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THE LIFEGUARD TOWER

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:33:24 CDT

In the beginning there were no lifeguard towers on the beach; which is understandable since in the beginning there were no lifeguards on the beach. There were lifeguards in the many indoor, salt water plunges along the bay in the early 1900’s but not out on the sand. As a consequence drownings were not infrequent. When Hawaiian George Freeth arrived in California in 1907 and became a lifeguard in the Redondo Salt Water Plunge he set about organizing volunteer beach lifeguard squads along the busier beaches of Santa Monica Bay.

1909, Freeth on the left with the volunteer lifeguards he organized at Venice Beach

These unpaid volunteer lifeguards could be found during the summer months at Redondo Beach and Venice Beach and spotted here and there along the bay, but the other miles of beaches remained unprotected. At first the volunteers simply roamed the sand on foot with primitive rescue equipment, but they did help to save many lives. By the early 1920’s a few, very small enclosed towers were placed on the busier beaches. These were uncomfortable; room for just one man and reached by a ladder, but it did get the lifeguard up above the crowded beaches where he could better view the swimmers.

1920’s Lifeguard tower, Venice Beach

The first open box towers appeared in the 1920’s on the beaches in front of the salt water plunges and a few of the beach clubs. These towers afforded good visibility and could be easily moved around to different locations. A beach umbrella could be opened if the guard desired respite from the sun.

1920’s lifeguards in front of the Venice Plunge. I lifeguarded with these fellows at the plunge as a teenager; many of them became L.A. County and City Beach Lifeguards later

The first two professional, paid beach lifeguards were hired in 1926, George Wolf in Venice and Jim Reinhart in Hermosa. They had no towers. Jim roamed the sands on foot and George patrolled the beaches from Venice to Playa Del Rey in a car. The following year many more lifeguards were hired, and the little wooden towers seen above were quickly assembled and scattered along most of the beaches.

In those days (over 70 years ago) a friend, possibly bringing you a cold drink, could visit at the tower. Today the girls in the towers are all professional, trained beach lifeguards

In the 1940’s the little wooden towers were deemed to be inadequate for the job. More roomy towers with more storage space were called for. The maintenance foreman designed the new towers and through the years they replaced almost all the old ones.

A place for everything: rescue board locker, dressing room, and lookout tower

Well, then along comes the 60’s and who needs all that space, and why a paddleboard at every tower? A smaller, more economical, functional tower is what we need, one with an outside deck to sit on. Soon most of the old ones were removed and made room for the new ones even though we kind of liked that dressing room with individual lockers.

My last tower, Nicholas Beach, Zero Point, 1976

One more and the evolution of the lifeguard tower is finished. The same principle as the above tower but today’s tower is more roomy, more functional and maybe even more attractive.

It’s pretty nice alright but for some reason I really liked those little white, wooden, open towers with all that fresh air and sunshine over seventy years ago.

And the visitors weren’t too bad either.

AN EARLY RESCUE

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 19:03:19 CDT

It’s called Dockweiler State Beach now, renamed in 1955 for the late, prominent lawyer and civic leader Isadore Dockweiler, whose name was put forth by the then California Governor, Goodwin Knight. Dockweiler had little to do with the beach but he was an important politician in the first half of the 1900’s, and in fact he was known at the time as “The Democratic Party of California”. And he did father thirteen children which is quite an accomplishment in itself. Back when I was a kid growing up on the beach there, some eighty years ago in the 1920’s and 1930’s, it was known as Surfridge Beach since the residential area overlooking the beach where I lived was called Surfridge Estates, which in turn was a part of Playa del Rey. It was also known as Moonstone Beach for the abundance of semi-precious pebbles that could be found there.

The Pacific Electric streetcar brought people from inland to our beach in the 1930’s.

Unlike the wide expanse of sandy beach that is there today, this photo shows the narrow strip that was there back then when the ocean abounded with much greater waves for swimming and surfing than is seen now. The beach at our house was some distance south of this photo and seldom drew even this sparse Sunday crowd; it was usually just my two brothers and I, our friends, and maybe a couple of neighbors. The lifeguard force for the beaches was started in the late 1920’s but the guards were mostly stationed on the crowded stretches of Venice Beach and Ocean Park with only an occasional patrol down our way on the road above the beach; we seldom saw a lifeguard. It would be a great many years later before a tower and summer guard would be on hand. We swam and surfed daily on our beach in the summer months and almost daily in the winter. After a while our non-swimmer mother gradually stopped worrying about us as she watched us from the front window in our home above the beach swimming, paddling, rowing, and disappearing far out to sea on all kinds of boards, boats, and homemade floating contraptions.

