A low-down town in the California desert loves its flagpole -- formerly the world's tallest

CALIPATRIA, Calif. — The little desert town of Calipatria, known for its state prison, is a humble place.

It struggles with poverty. It's in the middle of Imperial County, where the 20% unemployment rate is California's highest. And some days, its dusty air carries the stench of the polluted Salton Sea eight miles west.

But if you call townsfolk low-down, they won't take it as an insult.

Sitting 184 feet below sea level, Calipatria is the lowest incorporated town in the Western Hemisphere. (Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park is lower, at 282 feet below, but no one lives there.)

Like many rural towns that don't have a lot, Calipatria takes pride in what it does have. A flagpole that was once world's tallest: a 184-foot staff from which Old Glory flies at sea level.

Edgar Self, the city's public works director, called it "the shining star" of the Imperial Valley this month. He was setting out barrels of concrete to anchor 11 strings of white lights that would be hoisted to the top of the pole to create a very tall Christmas "tree" visible for miles around.

"It's a sleepy little community, but we're trying to get it going again," Self said.

"This community is very low income," added Self, 48, whose family has lived in this town 30 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border for several generations. "There's not a lot of money going around. This is one of the things we get to do for the community."

In this little town surrounded by agriculture fields and solar farms, summer temperatures exceed 110 degrees, and many homes have lawns of dirt instead of grass. The biggest employer is Calipatria State Prison. Besides a few restaurants, including a mouthwatering birria joint, there are not many businesses to draw in tourists.

The flagpole — marked on Google Maps as the Highest Flagpole — is the kind of road-trip oddity that has beckoned Canadian snowbirds, Bombay Beach bohemians and leather-clad Harley-Davidson riders passing through this town where pastors used to joke that their low-elevation parishioners had to pray harder because they are closer to hell.

Employees at City Hall across the street often step outside to take flagpole photos for tourists, sometimes lying on the ground to get the best angle.

Even better than the pole, Self said, is its backstory — an only-in-California tale for which city workers, led by an intern with an encyclopedic knowledge of its twists and turns, are trying to get official state recognition.

The flagpole, per the plaque at its base, is "Dedicated to Good Neighborliness."

But locals know it really stands in honor of the late Takeo Harry Momita and his wife, Shizuko Helen Momita. The Japanese American couple lived in Calipatria after being incarcerated with their three children at the Poston War Relocation Center in western Arizona during World War II.

Momita was a pharmacist who was born in Hiroshima, Japan, moved to California with his parents at age 8 and graduated from USC. In the 1930s and '40s, he ran drugstores throughout the Imperial Valley, including in Brawley and El Centro.

"You see, in those days, it was difficult for a Japanese to operate a drugstore successfully," his daughter, Louise Momita, said in a 1958 episode of the TV series "This Is Your Life." "As social pressures increased, and business fell off, Daddy would have to find a new location and start over again."

After Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, paving the way for the imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent — two-thirds of whom were American citizens — in desolate detention camps.

The Momitas' son, Milton, told The Times that his family was living in El Centro in the spring of 1942 when they were forced to board a bus bound for the Poston camp. He was nearly 5 years old. He remembers driving through the gates, past the barbed-wire fences.

At the camp, his elementary school classrooms were in converted barracks, where the children stood every day to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

"I think now, why did I do that?" said Milton Momita, 87. "I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and here we were, devoid of all our civil rights, put into camps and without having committed crimes — just the fact that we were Japanese."

The Momitas were incarcerated for three years.

Milton Momita, a retired pharmacist who lives in Contra Costa County, said that even after the imprisonment, his father "believed in this country."

"He taught us that this is a good country, a great country — to work hard, keep your nose clean, get an education, be good citizens," he said. "I'm happy to say that my two sisters and myself, we ended up being really good citizens."

By the early 1950s, the Momitas were living in Calipatria. That's where Momita became president of the Chamber of Commerce and opened another drugstore. It was a beloved hangout where wife Helen served coffee and locals served up chitchat.

"Besides being a very friendly town ... ever since we moved down there, no one hardly calls us Mr. Momita or Mrs. Momita. We're known affectionately as Helen and Harry," Momita said on "This Is Your Life."

