Authors Mike Schaadt, the director of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, and Ed Mastro, the exhibits director, gathered these evocative photographs to tell this beach's colorful story from the archives of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, San Pedro Historical Society, Port of Los Angeles, Cabrillo Beach Polar Bear Club, and Los Angeles Maritime Museum.
Title: What's Hot Cabrillo Beach has its place in the sun Author:
Tim Grobaty Publisher: Press-Telegram Date: 12/16/2008
Back in the wee part of the 1960s, our favorite beach, for some
reason, was Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro.
Of course it wasn't going to be Long Beach. Long Beach doesn't top
anyone's list of bitchin' beaches except, perhaps, from people who
demand darned little from their beach except peace and quiet and a
bit of sludge. We admit, our town's beach has its charms, but none
of them include going into the actual water. There lies madness, if
not hepatites A through L. And Seal Beach was great, if one
dimensional, but that dimensional was a huge one: whompin'
surf.
Cabrillo had a bit of everything. For us, it was an out-of-town
adventure, a great place to go for family get togethers with scores
of cousins who could be let loose all along Stephen White Drive,
from the park with its exotic hillside trails, down to the beach,
to the museum (the Marine Museum, which was held in the
decommissioned Bathhouse) and Aquarium, to strolls on the pier and
breakwater, some occasional body-surfing - waves and breakwater
living in peaceful coexistence, like a guy who lives with a tiger
and the tiger never kills him - and the tide-pooling; the place was
crazily alive with creatures until people of many cultures began
harvesting the pools of pretty much everything but barnacles and
rocks - turned out a lot of that stuff was a delicacy in various
parts of the world. We have had sea urchin a couple of times and
despite our uncanny ability to eat practically anything, the very
disclaimer ("practically") has its roots in sea urchin.
Turns out there was plenty we missed, and you can catch the entire
experience that was, and continues to be, Los Angeles' funkiest,
hometowniest, least pretentious of all the beaches in "San Pedro's
Cabrillo Beach," yet another segment of our area's history filled
in admirably and completely in Arcadia Publishing's "Images of
America" series.
The book, unavoidably dedicated to John and Muriel Olguin, who
almost double-handedly made Cabrillo what it is, was put together
by Cabrillo Marine Aquarium director Mike Schaadt and exhibits
director Ed Mastro, using about 250 images from the archives of the
Aquarium, the San Pedro Historical Society, the Port of Los
Angeles, the Cabrillo Beach Polar Bear Club and the Los Angeles
Maritime Museum. It is probably the most comprehensive and
entertaining of all the books we've seen in this sprawling series
so far.
It hit shelves on Monday with a price tag of $21.99.
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