Chris Epting - Huntington Beach Chronicles: The Heart of Surf City

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2014 by Chris Epting

All rights reserved

Front cover, top left: courtesy the Williams family; bottom: courtesy Marvin Carlberg.

All other images are from the authors collection.

First published 2014

e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978.1.62584.948.9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Epting, Chris, 1961

Huntington Beach chronicles : the heart of Surf City / Chris Epting.

pages cm

print edition ISBN 978-1-60949-534-3

1. Huntington Beach (Calif.)--History. 2. Huntington Beach (Calif.)--Social life and customs. 3. Huntington Beach (Calif.)--Biography. 4. Business enterprises--California--Huntington Beach. 5. Huntington Beach (Calif.)--Economic conditions. I. Huntington Beach independent. II. Title.

F869.H93E69 2014

979.496--dc23

2013047438

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

CONTENTS

This collection is dedicated to everyone who banded together during the summer of 2013 to fight the Southern California Air Quality Management District (AQMD), which tried to ban beach bonfires in our city. We showed the scoundrels what happens when you pick a fight with us, but still, lets never take our eyes off them. For all of the heart so many of you showed, thank you.

FOREWORD

The Huntington Beach Independent values Chris enough to ensure that his column is always on the front page. There he is, a picture of his head that appears to be dangling in space, and you can be almost certain that he will be accentuating the positive about someone. Someone, because his specialty is writing about people. His column has been devoted to latching on to the affirmative about his subjects and telling their unique stories throughout his writing career.

What sets Chris apart from other columnists I read are his need to always emphasize the positive side of his subject and his insatiable curiosity. These traits are responsible for his writing in some detail about a very wide range of subjects, not the least of which is the city of Huntington Beach.

When I first started reading Chriss work, I quickly became convinced that Huntington Beach is his hometown; it was later that I learned of his New York roots. He writes lovingly about so many aspects, past, present and future, of Huntington Beach.

In the articles herein, Chris tells us fascinating stories about the people who are the flesh and blood of this beach city. The man who runs the Beef Palace; a lady resident who portrayed Erin Walton (remember, Goodnight, John Boy); the Singing Goodtimers at the Senior Center; the pyrotechnician who provides the citys great Fourth of July fireworks; the operator of a beauty salon whose life revolves around honoring the troops; the Silcock couple who have adopted and cared for forty-three disabled and/or abused children over the past ten years; the local legend Bob Terry and family of Terry Buick, who helped put the city on the map; the 1976 Olympic swimming gold medalist Shirley Babashoff, now a mail carrier in the area; the multitude of performers like Janis Joplin and the Byrds who once entertained at the legendary Golden Bearthe list goes on and on and demonstrates the diversity of the fascinating subjects he continuously discovers and reveals to his readers through his unwavering curiosity.

Somehow, his lovely wife, Jean, and their two bright-eyed children, Charlie and Claire, are able to deal with all of these distractions and round out his caring family life.

If I tell the readers of this book any more, I will be spoiling the fun for them, so Ill close with this thought. It occurred before I had even met Chris, when I only knew him through reading his newspaper columns.

Whenever I pondered his columns, a passage in The Great Gatsby kept echoing in my mind. It is when Fitzgeralds narrator, Nick Carraway, says, upon first meeting Gatsby, that he had one of those rare smiles with a quality of reassurance in it. It concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

About two years ago, when I finally met Chris at an informal meeting in Alices Breakfast in the Park, I realized why this passage had kept echoing through my mind. Happy reading.

RICHARD D. REINBOLT OF HUNTINGTON BEACH

PROLOGUE

Now I know why I live in this paradise called Surf City.

Beautiful beaches, warm sand and plenty of tall green palm trees

Ocean breezes keep us cool, and at the same time, these breezes permeate the air with the sweet smells of the ocean mixed with the hint of smoke from one of our many beach barbecuing pits.

Now mix in the many stories in our beautiful city. And like any city, we have our highs and lows, but it seems like our highs are higher and our lows are, with the help of our compassionate neighbors, not quite so low.

Thank you, Chris, for writing all of these amazing stories.

Well done, my friend!

DEAN O. TORRENCE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to all those at the Huntington Beach Independent who have allowed me to write my In the Pipeline column over the years: Paul Anderson, Tony Dondero, John Canalis, Michael Miller, Alicia Lopez, Tom Johnson, Alisha Gomez, Vilma Hidalgo-Cruz and everyone else at the paper.

Thanks, as well, to Jerry Roberts and his team at The History Press and also to Richard Reinbolt and Dean Torrence for their kind words contained within this collection.

And of course, last but not least, thank you to my wife, Jean; son, Charles; daughter, Claire; and my mom for always reading the column first and sending me a note about it.

INTRODUCTION

About seven years ago, Paul Anderson, an editor with the Los Angeles Timespublished newspaper the Huntington Beach Independent, called to see if I might have any interest in writing a weekly column for the paper.

At that point, Id written a couple of books about the city and was in the process of becoming sort of a de facto historianspeaking at luncheons, schools and other places in the area. Pauls offer intrigued me, as Id long (secretly) dreamed of one day having my own column. But what was he interested in from my writing? Anything, he said. Go find stories. Dig up some interesting stuff. Have fun.

Little did Paul know how much his phone call would end up enhancing my life. See, the column (brilliantly named In the Pipeline by Paul to convey a sense of coming news, as well as referencing surfing and oil, two major facets of Huntington Beach) forced me to do exactly what he suggested: find stories and have fun.

While I think (for the most part) that Ive succeeded, theres been more to what Ive experienced, week in, week out: painful stories of loss that needed to be told and poignant stories of personal challenges have helped balance the flow.