Thirteen years after the Monrovia Municipal Plunge opened in 1925 with segregated swimming days, that segregation was challenged by a group led by my teenage father Félix Gutiérrez, President of the Monrovia Latin-American Youth Club and Pasadena Junior College student.

In the summer of 1938 club members presented a letter and speech urging the Monrovia City Council to end their pool segregation. This challenge and other Mexican Americans equal rights efforts are now displayed on a colorful monument on the sidewalk in front of the Monrovia Historical Museum, once the entrance to the Monrovia Municipal Plunge.

I must admit I’m not an Upton Sinclair expert. Hardly. But I am familiar with "The Jungle,” which was published in 1905 and 1906. Sinclair intended his novel to expose the dire circumstances in which industrial laborers found themselves. Instead, the novel’s graphic description of unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry caused Congress to take action. It passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both in 1906. People were outraged and disgusted by what they read, leading to lasting changes to the food industry.

​Well, you get Canyon Park: The Sequel.  But unlike some movie sequels that are pretty awful, the City of Monrovia got a sequel that is true to the original but oh-so-much better.
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​Canyon Park became “official” in 1911, yet the area had been utilized for decades prior.  Hibbard and Polly Rankin settled in the Emerson Flat area around 1874.  Around 1886, L.H. Emerson, for whom Emerson Flat is named, settled in the Sawpit Canyon area.  For many years, Monrovians enjoyed hiking and camping in Canyon Park, even though getting there was difficult because there was no road.  In1911, Taylor Renaker, member of a pioneer Monrovia family, started a group of volunteers building that road.  Thus began the “official” Canyon Park.

​At the end of World War II there were Monrovians who had lived there since the city’s incorporation in 1887. These people had seen the horse and buggy replaced by the automobile and the airplane. Monrovians had seen economic booms and busts, a Great Depression, and two World Wars. More changes would be coming to the city in terms of civil rights, and Almera Romney was one of those people who changed Monrovia for the better.

At Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, three Monrovians paid the ultimate price for our freedoms. Seaman First Class Dwight J. Orr (MHS class of 1940) was stationed on the Battleship USS Arizona, and became one of 1177 sailors and Marines killed on the ship. Nearby at Hickam Field Sergeant Gerald Anglich, an Army Air Corps gunner from Monrovia, was shot down by a Mitsubishi Zero as he ran to a machine gun emplacement, one of 139 soldiers killed there. The third Monrovian who perished at Pearl Harbor on that infamous day was Navy First Lieutenant Richard Rall, one of 18 men who perished on board the Battleship USS Pennsylvania.
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