In October 1957, the couple were driving to Los Angeles to visit their then-grown children when a car slammed headfirst into them in Colton. The 18-year-old driver of the other vehicle, The Times reported at the time, was trying to pass another car.

Helen Momita died instantly. She was 50.

The mayor of Calipatria, a city councilman, and the chief of the police hustled to the hospital. They persuaded Momita to hand over the keys to his pharmacy.

For weeks, while Momita recovered and mourned, his neighbors ran his shop. They even recruited a pharmacist from nearby Brawley to fill prescriptions for three hours a day.

Helen Momita's female friends "kept the coffee hot and waited on the customers and dusted and cleaned," said one of those women on "This Is Your Life." Host Ralph Edwards noted that her husband had been "killed in the Pacific" during World War II and her son was then serving with the U.S. Air Force in Japan.

The townspeople collected $500 for flowers for Helen Momita's funeral. But Momita said his humble wife would not have wanted a big memorial.

He suggested putting the money toward something that local officials had pitched years earlier but that the town could not afford: a flagpole reaching up to sea level. He was so touched by his neighbors keeping his store afloat that he gave an additional $500 from his own savings.

The story made national news and was featured in Time magazine, which noted that the Imperial Valley had come a long way "since the old days — and Pearl Harbor days — when inflamed feelings against Japanese settlers brought persecution and bloodshed."

Donations poured in. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon sent a flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol. Pacific Southwest Pipe Co. in Los Angeles offered to erect the pole at cost, which, The Times reported, was about $10,000.

The next year, Mayor Ed Rademacher and a city councilman brought an unsuspecting Momita to the Burbank set of "This Is Your Life," where, to his surprise, family and friends joined him onstage to tell his story.

And the story of the flagpole.

Rademacher, a World War II veteran, mentioned another landmark flag when describing his friend: "I can remember when I was on Iwo Jima, and that flag was on top of Mt. Suribachi. But I think Harry has raised that flag a little bit higher."

The Calipatria flagpole, set in 18 feet of concrete, was erected in October 1958.

A bright yellow sign at its base still declares it is the "World's Tallest Flagpole."

Today, it's not even close. The title currently belongs to a 662.57-foot flagpole in Cairo built in 2021.

The Calipatria pole isn't even the tallest in California. It was overtaken in 1996 by a 200-foot flagpole dedicated by the Lions Club in Dorris, a town of 860 people near the Oregon border.

But none of that matters to Calipatria city employees and elected officials, who want to see their flagpole formally designated as an official California historical landmark or point of historical interest.

The backstory, they say, is especially noteworthy. The Momitas were some of the few, if not the only, Japanese Americans living in Calipatria, where today less than 1% of the town's population is Asian, according to the U.S. Census. The mostly Latino town now has about 6,200 residents — a figure that includes more than 2,400 inmates at Calipatria State Prison.

Milton Momita said that, in 2019, he brought his daughter and two grandsons, one in high school and one in college, to the Imperial Valley to show them where he grew up.

"Being raised up in the Bay Area, they didn't think there was much to do there," he said, chuckling. But they were impressed by the flagpole — which, after all these years, is still a source of pride for him.

At Calipatria City Hall, Rudy Rosales, a 23-year-old intern from nearby Niland, has spent months researching the story of the flagpole, combing through municipal and news media archives, calling research libraries for obscure articles, putting together a comprehensive record that the city will be able to reference for years to come.

Rosales is a little shy — until he starts talking about the pole. He has memorized its significant dates, minutiae about the company that built it and details about what became an international fundraising campaign for the landmark.

"It's a bit hard to believe that this happened, which is why we're doing a lot — and I mean a lot — of research to make sure that we have all of our facts correct," Rosales said.

City officials said they hope to use Rosales' research as part of a nomination package for the state Office of Historic Preservation to get the ball rolling on a much-hoped-for official designation.

"It's iconic to this community," City Manager Laura Gutierrez said on a recent December day. She keeps a stash of stickers and pins in her office. They are emblazoned with the new city seal, which features — you guessed it — the flagpole.

A state designation, she added, would hopefully help the town preserve the pole and keep it well-maintained in the future.

If the city gets a historic landmark designation for its flagpole, it also could get a directional highway sign from the California Department of Transportation, pointing the way for tourists.

It's a humble hope. But a hope nonetheless.