On Sept. 21, 1945, Pasadena minister Charles Long and his followers stayed up all night, reading Scripture and waiting for the world to blow up, as Long had predicted.
"Many had sold their possessions, paid their debts and made peace with their neighbors," The Times reported.
To their considerable surprise, the sun greeted them the next morning. The minister matter-of-factly explained that he had made a "minor error in his calculations," The Times said.
Sixty-four years later, there still seems no end to end-of-the-world forecasts.
The latest concerns a supposed ancient Maya prophecy that pinpoints Dec. 21, 2012, as doomsday (a Friday, in case you were making plans).
Late last year, a group of New Age entrepreneurs sponsored a 2012 conference in San Francisco for which attendees paid $300 each to hear debates on such topics as whether the Maya were actually space aliens.
Catastrophe scenarios are old hat for this state, whether concocted by holy men, authors or moviemakers. And Southern California is often the focus, no surprise considering the region's reputation for kookiness and its propensity for earthquakes.
Successors to Pasadena's Long in the doomsday category included a Hollywood evangelist who hurt his credibility in 1980 by being tardy for his end-of-the-world news conference. He admitted that he had overslept.
Another clairvoyant, Ernesto Montgomery, assured L.A. reporters that his earth-shaking prediction for Oct. 17, 1992, would come true because, "I have an antenna behind each ear, and they throb when an earthquake is coming."
Several weeks after the 1994 Northridge quake, a bizarre urban folk tale had it that police were pulling over erratic drivers on Pacific Coast Highway only to be told that a poltergeist was to blame. The spirit was supposedly appearing in their rear-view mirrors, whispering to them that another big temblor was coming. (Talk about back-seat drivers.)
But many who have predicted the end for Southern California have done so from a distance.
In 1981, Joseph Granville, a stock market expert based in the East, announced that a quake would hit L.A. at 5:31 a.m. Aug 10. Like more recent stock market experts, he would prove unreliable.
An outsider with a particularly spotty accuracy record is Nostradamus.
