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BOARDWALK  Artist's view of today's Santa Cruz Boardwalk with the venerable Giant Dipper roller coaster in background. |
While the tourists played,
local kids worked overtime
of TheColumnists.com
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On a blanket with my baby is where I'll be." --The Drifters |
What The Drifters
sang about in 1964 is what most of us young fellows who came
of age a decade earlier usually only had fantasized about as
teenagers. I, for one, never made it under the Boardwalk--literally
or figuratively.
The Boardwalk I grew up with stretches along Monterey Bay’s
golden sands in the seaside resort city of Santa Cruz, Calif.,
about 75 miles south of San Francisco. The last of California’s
old-time beachfront amusement parks, the Santa Cruz Boardwalk
will be celebrating its 100th birthday in 2007.
Scores of Santa Cruz High students spent their summer vacations
at the ‘walk, but they usually weren’t gallivanting
with the tourists who more than doubled the city’s population
every June, July and August weekend when I was a teenager. They
were working at the rides, the carny-style games of skill, the
restaurants, the specialty food concessions and the gift shops.
“The Santa Cruz Boardwalk offered many of us opportunities
to work during the summer and earn some money for the school
year,” Layne LeComte wrote for the 50th Reunion Memory Book
of his SCHS Class of 1954.
Layne, who started working at age 12 at one of the skill games
operated by his aunt and uncle, remembered that the ‘walk,
“provided us working stiffs, particularly the barkers, one
perk we all enjoyed: the opportunity to meet out-of-town girls.
Our spiels doubled as our pick-up lines. If a girl rejected our
pitch, our egos could write it off as part of the job. If we
scored a hit, our egos could chalk it up as part of our charisma.
It was a win-win situation.”
Classmate Aldo Mazzei, who worked at the bumper car ride, said
he didn’t have to use a come-on to get the females’
attention: “The girls riding the bumper cars sometimes would
get tangled up in a corner, and we would have to untangle them.
That’s how we met them. It didn’t hurt us either when
we would give free rides to the girls we’d later arrange
to meet at either the Cross Roads or 5-Spot Drive-in restaurants.”
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Fort Ord, the Army basic-training center near Monterey at the opposite end of Monterey Bay, “was in full swing then,” wrote Darlene Biondi, a classmate who worked at a food concession. “Soldiers on weekend passes would walk the Boardwalk in their uniforms. Girls and young women looking for men--or just looking--would walk back and forth. Soon I’d see the soldiers and the girls walking arm-in-arm. Some of the women married the soldiers.”
Another barker in the Class of ‘54,
Bob Branstetter, recalled how “interesting it was to watch
all the action as I worked. Two gals would walk by and when they
passed by again on their return trip, they’d often be accompanied
by two guys.”
So many local youths worked at the ‘walk over the past century
that the amusement park’s owner, the Santa Cruz Seaside
Company, started an Alumni Club a few years ago. Among those
saluted was the Class of 1954’s John Biondi:
“My dad, my son and I were honored at the first reunion
for being the first family that had three generations that had
worked there. My late father, John Sr., worked there in the mid-1920s.
He worked in the spook house. He would jump off a platform with
a noose around his neck and pretend to hang himself. He was paid
12 cents an hour. My son, Richard, worked in the president’s
office and collected money from the various concessions and prepared
it for the bank. He worked there in 1975 and was paid $1.50 per
hour.”
John first worked as a bus boy for a restaurant next to the Penny
Arcade and “was paid 25 cents per hour to clean tables and
wash dishes. I think I was in the seventh or eighth grade. I
also worked at an ice cream concession while in high school.
I helped make and sell cones and was paid 75 cents per hour.”
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summers as head of the Santa Cruz lifeguards, protecting swimmers on the beach below the boardwalk. Later, his son, Eric, joined him as a lifeguard. |
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When you are part of a family-owned business, remembered ’54er Carole Barrish, whose parents operated a Boardwalk restaurant, “You learn to do everything. From the age of 11, I helped my mother with food preparation, waited on customers and cleaned up . . . Lots of employees who worked at the games and rides came there for breakfast . . . I did have a great time trading hamburgers for free rides on the roller coaster.”
