Burt and I were watching “The Godfather”, Part I, on Bravo but we had to flip the channel because they were showing the fractured version–you know inappropriagte commercial breaks. Fans that we are, we had seen “The Godfather” hundreds of times, but never, never the film all chopped up, and then submitting us to a meaningless series of fast paced too-cheery ads.
So we agreed that the Mafia should officially decree, unless authorize by them that “The Goldfather” must be shown without breaks. This would be a good way to show them some respect.
Burt and me, sad that we couldn’t watch “The Godfather”, (Part I) w/o commerical breaks. We’re going to lobby the Mafia about this!
Meet identical Coastside twins, Greg and Guy Giedzinksi. Guy is “retired” but brother Greg works for himself at his business called San Gregorio Design– building all kinds of neat stuff.
For awhile Greg and Guy were separated twins–Greg was skiing and working in Colorado and Guy lived in Montara and worked in South San Francisco.
I asked Greg if he was happy to be back with his identical twin and he said enthusiastically, “Yea…I think.”
In the photo above the twins (L-Guy, R-Greg) are working on an outdoor project in El Granada.
Final result gives the homeowners a nice comfort barrier from the street:
In the latter part of the 19th century (1870s) Half Moon Bay was known as Spanishtown because there were so many Spanish-speaking people living in the tiny community–there’s even a Spanishtown Historical Society which displays the town’s early history housed in a two=cell jail on Johnston Street (around the corner from Main Street).
When Westinghouse and the developers Deane and Deane were trying to promote the Coastside they put out a little pamphlet which I will quote from later and they produced a calendar in an attempt to dispell the rumor that this part of the county was always foggy.
The calendar featured a little yellow sun above the dates of the month when it wasn’t foggy.
As I said before, when I first moved to Half Moon Bay, actually El Granada, “the banana belt” which is four miles north of the town, it was foggy all summer long, all three months until “Indian Summer” heated us up in September. Folks I knew called El Granada, “El Gray” and when even the fog-hardened locals had had enough they drove “over the hill” to sun-drenched San Mateo. From Highway 92 you could look west and see the fog caressing Half Moon Bay. Hardly anybody wanted to go over there.
Of course, when it was sunny the Coastside was (and is) the most beautiful place to be and so card-carrying locals felt they had to feed the rumor that it was more often foggy here than not. In fact, this is the first almost foggy summer I’ve experienced in quite a while.
Soon after I moved here in the early 1970s, I became aware that Westinghouse was here, too. What was a big corporation doing in this rural scene?
It was a time when some giant corporationss were buying up land for subdivisions. Westinghouse had teamed up with developers Deane & Deane and together they built the first upscale Coastside development called Frenchman’s Creek. I remember going to their opening and doing a walk-through a model house. From memory, the showplace house was airy and filled with hanging plants– which, because in my garden I had a little plastic geodesic dome where I tended ill plants–impressed me greatly.
Westinghouse also had an interest in the ShoreBird Restaurant located in Princeton–and before the Shorebird John Patroni’s roadhouse, called Patroni’s, stood there. Patroni was “the man, the kingpin” during prohibition. His place was raided by the pro-his who sought his cooperation in nailing the leaders of the gangs who were bringing the booze in from Canada.
In the late 1880s, in Half Moon Bay, the inventor R.I. Knapp was a teetoaler who ran for high office on the Prohibition Party ticket. Knapp also published a newspaper in town but was famous for the sidehill plow that he manufactured in a little factory on Main Street. He sold it to the farmers who found it helped them to work the soil on the hilly Coastside.
After my “Half Moon Bay Memories” book was published in 1978 I met R.I. Knapp’s daughter who was well into her 90s and living in a senior facility in Millbrae.
And here is R. Brandt, the well known Ocean Shore Railroad memorabilia collector/historian whose father had invested in the illfated company holding only worthless stock in the end (which bugged Brandt endlessly). It was Mr. Brandt who gave me the cover photo for the “Half Moon Bay Memories” book. The photo is actually an automobile ad shot about 1922 at El Granada beach–I can see the spot from my living room window!
Back to Westinghouse.
The corporation also bought land at the golf course south of Half Moon Bay. When I was in high school in San Francisco I worked for Westinghouse at Christmastime. My job was to go to the equivalent of stores like Target and show customers Westinghouse’s irons and other products. (But I was so shy I spent more time trying to blend into the aisles).
