Developer Lloyd Samuel Whaley (1906-1973) named this street after himself in 1944; he had just purchased 115 acres here from the Jotham W. Bixby Company. Whaley was a Nebraska cattle rancher who came to Long Beach in 1935 with his wife LaVere (see La Vere Drive) and sons Rodney and Lloyd (see Rodloy Avenue). It must have been a big risk to get into California real estate in the midst of the Great Depression, but that’s exactly what Whaley did – and it paid off: by the late 1940s he was one of LB’s biggest homebuilders, particularly in the Los Altos neighborhood, where he reportedly constructed over 11,000 houses. The Whaleys had a third child, Susan Jane, in 1939. They divorced in 1960, with LaVere winning a million dollars in the settlement. Whaley married fellow divorcée Evelyn Curtis the following year.
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