It appeared quite suddenly.

Thick, silvery blue clouds descended over Los Angeles.

When folks came out of their house, their eyes began to sting.

Their throats began to burn.

And there's people wheezing.

People not being able to breathe clearly.

It was so bad the cars crashed and the Los Angeles airport shut down.

All of us that live in Los Angeles realized that we have a smog problem.

But local governments, really had no idea what it was.

If this keeps up, I'm going to leave California for the sake of my children and myself.

There was an immense amount of pressure to figure out what's going on here.

We did some rather wild demonstrations with little children in gas masks.

And one of the things that Los Angeles did was to bring in an expert.

This device here then will recreate smog as we breathe it in Los Angeles.

That's right.

He was the one who discovers that what's coming out of automobiles is what's causing our smog problem.

What is smog and where does it come from?

Well, I don't know.

The petroleum interests try to undercut the findings, and the auto manufacturers simply deny that their product caused any problems.

And they ignored research.

That a high school student would recognize this is a conspiracy.

So Los Angeles County actually says, you've got to create some sort of device to control the amount of hydrocarbons that are coming out of automobiles.

But you're not going to beat a industry like the car makers without some big guns on your side.

And the only way to do that was to take it up to the state level.

And bring together people from all kinds of ideological stripes, with a common civic commitment to a common civic goal.

My fellow Californians, today we lead the nation in the battle for cleaner air.

It would revolutionize the auto industry.

In the future, motorists and pedestrian are going to be pollution free.

And this would have a tremendous effect on the quality of air that we all breathe to this day.