston and bathtub gin all arrived on the scene and, almost as quickly as they appeared, they dropped out of history. So it was with the shipping line that hailed from Southern California: the Los Angeles Steamship Company. This once magnificent ocean going operation put its namesake harbor on the map, brought the idea of a glamorous ocean passage into the price range of the newly forming tourist population, and once and for all time branded the vision of a stately white cruise ship gliding effortlessly into a tropical Hawaiian paradise into the mind of the nation.

Martin Cox and Gordon Ghareeb have joined forces and together told a story of glamour, high finance, movie stars and gossip. Operated under the aegis of the Chandler publishing family of Los Angeles and the rest of their contemporary Chamber of Commerce associates, the Los Angeles Steamship Company (or LASSCO as it came to be known across the nation) brought to the world the realization that fledgling Los Angeles was coming into its own as a financial, industrial and culturally cosmopolitan crossroads of the country.

Ghareeb and Cox recreate a lost world of a nation riding high on the crest of a military victory from World War I juxtaposed against labor problems, political unrest and an economy gone mad.

At its height, the company had seven passenger vessels plus a host of freighters. The Los Angeles Steamship Company perished somewhat quietly in the stock market crash of 1929, but not before it had reshaped Los Angeles.