B & H Inglewood Towing

Growing up on a dairy farm as a boy, Clarence Van Lingen joined the military to get away from the 24 hour a day dairy farm life. Little did he know he’d be trading in one 24 hour job for another.

While in the military, Clarence was stationed on the USS Enterprise scheduled to be in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. Luckily, the carrier wasn’t running on schedule and narrowly missed the Pearl Harbor disaster. As one of the few surviving aircraft carriers, the Enterprise, later nicknamed the Galloping Ghost because it changed names at every port, was in hot demand and badly in need of on-board metal smiths to patch-up the battered carrier. Clarence was a fast learner and quickly caught on to a trade that would be the spring board for his career.

Not wanting to go back to the farm after the war, Clarence and his wife, Inez, with the help of their families, opened a small auto body business on the edge of his uncle’s dairy farm on Hawthorne Boulevard in Torrance. As his auto body business grew, Clarence noticed he couldn’t get tow service on the weekend and Torrance Police officers informed him that if a car needed to be towed, people were told to lock it and leave it on the side of the road until it could be picked up on Monday. The Police told Clarence that if he got a truck, they would call him when their other vendor was busy. Little by little, the late night and weekend calls trickled in and Clarence established himself in the towing business.



Now over 60 years, four facilities, three corporations, and 75 trucks later, the Van Lingen family enterprise still offers both private and commercial 24-hour towing services. The quality service first provided by Clarence has become the hallmark of the Van Lingen organization.