Page 9, North Beach Journal, October 1985

Every once in awhile, I lament the family’s “saving” gene — that proclivity the generations have had to keep just about everything.    When the three or four generations of “stuff” in this household becomes overwhelming, I dream of a simple life furnished by Ikea and sustained by GrubHub.

This morning, however, I am regretting that genetic quirk the other way around, as in why didn’t I save more of the old North Beach Journal issues.  If you were here in the mid-eighties, perhaps you remember the short-lived tabloid-sized newspaper published in Ocean Park by Peter Campbell (I think.)  I recently ran across two partial issues — pages 9-12 part of the October 1985 issue and pages 9-12 of the June 1986 issue.  They are definitely a walk down memory lane!

Page 10, North Beach Journal, October 1985

I’m not sure why I saved the 1985 pages — perhaps for the article on the “Peninsula Firemen’s Muster” highlighting Jack McDonald and Ossie Steiner and Max Weidner, among others.  Or perhaps it was for the double-page spread by Dale Hill on shipwrecks, featuring stories of the Robert Bruce, “Bad Food Sinks Ship” and the Alice, “Hard-Hearted Alice.”  Both articles were great, starting with those provocative and pun-ish headlines.

The first tells of the cook of the Bruce who burned the ship to the waterline shortly after its 1851 arrival in Shoalwater Bay.  Presumably, crew and captain had not been appreciative enough of his culinary efforts and so he “hotly” retaliated and rowed off in the ship’s dinghy.   Some years later, in 1909, the Alice ran aground near Ocean Park and, though the ship was unharmed, she could not be re-floated because her cargo of dry cement immediately solidified on contact with the salt water washing over her hull.  Somewhere under the beach sands off “The Park,” as my forebears called it, the cement cargo remains even now.

Page 9, North Beach Journal, June 1986

It’s easier for me to determine why I kept the 1986 fragment.  On the upper left corner of Page 9 is a picture with the caption, “After their annual beach clean-up trip, Ocean Park elementary students construct sand sculpture.”  My class began that field trip in 1981, the year Ocean Park re-opened after a two year closure.  It soon became an annual event for the whole school.  I like to think of it as the forerunner to the present-day Garbage Gang, but perhaps I’m erroneously filling in too many blanks.

I do wish I’d kept every issue of the North Beach Journal.  I wonder if there are copies at the Ocean Park Library or at the Heritage Museum…  Just what I need.  Another quest!