Long Beach is a large and diverse community. It has a large urban university, an international port, tourist serving hotels and a convention center, water sports and recreation petroleum production and refining facilities, aerospace and other manufacturing and industrial plants as well as commercial offices and retail stores. Still, however, it's overshadowed by its larger neighbor, Los Angeles, and popularly known as the "Sea coast of Iowa." So the people who built the city are a diverse group and those whose interviews are included in this series reflect that. Many of them talk about growing up in Long Beach when it was a small town with agricultural fields around its edges, including on top of Signal Hill. They describe the surf before the breakwater was completed. And then oil was discovered on Signal Hill and everything changed. Bob Hoffmaster, for example, worked at the port for many years and talks about its development. Virginia Reid Moore describes growing up in a family that ran an oil company. Don Thomas talks about growing up in north Long Beach and Don Utter describes growing up and becoming a teacher in Long Beach. The interviews in this series were collected in a variety of ways. The largest number were collected as part of a project to study the impact of the discovery of oil on the development of Long Beach. Others were conducted by students as part of class assignments at CSULB. Still others were simply done by people interested in their subjects. Together, they provide a complex picture of the Long Beach community the narrators helped to build.