Writing Honorable Mention: “Working on the Beach”
Photography Honorable Mention: “Dolphin Duet” by Cathi Lundy
by John Shearer
My great grandparents bought a summer beach house as an anniversary present for my grandparents on a walk street on 2oth Street in Manhattan Beach in the 1920s. My grandparents and their seven children spent every summer there after they had the house. My parents settled year-round in Manhattan Beach in the 1950s. But the biggest influence in my life was when my family moved to an old Strand house built in 1900 just south of the Manhattan Pier in 1962. (The house is now 110 years old.)
My mom Ginger, and her sister Mona, believed (and still believe) that every summer day should be spent at the beach. This was the best place to baby-sit us children. The adults could play volleyball, suntan, bodysurf, read books, eat, drink, and be merry. We children could roll in the sand, ride surf mats, play cards, build sand castles, play on nearby swings, eat, drink, and be merry. Plenty of Ginger and Mona’s friends hung around the volleyball courts, and the adults kept a watchful eye on the numerous children.
I got hooked on the beach and riding waves from a very young age. I soon developed my life’s guiding philosophy. There were three things that I must do in life: surf, go to school, and work. I could do only two of these things at one time. One of them always had to be surf. I could surf and work or surf and go to school, but I could not surf, work, and go to school. I’ve tried to follow this philosophy throughout my life.
When I was a pre-teenager, I did my best to live off the beach and ocean. Occasionally, I would do some annoying house chores to earn a small allowance. But I had four unique ways to live off the beach.
The first way was to collect bottles. After playing on the beach every summer day from noon to four p.m., I would walk four to six blocks north along the beach and fill one or two large grocery bags with bottles. I’d return to the adults’ volleyball court, drop off the bottles, and walk south four to six blocks and collect another one to two bags of bottles. Most bottles were worth two cents, but quart beer bottles were worth five cents. Sometimes people would leave spare change in the bags they discarded. I’d take home the bottles, rinse off the sand and take them to the Food Giant store on Sepulveda Boulevard near Marine. I made a lot of money on nice sunny days and weekends.
A second method of earning money was to strain the sand with a sand crab catcher. Around six p.m., when most people had left the beach, I would grab the sand crab catcher from the backyard, and return to the beach to drag the sand crab catcher through the high use areas of the beach. I would set the leading edge of the catcher about four inches into the sand and step backwards for about 15 or 20 feet. As I lifted the catcher, the sand strained out and left coins, rings, bracelets, and necklaces exposed in the metal net. I found a lot of money and jewelry in the dry sand near the berm and in and around the volleyball courts.
I tried to earn as much money as I could during the summer months, because I didn’t want to work and go to school while I was surfing during the school year. But three to five times per year I was able to employ my third method of earning money at the beach. Every spring we got fierce winds as quick moving storms blew out of the area. On those few days, after I got home from school, I put on trunks, a T-shirt, a jacket, a baseball cap, and a hooded sweatshirt and I walked along above the high tide line shielding my eyes from the blowing sand and looking for coins that were exposed after the dry sand cover had been blown away. I really enjoyed walking on the deserted, windswept beach and finding treasures. My footprints were usually the only ones on the entire beach. When I returned homeward, my old footprints had completely disappeared and I found newly unearthed coins.
A fourth method to earn money was less frequent, but sometimes very lucrative. One winter day when large waves were pounding the beach at an extreme high tide, I was standing on the Manhattan Pier looking southward and I saw the pioneering surfer, Mr. Benson, at the water’s edge with his back to the ocean. It was unusual for a person to be in that position, so I looked closer to see what he was doing. The big waves and high tide had eaten away at the berm, creating a five-foot drop-off. As the waves surged up the berm, the sand wall collapsed with the retreating backwash and previously buried coins started rolling on edge toward the shore pound. I watched Mr. Benson dash towards the rolling coins and nab them before the next shore pound obscured them from view. Once I discovered what Mr. Benson was doing, I hustled off the pier and ran down to the north side of the pier to try to grab some coins also. I found many coins that winter day. However, this method of earning money was rare; these conditions occurred very infrequently in winter.
Unfortunately, in my teenage years, I had to give up these lucrative beach incomes. Disposable bottles and cans became more widely used, so I found fewer returnable bottles. People started using metal detectors to easily find the coins that I had searched for in the summer with my sand crab catcher, or on windy spring days, or on rare high tide, large swell winter days.
Although I can no longer survive on these money-earning strategies, I have fond memories of those days at the beach in the early 1960s when I really did earn most of my spending money in these four ways. And today, every now and then, I’ll grab a few aluminum cans or plastic bottles on the way home from a surf session, or I’ll use my sand crab catcher for its true purpose – to catch soft-shell sand crabs for surf fishing for perch and corbina, or I’ll walk along the beach on windy spring days, or I’ll be looking at winter high tide berms for a stray rolling quarter. And the one constant that has not changed, I’ll still be riding waves whenever I can. ER
Photography Honorable Mention: “Stacks” by Alex Kojima