Cal, Lee, Dog, Ray

My best school pal, Bob, lived on Caroll Canal in Venice about ten miles north. On school days my dad, on his way to his office in Los Angeles, often dropped me off at Bob’s house. From there we would paddle and pole our way down the canal system on his homemade raft ending up on time right behind our school, Florence Nightingale Elementary; a lot of fun unless the raft tipped and you fell overboard (it happened to me in my school clothes). I was at his house a lot but he was seldom at mine since it was a long bike ride and he didn’t have a father to drive him, and I don’t remember that his mother even owned a car. On this particular Saturday I convinced him to get on that bike and we would have a great time all day on the beach and in the water. I knew nothing about his swimming ability but since he lived just a block from the ocean I assumed he was probably in the water a lot just like we were. I guess Bob and I were about eleven or twelve years old, maybe fifth or sixth graders. Anyway, he made the trip and we first explored the nearby sand dunes for a couple of hours looking for snakes, coyotes and such and then decided it was time to head for the beach for a cool-off swim. There were some fine little waves breaking that day, no double overheads or anything like that, but good enough. We splashed about awhile and then I moved on out a ways and picked up a couple of nice body surfing waves passing by Bob each time where he was still standing in chest deep water. As I headed back out after the second ride I noticed Bob was further out now and in over-the-head water. There was a bit of an off shore flow running, a very minor rip tide, certainly not one of those white water terrors by any means. I thought Bob had moved on out there to position himself for a ride, but far from it, he was floundering and dog paddling straight up and down and looking like, “how did I get way out here?” I swam to him and said, “Hey, are you ok, can you swim in?” He sputtered that he could barely swim at all, which suddenly became obvious to me, and besides he was starting to panic. Now this was no great, heroic rescue, the water was about a foot over his head. I just propelled him by swimming and pushing against him and going down to the ocean floor with my feet to get a push off the bottom to keep his head above water. It took a while but I was able to move him out of the little rip current back into the surf zone where I knew the waves would give us some momentum toward shallow water. When he finally got his feet on the bottom and his head above water he was going to be okay. Once on shore Bob thanked me but I assured him he would have made it on his own. But in truth I felt pretty good about it.

Bob passed away some years back; I think he was about eighty. He lived in Malibu and I would see him from time to time, and occasionally he would bring up the subject of that day so long ago and we would have a good laugh about it. I worked as a beach lifeguard for thirty-seven years, and from time to time I worked the very spot of that little, long ago rescue. It is now Dockweiller State Beach, Lifeguard Towers 49 and 50.

And there’s always a lifeguard on duty.

SURFRIDGE ESTATES - THE LOST RESORT

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:02:27 CDT

Where stately mansions overlooking the beach and the Pacific Ocean once clung to the sandy hills of Surfridge Estates, today the visitor sees only this surreal, ghost town visage of what once was there. Barricaded by a high, chain link, barbwire fence with posted warnings of arrest if trespass occurs, what could possibly have occurred here, a catastrophic earthquake, an atomic blast? The roads are still there, but cracked and invaded by vegetation, and a few old globeless lampposts jut eerily skyward from the sidewalks. No cars or people have traveled these streets for forty years. Crumbling walls and foundations of the hundreds of former homes are visible, appearing as if in a movie scene of some cataclysmic disaster, with the former residents vanishing without a trace.

This was once Surfridge Estates, the southern section of the beach community of Playa del Rey, with Venice Beach to the north and Manhattan Beach to the south. In the mid 1920’s my father and my grandfather were looking for beach property to build homes for our families and they fell in love with what they saw at Surfridge. Perhaps this real estate ad at the time helped them with their decision: “Playa Del Rey, the King’s Beach, with the finest climate in the world, the grandest resort within reach of Los Angeles, the finest site on the Pacific Coast for high class homes for people of means, destined to become the most popular all year round resort and residence city in the United States”. Sold! An architect was selected and our homes were soon under construction following the strict building code for size and style. Each home had to be of the Mediterranean or Spanish style with white stucco walls and red tile roofs, and with the required square footage. Surfridge soon became home to many Hollywood actors, directors, and writers.

A Surfridge Estates Home

With the sand dunes to roam, the deserted beach below the house stretching for miles in each direction, and with the ocean for fishing and excellent waves for surfing, this was a paradise, especially for my two brothers and me and our friends. Inland to the east a block or two, where the sand dunes ended, lay what we called the valley. The valley was an uninhabited, wild and scrubby expanse full of rabbits, coyotes and crawling things. We shot our bb guns at targets there, built forts for mock battles, using the wild tomatoes that grew there for ammunition, and explored this empty, desolate area that ran all the way inland to what a couple of decades later would develop into the town of Westchester.

Then something exciting happened in our quiet valley. Some acreage was sold and cleared, and a single dirt airstrip was created. There was no hangar or building of any kind but occasionally a 1920’s style biplane or two would land and take off from Mines Field, named for the real estate agent that handled the sale, William W, Mines. Now we had an added attraction since we seldom saw planes in our skies at that time over eighty years ago. This air strip in the valley was some distance south of our homes on the beach so the sound from the engines seldom reached where we lived, and after taking off the planes usually made a turn inland before reaching the ocean.

Early Mines Field

All was quiet for many years at little Mines Field except for the once or twice that air races were held there. Pylons were erected and the planes would race round and round the oval course until the winner crossed the finish line. It was scary but fun to watch, except for the time one of the planes rounded a pylon too low to the ground and crashed, with the result that there was not much left of the plane or pilot when my brothers and I were first to arrive on the scene. By this time the first small hangar had been built. Air travel was starting to become more common, and then in 1937 the City of Los Angeles purchased Mines Field for use as a municipal airport. In a few years the real estate agent’s name was removed and replaced by Los Angeles Airport. The rest is history. Constant expansion of the airport in every direction through the years was necessary to keep up with the growth of air travel, and now LAX is the sixth busiest airport in the world. The homes of Surfridge Estates lay directly under the flight path of the much expanded airport. Eventually it was decided that the people and the houses could be in danger and should all be removed by eminent domain. In a losing battle, a great many residents fought the edict for many years in the 1960’s and early 70’s since almost no one wanted to leave, but since then more than one airliner has crashed into the ocean after passing over Surfridge Estates.

I was long gone, married with a family, and living in Malibu when my boyhood home and that of my grandfather’s and all the others were removed. It was at the time, and remains to this day, a sad sight to behold.

Aerial view of the vacant streets of what was once Surfridge Estates.

To the right, giant LAX sprawls over our “Valley”.

My home overlooking the beach was near the double street seen above.

All plans for a park or golf course have come to naught after forty years.