Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [19]
Well, as the trite saying goes, When God hands you lemons …
Plant lemon trees.
Left with little but dirt and sun, the developers of Pacific Beach used them both to plant lemon trees, and around the turn of the century, the community proclaimed itself “the Lemon Capital of the World.” It worked for a while. The flats now occupied by rows of houses were then rows of citrus trees until cheap steamship rates and relaxed import laws made Sicily the Lemon Capital of the World instead; the lemon trees of Pacific Beach were no longer worth the water it took to irrigate them, and the community was back to a search for an identity.
Earl Taylor gave it one. Earl came out from Kansas in 1923 and started buying up land. He built the old Dunaway Drugstore, now the on the corner of Cass and Garnet, a block east of Boone’s current office, and then put up a number of other businesses.
Then he met Earnest Pickering, and the two of them conspired to build Pickering’s Pleasure Pier.
Yeah, Pleasure Pier.
Right at the end of present-day Garnet Avenue, the pier jutted out into the ocean, and this wasn’t a pier for docking ships; this was a pier for, well, pleasure. It had a midway with all kinds of carnival games and cheap food treats, and a dance hall, replete with a cork-lined dance floor.
It opened for business on the Fourth of July, 1927, to flags, fanfare, and fireworks and was a massive success. And why not. It was a beautifully simple, hedonistic idea—combine the beauty of the ocean and the beach with women in “bathing costumes,” junk food, and then the nocturnal Roaring Twenties pleasures of illegal booze, jazz, and dancing, with sex to follow at the beachside hotels that sprang up around the pier.
All good, except that Earl and Earnest forgot to creosote the pilings that supported the pier, and “water-born parasites” started eating the thing. (The uncharitable would have it that water-born parasites—that is, surf bums—still infest Pacific Beach.) Pickering’s Pleasure Pier started crumbling into the ocean and, a year after opening, had to be closed for safety purposes. The party was over.
Truly, because with exquisite Pacific Beach timing, the town had reinvigorated itself just in time for the Great Depression.
The tents went up again, but the Depression wasn’t as severe in San Diego as it was in a lot of the country, because the navy base in the harbor cushioned the unemployment. And a lot of people loved Pacific Beach in those years for precisely what it didn’t have: a lot of people, houses, traffic. They loved it precisely because it was a sleepy, friendly little town with one of the best stretches of beach in these United States, and the beach was free and accessible to everyone, and there were no hotels or condo complexes, no private drives.
What changed Pacific Beach forever was a nose.
Dorothy Fleet’s sensitive nose, to be exact.
In 1935, her husband, Reuben, owned a company called Consolidated Aircraft, which had a contract with the U.S. government to design and build seaplanes. The problem was that Consolidated was located in Buffalo, and it was hard to land seaplanes on water that was usually ice. So Reuben decided to move the company to warm and sunny California, and he gave his wife, Dorothy, a choice between San Diego and Long Beach. Dorothy didn’t like Long Beach because of the “smelly oil wells” nearby, so she picked San Diego, and Fleet built his factory on a site near the airport, where he and his eight hundred workers came out with the great PBY Catalina.
Airplanes had a lot to do with creating modern Pacific Beach, because Japanese bombers hitting Pearl Harbor launched the Consolidated factory into high gear. Suddenly faced with the job of producing thousands of PBYs plus the new B-24 bomber, Fleet imported thousands of workers—15,000 by early 1942, 45,000 by the war’s end. Working 24/7 they pumped out 33,000 aircraft during the war.
They had to live somewhere, and the nearby empty flats of Pacific