Long Beach California, in case you didn't know, is a fairly large city although most people think of it as a southern suburb of Los Angeles. It is nothing like Long Beach Island, the summer hamlet in New Jersey featuring seaside cottages with pastel siding and pink shutters or the one in North Carolina that daintily perches along the outer banks. 

It's a large industrial city with major manufacturing operations for Hughes Aircraft (now famous for satellites and missiles), Boeing, and Northrup nearby (F-18 fusilages in City of Industry).  The Long Beach Airport is the site for what used to be the main operations for Douglas Aircraft, later McDonnell-Douglas and now owned by Boeing.  Most of the Douglas commercial aircraft were built there including the DC-8, 9, 10 and MD-11.  The military airlift jet, the C-17 Globemaster was developed alongside the airport and I believe it is still being built.  To give an indication of size and scale, at one point McDonnell-Douglas had 60,000 people working in the various operations around the Long Beach Airport, most, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW).   

Close by, in adjacent Huntington Beach (featured in Hollister Stores web cams) there were operations for McDonnell-Douglas' Space Station and the management offices for the Delta Rockets.  Not far from Long Beach, just a few miles along the 710 freeway north were the Downey CA HQ for Rockwell's space shuttle and a few miles further in Pico Rivera were the once-classified operations for the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. 

The Long Beach Harbor is one of the biggest Harbors in the country and with that are lots of longshoremen.  It is the second largest container port in the country. There's also a large presence of tour ships with many excursions north to San Franciso and south to the Mexican resorts like Cabo St. Lucas.   Dotting the waters off Long Beach are well decorated oil derricks.  I think the same guy who designed the Dodgers' Chavez Ravine designed the "beautifcation" of the oil derrick islands beause they feature the same pastel "sails" seen at Chavez Ravine and the NY Met's former home at Shea Stadium in Queens NY.  Long Beach is also home to some major oil refineries.  These are large operations that are largely automated.  What you see are large black pipes ranging up down, left and right with spewing smoke.  Every now and then they surprise the surrounding residences with an errant ball of fire which mostly just dissipates in the sky, but sometimes lands with dangerous results. 

Long Beach is the home base for West Coast Choppers (Motorcylces) which is really just a small shop near the town center circle along the Pacific Coast Highway that got a bit famous thanks to some innovative designs and a television contract.  It is visited and equally praised by lawyer weekend-bikers and Hell's Angels. 

The city is also notable for it's tony section called Belmont Shores which has nice beaches, lots of restaurants and a vibrant night life.  Long Beach hosts the annual Long Beach Grand Prix which is run through the city streets in formula 1 racers.  The downtown area, featuring many art deco high rises, is similar in size to the city center in Nashville. 

Long Beach's population is 462K and Nashville's is 602K.  There's a difference though, surrounding Nashville is....countrside punctuated by the occasional twang of a banjo.  Surrounding Long Beach is ocean on one side and on the other...more cities.  Think of it this way, even though it's just a suburb, it's almost the size of Nashville on its own.  The Los Angeles basin, including Long Beach, is home to approximately 27 million people. 

Long Beach is not ALL muscles, sweat and engines.  The Palos Verdes penninsula is adjacent to Long Beach.  It's a large oceanside hill, almost a mountain, with dramatic views in all directions.  Along with Beverly Hills and Bel Air, it's one of the most exclusive areas in the LA basin.  The oceanfront locations get clean air from ocean breezes and are therefore very desireable places to live.  Note, most of the pollution that LA is famous for blows inland and gets trapped against the tall mountains that stand a few miles east of LA where it turns browner and browner until an air inversion blows it out  another direction. 

Long Beach is vital to America.  It's an industrial town that gives us imports, oil and a stout national defense.  As you can tell from my descriptions, most of kids from the Long Beach area are not typically beach-bleached surfer dudes, but are more likely to be hard-scrabble get-er-done dudes and the proudly worn nickname "Dirtbags" is well earned for the city's working class roots and ability to survive.