by Kevin Cody
Barb Quimby was not expecting to see the USC frat boy with the James Dean looks on the upstairs landing of her garage apartment when she answered the knock at her door.
Though he lived two doors down on the Hermosa Strand, and she bicycled past his family home every day, he had never acknowledged her, nor she him.
She had a boyfriend. He thought she was 16. Only after a friend told him she was 21, a year older than he was, and working at Northrop as an engineer did he decide to call on her.
Don Guild chose the day he saw her bike by, riding no hands, eating a pickle.
When she answered the door, he asked if she would like to go lobster diving.
She knew lobster diving, like snipe hunting, is done after dark. She wondered if he was serious. She knew he was when he offered to loan her a face plate, fins, and a dive light. She’d need to bring her own garden gloves, and a gunny sack in the unlikely event she got her hands on one of the aptly named California Spiny Lobsters.
She grew up in Torrance. Her mother taught her to body surf at 14th street in front of the Hermosa Biltmore Hotel. She learned to surf at the Cove in Palos Verdes, which required carrying her 80 pound redwood board down a half mile long, cliffside trail.
But she had never put on a face plate. She told him yes.
They dove that October night in 1949 in swimsuits, on the inside of the newly completed Redondo Beach Breakwater, still a favorite spot for lobster divers.
Twins Bob and Billy Meistrell, Don’s lobster diving friends, were still years away from inventing the modern wetsuit.
Don told his date not to swim into the caves, where lobsters hide. Wait for them to crawl out for food. He neglected to tell her to grab them from behind because lobsters retreat backwards.
She still bagged three lobsters. He was impressed.
A week later Don knocked on her door to invite her to go mat surfing. She said yes, knowing she could borrow a blue, and yellow, canvas and vulcanized rubber Converse surfmat from Bunny Seawright, who also lived on The Strand. Seawright was an accomplished waterwoman who participated in the annual Catalina to Hermosa Beach aqua plane race. Competitors rode standing up on toboggan-shaped sleds towed by speedboats. Seawright won the women’s division in 1937. Barb’s mother gave music lessons to Seawright, and also taught her bird whistling.
The winter surf was too big to paddle out through, so Don and Barb convinced Jim Bailey, a lifeguard friend who also cut Barb’s hair, to unlock the gate to the pier, which was closed for repairs.
Barb knew from jumping off the high dive at the Long Beach Plunge to hold her nose. But on her first pier jump, the impact drove her thumb into her eye, leaving her with a black eye. Don was impressed, again.
Their third date was a bike ride to Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica.
They ended the day back at her apartment talking about how much fun it would be to bicycle through Europe together. Both had friends who had done it, sleeping for free at youth hostels.
Don was studying to be a pharmacist at USC, in anticipation of taking over his dad’s pharmacy in downtown Hermosa. Barb was a devout Christian Scientist. The only time she went into a pharmacy was when she needed shampoo.
If we are going to bicycle through Europe, she mentioned, we’ll have to get married. They married nine months later, in May, 1950. In May, 1951, they sailed aboard Cunard Cruise Line from Montreal to Southampton. In London, they purchased two bicycles, and set out on a four month 1,508 mile tour through England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and France. In Paris, they sold their bikes, and returned to Hermosa with some modest antique souvenirs.
Though unforeseen at the time, their newly developed appreciation for European antiques, would prove central to the success of the 12 Guild Drugs and eight Antique Guild stores they would open over the ensuing four decades.
The trip also fueled the couple’s wanderlust, which continued through their late 80s, when the couple was featured on the cover of Ski Magazine, and Don was recognized for having skied 15 million vertical feet in Canadian Bugaboos’ powder. Barb skied 11 million vertical feet. Their heli-skiing ended when Barb was 89, after she suffered a leg injury on a bus racing up the winding road to the heli-skiing’s lodge.
In 1953, Barb and Don bought The Strand home they would live in throughout their 73-year marriage. The home today is not much different from when it was built in the 1920s, except for their enclosure of the upstairs landing where Don first invited Barb to go lobster diving. They had bought home Barb lived in when they met.
The house is notably unpretentious, especially in contrast to the neighboring architectural showcases.
