What Gerald Desmond’s son thinks of bridge name
Jerry Desmond was only a teenager more than half a century ago when he tightened the last bolt — a gold-plated one — on the new bridge bearing his father’s name.
But he remembers the day like it was yesterday: June 7, 1968.
“I was an 18-year-old college student, and I remember driving down from UC Santa Barbara and tightening that bolt,” said Desmond, now in his 70s, with the same name as his father, Gerald Desmond, and working as a private attorney in Santa Rosa. “My mother gave a real nice speech at the dedication. It was a great day.”
At the dedication of the $19 million Gerald Desmond Bridge, thenLong Beach Mayor Edwin Wade praised the span’s namesake, who had died of cancer four years earlier at the age of 48, for “fighting the city’s battle to retain its share of Tidelands oil funds.”
“May the Gerald Desmond Bridge,” Wade added, “serve this community as well as did the man for whom it is named.”
Desmond’s wife, Virginia, stood between two breezewhipped flags and expressed her appreciation to city officials for naming the bridge after her husband.
But the Desmond Bridge wore out and wasn’t high enough to handle today’s newer cargo ships, so a spectacular new bridge was built to replace it.
The Gerald Desmond Bridge is now set to be demolished.
The new bridge opened to traffic in October without a name, other than those meant more as descriptors or aspirational nicknames: the Gerald Desmond Replacement Bridge and, as Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero called it, the Bridge to Everywhere.
Naming the new bridge requires an act of the state Legislature and that process has been in the works since the span opened.
Those favoring a change in the name felt that a new moniker would draw more attention to Long Beach and its bridge, which boasts twin towers 515 feet high, making it the tallest structure in the city.
State Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, who represents the 70th District, which includes Long Beach and the two busiest ports in the nation, the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, told me in September that he didn’t want to prejudge what the name should be.
“But the bridge will be a unique, iconic structure for the entire region and deserves a name befitting that,” he said.
O’Donnell joined with state Sen. Lena Gonzalez, who represents the
Gerald Desmond was the Long Beach city attorney who secured oil funding to build the bridge that opened in 1968 and would bear his name. Desmond died in 1964. He was 48.
33rd District, which includes Long Beach, and Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia to come up with a plan to get the community involved in voting on a name for the new bridge.
O’Donnell and Gonzalez announced that voters in a survey favored calling the span the Long Beach International Gateway Bridge.
About 54% of the 2,780 votes favored this name. The other choices were International Gateway and Long Beach Transpacific.
O’Donnell said the community has spoken and made “a great choice.”
He said he and Gonzalez will now take a resolution with the name change to the House and Senate in Sacramento for a final, official vote.
But what does Jerry Desmond, son of Gerald Desmond, think of the name change?
“Our family is unanimous in favoring my father’s name on the bridge,” he told me via phone from his office in Santa Rosa last week. “We were greatly honored when the bridge was named after my father, and we would have been honored if his name was kept on the new bridge, but I understand the political realities of the situation.
The new name “fairly represents the city and the tremendous port there,” he added. “I think it is a nice name.”
For the record, just who was Gerald Edward Desmond?
He and his family have deep roots in Long Beach.
He was born in the city on April 12, 1915, the second-oldest son of Walter Desmond, a lawyer from Boston who came to California in 1905 and opened a law office in Long Beach. Walter Desmond was a Superior Court judge and presiding justice of the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District. Walter Desmond Jr., brother of Gerald, was an attorney and judge in Long Beach for nearly 60 years and president of the Long Beach Bar Association. He died in 2007.
Gerald Desmond graduated from Poly High School, Long Beach City College and UC Berkeley. In 1932, he met his future wife, Virginia Slater, a Wilson High School graduate, at LBCC.
They were married in 1937 and had five children, including a son named after him.
Desmond worked his way through Harvard Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1941. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he started a private law practice. He became active in local government and served two terms on the Long Beach City Council before being elected to two terms as city attorney. He also was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.
He gained prominence for playing a major role in obtaining Tidelands oil funds, which helped pay for the bridge that later would bear his name. He also was successful in prohibiting oil drilling on the city’s beaches.
He died of kidney cancer in 1964 while still serving as city attorney. He was only 48. After Desmond died, his wife got a degree in library science at USC and worked as a librarian in the Long Beach Public Library in the 1970s and 1980s. She died in 2005 at 91. Jerry Desmond followed in his father’s footsteps, working as a Long Beach deputy city attorney from 1974 to 1981 in the same office his father ran in the 1960s.
Monica Daley, one of the daughters of Gerald Desmond’s sister, Edith, said her Uncle Gerald was “a brilliant man.”
Daley served as principal at Newcomb Academy, Hughes Middle School and Millikan High School before retiring. Her mother died in 2017. Monica’s father, Bob Daley, is a retired Air Force colonel and a graduate of St. Anthony High School.
Gerald Desmond was “a great man who did wonderful things for the city,” Bob Daley said, “and deserved to have the bridge named after him.”
Since it looks like the new skyline bridge will have a name change, there should be some way to remember Gerald Desmond for all that he did for Long Beach.
One possibility is to name one of the observation decks on the new bridge in his honor. There are beautiful views from the observation decks, which are connected to the bicycle and pedestrian walkway on the bridge, which has been named the Mark Bixby Memorial Bicycle Pedestrian Path. Bixby, 44, died in a private plane crash at the Long Beach Airport on March 16, 2011, en route to Utah to go skiing.
“The Desmond name is historic and deserves to be remembered,” O’Donnell said.
Jerry Desmond agrees. “I would fully support naming one of the observation decks after my father,” the son said. “We were hoping the entire bridge would have his name, but it is what it is and it would be very nice to keep his memory alive in some way.”