COUPLE CHRONICLES HOW A COMMUNITY TOOK ON OIL
“I have never seen a refinery as beautiful as a cypress tree.” — C.W. Fisher of the Carmel Citizens Committee.
MOSS LANDING >> This could be a film. Except it’s a true story about things that happened and things that didn’t. But most movies are made from some modicum of ex
perience. This would be a nonfiction film based on an interpretation of facts. The only caveat is that there were no bad guys and no good guys, no black or white hats.
Everyone was wearing some shade of gray.
Husband and wife, Glenn Church and Kathryn McKenzie, were culling the personal effects of his late father, former County
Supervisor Warren Church (19651977), when they came across a controversy and the carefully chronicled documents to corroborate it.
Maybe it’s because both grew up on the Monterey Bay — she, in Santa Cruz, and he, in the Elkhorn Slough area. Perhaps it’s because both are writers. Surely it’s that both have an inquisitive, sleuth nature that
caused them to see the intrigue in the story they were uncovering; something that filled newspapers back in the day but had been receding into history like a secret.
How did they not remember that, in the 1960s, plans progressed all the way to the point of impact on history for Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil)
— to build and operate a 50,000-barrel-a- day oil refinery in Moss Landing? Eventual expansion would have increased production to 150,000-200,000 barrels of oil per day in what would convert a fishing village into a major industrial complex.
And the skies over the pristine waters of the Monterey Bay would have become cloudy all day.
McKenzie and Church aren’t old enough to remember. But plenty of others are. Understanding that one of the best ways to get to the heart of an issue is to research and write about it, the couple set out to find the people who lived in the path of this “industrial revolution,” people who know exactly why, although the powerful oil company had secured a permit to build their refinery, it didn’t.
Surely it was no match for the people who stood up, held hands, and never let Rover come over.
The resulting book, published by Vista Verde Publishing in the midst of a pandemic, is “Humbled: How California’s Monterey Bay Escaped Industrial Ruin,” by Church and McKenzie. They haven’t yet decided who should play their parts on the big screen, but they have some ideas.
How it h8ttened
Glenn Church’s middle name is Warren, just like his father, who used it as his first name, and two generations of fathers before them. What’s most significant about the name is the four generations of Warrens playing out their lives in the Elkhorn area, caring about the place in which their roots run deep into the history of a place they’ve called home.
McKenzie and Church live in his boyhood home, on a Christmas tree farm his father established before joining the Board of Supervisors in the ’60s. Today, the couple enjoy life on 19 scenic acres near the Elkhorn Slough, which they maintain throughout the year, while they write or edit articles and books. The day after Thanksgiving, their life resembles a Hallmark holiday movie, as they start selling a wide diversity of cypresses, pines, and firs, keeping up the chaos all the way to Christmas.
Yet, since 2017 — the same year they married, after being together “forever” — the couple have been working, side by side, researching and writing, and editing each other’s words, as they endeavored to understand the historical significance of
Humble Oil, its proposed refinery, and the cast of characters determined to keep those plans “at bay.”
“What we realized in our research,” McKenzie said, “was that this story was a very big deal, considering Humble Oil’s proposal, the approved permit by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors and that Humble Oil never actually started construction. Yet, as the decades roll along, and so much else happens to occupy our attention, some people forget, and others never learn what happened.”
People forget what’s not written down. But Warren Church kept everything. So, there it was, chronicled in a filing cabinet. Where McKenzie and Church found gaps in the story or their understanding of it, they turned to the folks who are still around, who still remember the fight for fresh air.
Retired Judge Bill Burleigh, who had been hired as city attorney in 1965, was just 31 at the time, and fresh out of law school when the City Council, he says, asked if he was willing to take on Humble Oil.
“It really was Humble Oil vs. the people of our community, a ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ kind of thing,” said Burleigh, 85. “Here was this giant coming to a small community on the Central Coast, where a refinery would have been so out of place. The bad publicity grew and grew. Humble Oil said they quit because the lawsuit would take too long to appeal. My understanding is that it was because the whole
community came together and made too much noise for them. I love stuff like that.”
Retired Congressman Sam Farr said his father, the late State Senator Fred Farr, fought hard against the Humble controversy, to preserve the Monterey Bay he so loved.
“My mother once told me, ‘ Thank God you live in America because every decision is appealable.’ Stopping Humble Oil was the most important political decision we faced in the latter part of the last century,” said Sam Farr, 79. “Imagine supertankers coming into Monterey Bay, and making all of Moss Landing into a giant industrial park. One oil refinery would have invited another, plus all the allied industries. That refinery would have ruined us, sacrificing all the natural beauty and appeal of living here.”
What Farr finds remarkable about the whole process is that the Board of Supervisors actually approved the refinery, yet the people of this area appealed the decision, putting so many “backroom pressures” on Humble Oil.
“Glenn’s father, Warren Church, was under some tough politics,” said Farr. “As a supervisor, worried about getting re-elected, he was supporting a project in his heart he didn’t want. Instead, he was clever about putting conditions on the project that made Humble have second thoughts. Humble had the politics to win it, but it took more than a permit to make it happen.”
The Humble Oil controversy and its outcome was a watershed moment in the history of the Monterey Bay area, says Farr, something the late John Lewis would have called “making good trouble.”
Thus, “Humbled” is the story of how and why one of the world’s largest corporations, an icon of American industry, eventually had enough and walked away.
“It was one of the first battles of the modern environmental age,” said McKenzie, “a clash between the past ethos of industrialization at all costs, and a burgeoning environmental movement. I’m hoping, when people read our book, they will reflect on how important it is to fight for what’s vital, and the impact of decisions on the future.”
Reading “Humbled” is like watching the Wizard of Oz. The players are prominent, and everyone knows how it ends. But we don’t know all it took to get there. And so, we return to the story, just to see it play out. And just to sustain the suspense, we won’t reveal who “poured the water on the witch” and doused the dreams of Humble Oil. You have to read the book. Or wait for the film.
In addition to cultivating a Christmas tree farm with her husband, Kathryn McKenzie worked for the Monterey Herald for 10 years as a staff writer and has continued to contribute to the newspaper as a writer, columnist and editor since 2004.
Excertt from Introduction:
The Monterey Bay has been our home for our entire lives. Both of us grew up here during the 1960s and ‘ 70s, played on its beaches, and admired the seabirds and marine creatures at its edge. And both of us remember vividly the PG&E plant in Moss Landing, which was visible at even relatively minor elevations. The tall stacks of this industrial plant from 1965 on dominated bay views as it exhaled dark clouds of smoke into the air.
We also remember the thin line that appeared now and then, a yellow or brown horizontal brushstroke in the sky. As kids, we didn’t think about it all that much, but as years passed, it disappeared, just as mysteriously as it showed up. Now we know that this was the mark of the area’s inversion layer, trapping unburned hydrocarbons and other pollutants underneath. As air quality has improved, it has vanished.
Just think of how thick this layer would have been, had a 50,000-barrel-a- day oil refinery actually been able to operate and grow here.