In 1971, I was shoehorned into a three-bedroom roach motel in Encinitas with six other stow-aways from polite society. Our total rent was $75 a month, but with real estate prices exploding, our greedy landlord was about to double it.
When I say Encinitas, you get a certain picture, but that is not what I am referring to. The Encinitas in this writing no longer exists. The palace flop houses I once knew can only be observed in peaceful dreams. Then, nothing but a train or a rooster would interrupt visions of a new south-west swell.
Breakfast was about a buck and the best abalone sandwich you ever had would set you back another quarter. Stan Lewis, or his son Tommy, sold fresh fish from their skiff, parked on the beach near George’s Restaurant. A half-finished castle stood on the bluff, occupied by three gay dreamers.
Crack was not yet popular, and the local winos, some of whom were surfers or ex-surfers, were usually coherent, apologetic and polite by daybreak. I recall one of them who sat on the beach and rescued surfboards in those pre-cord days. When not doing that, he could be seen cleaning the beach of the discards left by the few inconsiderate weekend tourists who somehow found the place without Google Earth.
In my thinking, such a paradise seems so unlikely that I am tempted to think it never really existed. The houses we lived in then were not constructed of thin stucco walls. They had character and were such good friends to us, many of them were given names. There was “The Hanger,” so called because it hung threateningly over the cliff at Moonlight Beach. It was there, in the Hanger, that brilliant craftsmen like Gary Stuber and Ryan Dotson built boards under the Black Dot label.
By the time I moved to Encinitas in the summer of 1970, Swami’s locals Malcolm McCassy, Billy Hamilton and Rusty Miller had moved on. Cheer Critchlow, Syd Madden and Steve Oberg ruled the Swami’s peak. I moved into a large dilapidated structure known as the “Brother’s House.” The place was something of a Christian commune for refugees from hippiedom.
Once the Brother’s House decayed further and we Christians moved out, the lions moved in. They christened the place the “Rag Pile.” Up the street was “The House of Seven Gables.” “Noah’s Ark Trailer Park” were cardboard cutouts of animals posted on the sand.
Some magical looking dwellings overlooked Ponto. On Coast Highway was a cheap motel that one Texas transplant called “The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Suites.” All were within walking distance of the beach and cost less per month to rent than what dinner for two currently does in the same region.
Someone affectionately named our luxurious Leucadia dump as “Termite Townhouse.” It lived up to its name as each summer the winged creatures fought the mosquitoes to a draw. I was the delegate in charge of complaining to our slumlord that we would move out if he raised the rent from $75 to $125. That seemed like robbery for a roof, a volunteer tomato patch and a shower that trickled rusty water, if it worked at all.
But the signs were upon us, and the town was going so nuts that some places on the bluff were renting for as much as $400 a month! This often brought with it unwanted attention since nobody but a purveyor of mood altering substances could afford such a rate.
The old Encinitas was beautiful, and so is the new one, in its own way. You just can’t be a surf bum to live there.