The Guilds’ public profile was similarly unpretentious. The couple neither sought nor received community recognition. The Chamber of Commerce didn’t name them Man and Woman of the Year. They didn’t serve on city commissions, nor run for city council.
But without the couple’s many unheralded political and financial contributions, Hermosa’s physical profile would be significantly different.
In the early ‘50s, they organized neighbors to block upzoning the north end of The Strand, from single family to high density. What might have been, without that effort, can be seen along the Redondo Esplanade, where old waterfront homes gave way to high rise condominiums.
In 1958, Barb drew on her UC Berkeley engineering degree background to lead the fight against the Shell Oil ballot measure. If approved, Shell would have been allowed to drill in Hermosa’s tidelands. Huntington Beach has never fully recovered from its oil derrick era.
When the stress of the Shell Oil campaign pushed Barb to the verge of a nervous breakdown Don proposed a surf trip to Hawaii. They sailed aboard the Matson Liner SS Lurline with two new Dale Velzy balsa boards. Don took a photo on the day he picked up the boards that shows Velzy and fellow boardmaker Greg Noll in front of Velzy’s shop at the Manhattan Beach Pier. Last month, the small, black and white was shown to the Manhattan Beach City Council as evidence of the shop’s existence. The council subsequently approved a plaque to be placed at the shop’s location declaring it the site “one of the world’s first known surf shops.”
In 2016, five decades after stopping Shell Oil, her knowledge of State tidelands drilling restrictions helped defeat E&P Oil’s ballot measure. The measure would have allowed E&P to drill into Hermosa’s tidelands.
Don Guild passed away from natural causes in March of this year, at the age of 95.
During his memorial Barb made a point of telling friends, “Don’t you think I’m going away anytime soon.”
A friend who visited her last week at her home found her on the phone, deep in jargon-loaded conversation with an Apple Computer technician. She had bought a new apple computer that morning.
Compound pharmacist
Don Guild was never enthusiastic about being a pharmacist, Barb said. His gift was in merchandising. He went to pharmacy school at USC to avoid the draft, and because the classes were in the morning. He kept his afternoons free to dive for lobster, which he sold to housewives and on the San Pedro Wharf. It was a logical progression from when he was a child and sold molting sandcrabs, called gummies by fishermen, to the bait shop on Pier Avenue. Like lobsters, crabs hide during the day. But the young Guild knew if he saw an air bubble in the wet sand, a quick stab of his fist would yield a crab.
Following their marriage, Barb continued working at Northrop Corporation to save money for their bike tour of Europe. Don also helped save money, by working at three pharmacies, including his father’s, on the northeast corner of Pier and Hermosa avenues. Arnold’s Hardware was next door. A JC Penny’s department store anchored the end of the block. Bustler’s Camera was on the southeast corner of Pier and Hermosa avenues. The Hilltop and the Gem cafes were across the street from each other on upper Pier. Jean’s Men’s and Lady’s Apparel was down Pier, across from Bank of America. Coast Drug was two doors west of the bank.
Barb credits Bank of America manager George Royce with the fact Don’s parents, and subsequently she and her husband, lived on The Strand
In 1942, she recalled, a two-man Japanese submarine was captured off El Segundo. A Realtor friend of Don’s parents told of a woman who owned a vacant lot on The Strand. She was afraid to build on the lot because she was afraid the Japanese were going to invade, so she listed it for sale. The price was $1,250, but it was Saturday, and the woman wanted full payment before she left for Iowa early Monday morning. Guild’s parents called the Bank of America manager, and he went to the bank for the money.
It wasn’t unusual, Barb said, for small towns to have more than one drugstore. But Guild Drug was at a competitive disadvantage because Barb asked Don not to sell alcohol or cigarettes. So he began selling beach accessories, including straw mats, beach parasols, and go-aheads, so called because they would go ahead when the wearer stopped walking.
According to the skateboard exhibit in the Hermosa Historical Museum, in 1957 Guild Drug became the world’s first skateboard retailer. Their steel wheel skateboards were called Bun Boards because they were made from the short wood planks bakers baked buns on.
In 1961, they had a new store built to their specifications, in a new shopping center at the intersection of Artesia Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. Business benefited from easy access for homebound commuters.
When they expanded locations, they would search the Thomas Guide for centers on homebound commuter streets.