Classmate Alberta Young, who worked as a hatcheck girl at the Boardwalk’s Cocoanut Grove ballroom the summers of 1951, 1952 and 1953, fondly recalled the days of the Big Bands, including Jimmy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton and Guy Lombardo, but “the highlight of my job there was when I got a $20 tip for a 10-cent hat check.”
A $20-bill may not seem like much now, but in 1951 it was the equivalent to about $150. But nobody wears a fedora today.
Across the street from the Boardwalk resided the Seaside Company’s historic Casa del Rey Hotel, connected by an overhead, enclosed walkway that its guests used to reach the Cocoanut Grove. It hosted the famous and not-so-famous, including the Miss California Pageant hopefuls who could cross unimpeded to the Boardwalk for the pageant’s Sunday finale held each year at the Beach Bandstand.
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the Cocoanut Grove ballroom, which once hosted some of the top orchestras in the Big Band era. Across the street at left stood the historic Casa del Rey Hotel in this circa 1952-53 snapshot. |
Classmates Ruth Mitchell and Rose Unger worked summers as hotel maids. As Ruth wrote, the Fifties were still an age of innocence:
“One Sunday morning as I was stripping a bed in the Casa del Rey accompanied by Velma, another maid who was somewhat older and certainly worldly wiser, I spotted this ‘foreign’ object on the sheet. ‘What’s that,’ I asked innocently. Velma laughed slightly and said, ‘It’s a rubber used for birth control. It’s also called a prophylactic’.
“One afternoon after school had resumed that fall, a bunch of us girls were playing basketball on the outdoor courts near the girls’ gym when one of them started giggling and pointing at a similar object and squealed, ‘Look, it’s a rubber.’ A close friend standing next to me--who was not so worldly wise as I had become--asked, ‘What’s so funny about a rubber band?’ ‘It’s not a rubber band,’ I said. ‘It’s a prophylactic.’
“Later, when my friend and I were alone, I explained what its purpose was. That’s really what sex education in the schools was like in the Fifties.”
Many of the games and rides that existed 50 years ago are long gone as the Seaside Company continually upgrades Northern California’s most popular seaside amusement park. But the Giant Dipper--the famed wooden roller coaster built in 1924--still captivates riders young and old. One of two Boardwalks rides that have been declared National Historic Landmarks by the U.S. National Park Service, the Giant Dipper thrilled its 50-millionth rider in 2002.
Although there are new thrill rides today, including the Double Shot, which was added this year and drops its riders 125 feet straight down to experience the weightlessness of negative G forces, the frightening favorite from my youth, The Octopus, is gone. The Octopus had long arms extending out from its center with cars attached at the end. While the individual cars twisted and turned on their own axis, the long arms whirled all of the cars around in a giant circle, arching up and down at what seemed to be lightning-like speed. Riders felt the sensation that their car would be flung out across the adjacent beach and into Monterey Bay.
The ‘walk’s other National Historic Landmark, the merry-go-round, is celebrating its 95th birthday this year. Riders aboard the hand-carved wooden horses on the outside of the carousel can try to snatch a steel ring from a long metal arm as they swing around and then fling it into a clown’s mouth as the carousel circles the building. A 342-pipe German band organ playing early 20th Century music delights riders and spectators alike.
Gone, however, is the Boardwalk Plunge, a heated saltwater-filled swimming pool, where I and thousands of other local kids learned to swim, courtesy of the Red Cross. In the early 1960s, it was filled in and turned into a miniature golf course.
Also gone is a tiny kiosk that harbored a magic shop with an on-site magician who was so amazing that I spent most of my 1948 summer allowance buying his tricks and then joined my junior high school’s magic club that September. (I can still remember the trick that turned me on.) I’d put on magic shows in our garage for my cousins and neighborhood kids and in later years I’d buy magic kits as Christmas presents for my kids and my nephews and nieces. But the illusions never enthralled or entertained or inspired them as much as they did me.
