Fontana

Fontana was founded in nineteen thirteen by Azariel Blanchard Miller as an agricultural colony of citrus groves, vineyards, and chicken ranches along Route Sixty-Six. For nearly three decades it stayed small and rural. Then the war changed everything.

In nineteen forty-two, Henry J. Kaiser needed a West Coast steel supply for his Liberty Ship shipyards in Richmond and Portland, and he chose Fontana. The Kaiser Steel mill commenced production on December thirtieth, nineteen forty-two, as the first fully integrated steel mill on the West Coast.

Workers flooded in from across the country. A farm town of a few thousand became an industrial city almost overnight. Fontana had about fourteen thousand six hundred people in the nineteen sixty census, and by nineteen ninety it had climbed past eighty seven thousand.

Part of the old mill grounds later became the Auto Club Speedway, a two mile oval that hosted NASCAR races and is now being rebuilt as a half mile short track. Kaiser Steel operated for over four decades before closing in nineteen eighty-three, leaving a wound in the local economy that took a generation to heal. Fontana today is better known as the birthplace of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, founded here in nineteen forty-eight by World War Two veterans.

The club's founding charter is still known as the Berdoo charter, a nickname for San Bernardino.