The new Guild Drug’s offerings expanded from beach accessories to gifts, apparel and a cosmetic section with a cosmetician on duty. Pinball machines kept the kids occupied while their parents shopped.
It was the prototype for today’s pharmacies, where the pharmaceutical sales are secondary to merchandise sales.
Scarves and ties were displayed, one at a time, on busts the couple purchased from antique dealers on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. The busts were displayed atop antique bureaus, whose drawers customers were encouraged to open to see a broader selection.
They wanted to display the merchandise the way you might see it in a home, Barb said.
An unanticipated consequence was customers began buying the antique busts and antique bureaus. Buying trips to Melrose became a weekly routine.
In 1969, while awaiting construction of Guild Drug number 5 in Westlake Village, the couple went to Europe to ski, and to buy antiques for the new store.
They hired antique guides in London, Paris and Amsterdam, whose names had been left on the Melrose antiques.
The trip coincided with the advent of container shipping through the Panama Canal, which greatly reduced shipping time, and pilferage by longshoremen. The containers were locked, and they were given the key, Barb said.
When the couple arrived home from the 1969 trip, they learned construction on the Westlake store had been delayed by a burst water pipe. With no place to unload the container full of antiques, they rented a former pharmacy in Redondo whose floor to ceiling windows had been painted black because the previous tenant was a pornographic filmmaker.
The Guilds’ high school age sons Jamie and Whitney scraped the windows, and shortly before Christmas, Antiques Etcetera opened.
Three weeks later the container’s worth of antiques had been sold.
This is a business we should get into, Barb recalled Don telling her.
Their second antique store, Antique Guild, a fortuitous play on words, was the former Helms Bakery three acre property in Culver City. The advent of supermarket bakeries caused the blue and yellow Helms trucks, with their two-tone whistles, to disappear from Los Angeles streets, seemingly overnight.
Within a few years, the couple had eight Antique Guilds in Los Angeles County and Orange County. Post War Europe wanted everything new. In California, where everything was new, second hand stores were flourishing, Barb said.
But with the growing popularity, European antiques became scarce and costly. Eventually half of the Guild Antique sales were reproductions, for which the couple had little enthusiasm.
In 1985, Antique Guild was sold to A.A Importing, which specialized in manufacturing and selling reproductions.
The following year the Guilds sold their 12 Guild Drugs to Thrifty Drug.
They planned to ask half a million for each store. But their experience was in buying, not selling, Barb recalled. So Don asked the circle of business friends he regularly met with for advice. They told him to double what the stores were worth so he’d have room to negotiate.
On the way to meet Thrifty chairperson Leonard Strauss at his Mid-Wilshire office, Guild stopped for coffee at the McDonalds next to his Artesia Boulevard store, and spilled the coffee on his tie.
He buttoned up his suit coat before entering Strauss’s office, and said his price was $12 million.
Strauss didn’t counter.
In retirement, the Guilds spent much of their time with ski filmmaker, and fellow Hermosa Strand homeowner Warren Miller. He passed away in 2018 at age 93.
The three met in the early ‘50s when a mutual friend invited them on a surf trip to Malibu.
They rode in the Guilds’ woody, which the couple had recently bought from Velzy for $200. Velzy threw into the deal the two balsa surfboards the couple would take to Hawaii. Because Barb was the smallest of the four, she was put in the back, on top of the boards. The three men sat on the front bench seat. On the drive up Pacific Coast Highway Miller turned around, and saw Barb reading the Christian Science Monitor. He asked if she was a Christian Scientist. She said she was. So was my wife Jean, Miller said, until she died of spinal cancer.
In retirement the three kindred spirits windsurfed together out front of their neighboring condos on Maui, fished together out front of their neighboring homes on Orcas Island, and helicopter skied in Canada.
Back home on The Strand, Miller would invite the Guilds and other neighbors to his home screening room and show rough edits of his upcoming ski film.
The friends were given yellow tablets to write jokes on for the monologue Miller delivered with his films. Typically, they were one liners, often with a philosophical undertone.
Many of the one liners Miller used were Don’s, Barb said.
The one Miller use to end his movies could easily have been one of them. It certainly sounded like Don Guild.
“If you don’t do it this year, you’ll be one year older when you do.” ER
