CATHERINE MULHOLLAND, granddaughter of William Mulholland, author of “William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles.”

“I grew up hearing guys talking about the Met. My folks were friends with Mr. Whitsett (W.P. Whitsett, who would serve nearly 18 years as MWD’s first board chairman). My dad was a rancher in the San Fernando Valley and Whitsett lived in Van Nuys. Whitsett had been a land developer in the early days of the valley. He had a home and land in the Van Nuys area…. Harvey Van Norman (Mulholland’s successor) had property out here. I grew up with all these men around me. We had a ranch, rural life and the horses. Then just over the hill was this wonderful city and there was the Hollywood Bowl.

“I was terribly aware as a kid of the Colorado River and that grandpa was involved. I always knew that grandpa’s aqueduct (in the Owens Valley) was not going to be adequate.

“(MWD) was just being born. It was viewed with a lot of excitement with my dad and my grandfather. I came from a family that thought the Metropolitan Water District was a wonderful idea. It was a real advance to civilization.”

The school of thought is that Mulholland wanted the city of Los Angeles to encompass all of Los Angeles County from San Gabriel Mountains to the sea, but gave up that vision after facing insurrection in the Owens Valley and the defeat of two local bonds in the early 1920s.

Catherine Mulholland and others dispute this view.

“My granddad’s idea of an ideal city was Dublin, Ireland. He liked the idea of agriculture surrounding the city,” she said. W.P. Whitsett–who would serve as Metropolitan’s first chairman–had a dream during the 1920s of annexing the Owens Valley to Los Angeles and turning it into an American Switzerland and a tourist Mecca.

“My granddad always kind of pooh-poohed all of that,” Catherine Mulholland said. “My granddad never got into visionary plans like that. He was pretty focused on the water and the power.”

ROBERT V. PHILLIPS (right) rose to become chief engineer and general manager of the Department of Water and Power before retiring in the 1970s.

A few months after graduating Beverly Hills High, Phillips was working a summer job in 1935 in the Copper Basin tunnels, when the word came through to cease work for two minutes– Mulholland’s funeral was taking place in Los Angeles. As the din gave way to dead silence, Phillips found himself with a lot to think about.

“I had a great deal of respect for Mulholland,” Phillips said, “because of the visits I’d had with him from the time I was a little boy to the time I was a young man.”

His childhood memories include visits to dynamited sections
of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which his father oversaw.

As a youngster during the 1920s and early 1930s, he would find himself in downtown Los Angeles–for everything from holiday shopping trips to orthodontist visits.

“The streets in downtown LA were full of streetcars,” Phillips said. “I remember when the city hall was built. It was a bustling city.”

He would often see Mulholland chatting in his father’s office.

“He would ask me how school was going. He was a fine old gentleman–always very nice to me. Of course, they were all for the formation of the Metropolitan Water District. Most everybody was, in those days.”

“One of the reasons Mulholland supported the Metropolitan Water District is that he thought the city of Los Angeles was already large enough. He did not want to annex any more property,” Phillips said.

“While the city filed for water on the Colorado River, Los Angeles couldn’t afford to build its own aqueduct and had no desire to build an aqueduct of that capacity. The city was still burdened by the cost of its own aqueduct, and the Colorado River Aqueduct ended up costing 10 times as much.”