Gone, too, is the Boardwalk’s Pleasure Pier, where a huge speedboat once took visitors skimming along Monterey Bay. “Hi-de-ho and away we go” blared from loudspeakers at the speedboat’s ticket booth at the end of the pier. It could be heard all the way back to the Boardwalk.
The Miss California Pageant is but a local memory now, run out of town by a city whose newest leading citizens claim to be progressives. Its local run started in 1924 and ended in 1985. Also in 1985, The Beach Boys wanted to give a free concert on the Main Beach over the July Fourth weekend. But those same progressive city officials turned them down, claiming holiday congestion already was too difficult a problem to handle without the additional traffic The Beach Boys would lure.
The Suntan Special, the train whose engine has been cited by one railroad-buff web site as the most photographed steam engine in the nation’s history, hasn’t made its run from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Boardwalk for decades. It carted thousands of passengers to the ‘walk over the years, dropping them off at the Boardwalk every Sunday afternoon in the summer.
The Casa del Rey Hotel with its overhead walkway is gone, too, victim of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake that devastated downtown Santa Cruz. A parking lot has taken its place.
For many years, Santa Cruz always seemed to play second fiddle to the more “sophisticated” Monterey, Carmel and Pacific Grove on the other side of the bay. But for Northern California’s best beaches and best surfing and just plain fun, Santa Cruz was and always will be first chair.
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sheet music for "Down in Santa Cruz," the song composed by Irene and Fred Rode, recorded by Eddie Fitzpatrick and his orchestra. |
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I remember a record played on local jukeboxes during those carefree summer days of the Fifties: “Down in Santa Cruz.” I can still hum the melody and recall a few words, but had no clue as to who sang it until a couple of months ago. I happened to mention the little ditty to Ron Miller, managing editor of The Columnists, who was graduated from SCHS two years after me. Ron, who seems to have all the answers to my questions about anything to do with the world of entertainment, proudly proclaimed that it was his wife's mother, the late radio singer Irene Saunders Rode, who had composed “Down in Santa Cruz” with the assistance of her husband, the late Fred Rode. It was recorded in 1949--12 years after Mrs. Rode's death--by San Francisco singer-bandleader Eddie Fitzpatrick and his orchestra.
The lyrics go like this:
A paradise down 'neath
the hills,
A throbbing sea that rushed us thrills,
That's where I first met you...
Down in Santa Cruz.
Oh, heart of beauty
by the sea
Still holds my fairest memory
That's why I'll never lose
Dreams of Santa Cruz
Gay colored casino lights
Burning through the misty night
Set our hearts aflame
The night you came to me
Then when I held you
close to me
I lost my heart down by the sea
And it will always be...
Down in Santa Cruz
To help celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Boardwalk is seeking old photographs and anecdotes and especially old 8mm home movies from the public to post to its web site and to incorporate into a quasi-documentary DVD they’ll be making. The last time I checked, they were really short on home movies. You can help become part of Boardwalk history by offering yours. Check the Boardwalk’s “Millions of Memories” web site to find out how to submit stories, snapshots and movies. It’s at:
http://beachboardwalk.com/memories/
The last time I visited the Boardwalk was
in September 2004, when the SCHS Class of ’54 held its 50th
Reunion dinner-dance in the magnificent Cocoanut Grove ballroom.
But I didn’t get out of the ballroom that night. It has
been close to 30 years since I last actually traipsed the Boardwalk
proper--back when my kids were still kids.
Next year I plan to walk the ‘walk again to help celebrate
its 100th birthday.
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The photos are courtesy of the
Santa Cruz High Class of 1954 50th Reunion Memory Book. It includes
some 40 articles covering a wide range of topics, from racial
discrimination to job opportunities for women to the impact of
the military draft on men. For historians interested in learning
what the Fifties’ teen culture was like from those who lived
it, copies of the book are available for public viewing in the
main Santa Cruz Public Library and the Santa Cruz High Alumni
Association office. Copies will be made available this summer
for the libraries of the local Cabrillo Community College and
the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The "Down in Santa Cruz" lyrics and sheet music cover are ©1949 by Fred W. Rode. Their reproduction is courtesy of Ron and Darla Miller, administrators of the musical legacy of Irene and Fred Rode.
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