I don’t think Westinghouse or Deane and Deane are involved with Coastside property anymore but they did leave us the legacy of the Pumpkin Festival. The Pumpkin Festival reminds me of the “free lunches” the promoters of the Ocean Shore Railroad gave to passengers in the early 1900s, an attempt to get new people here to sell them lots. The Pumpkin Festival is the same thing–people come here, they love it, they want to move here.
(Photo: Ida and her husband pose for the camera at their colorful outdoor market near the site of a new restaurant/seafood market to be called Sam’s Chowder House)
Paul Schenkman, owner of the Cetrella Bistro on Main Street in Half Moon Bay, just called. He is going to remodel what once was the famous Ida’s Seafood Restaurant overlooking the harbor north of surfer’s beach. It’s going ot be a fresh fish market and restaurant called Sam’s Chowder House.
There are a couple of other restaurants there now and nearby stands the Beach Hotel.
Great location for Paul’s latest.
I loaned him a few historical photos, including a couple of Ida and her husband selling fresh fish from a colorful outside stand.
Paul said he had the photos blown up and they look great. Can ‘t wait to see them.
When I first moved here there was one old house north of Ida’s, a private residence with a driveway, with big old-fashioned glass windows overlooking the harbor,home to a lot fewer fishing vessels than today. And below on the sandy beach there were tiny shells to collect. A young couple lived there, and since it was one of the few homes overlooking the water on that particular stretch of coast, everybody wanted that house.
I believe the house was sold, and didn’t I recently see a sign that it was for rent to someone who was in a fishing-beach-related business?
First of all, it’s foggy….let’s celebrate….the last few summers have been all too sunny for me, this is more like it. In my opinion, when you live on the Coastside, it should at the very least be drizzly, gloomily foggy until the afternoon when the sun comes out for no more than three or four hours and then the fog returns. That’s beachy Coastside weather.
I just don’t feel “right” if it’s not foggy during the summer. You want blue and yellow, go over the hill to San Mateo. You want hot, go to San Jose.
I told you I’m writing this from memory–I do have notes among files and files of historical memories but after writing for newspapers for years and digging through my files over and over again I don’t wanna now. I just want to write from memory. It would be better to have my “facts” in front of me, make a better little story, so I am sorry about that.
This morning I was thinking about a book I published in 1992 called “The Coburn Mystery”. It was a true story about the life of the doomed Coburn family who lived in Pescadero between about 1870 and 1919.
The “Coburn Mystery” focussed on Loren Coburn, a rich but illiterate landowner (at one point he believed everything between Pigeon Point and the southern edge of Half Moon Bay was his) and all the terrible things that happened to him until he died in his 90s during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. And after he died his wife was murdered– probably by one of the thuggish men who had moved into town and were trying to get everything Coburn owned without paying for it.
The bad guys who drifted up from the Monterey area (and had some legitimate biz relationship with Mr.Coburn but now wanted to take advantage of him) had gotten so much control they were doling out jobs to the locals. The head thug who had a girlfriend from central casting–you know, blonde, liked pretty clothes and fast cars–had everybody terrified but was known to be kind during holidays like Christmas when he gave everyone in this rural village a present.
What I was remembering, with humor, was one piece of research I did for that book. If you haven’t been Pescadero is located about 15 minutes south of Half Moon Bay on the San Mateo County Coastside but because there’s nothing to the south, just the redwoods to the east, and the Pacific to the west, it’s remained kind of frozen-in-time. Folks who lived there could keep secrets from the outside for decades.
I became obsessed with the true story behind the “Coburn Mystery”. It was important to find locals who remembered anything, even though they would have been very young children. Turned out that Ron Duarte’s (of Duarte’s Tavern, gotta go there for artichoke omlettes and fruit pie) Aunt Carrie Dias did remember and so did Uncle Joe Duarte. Aunt Carrie lived in Pescadero and Uncle Joe lived near Santa Cruz.
One day I picked them all up to take a trip to Los Gatos where a former Pescaderan lived. She was a lady who had been married to the chauffeur who drove the thugs around. It’s hard to imagine limos in Pescadero but Sarah, the murdered and extremely homely wife of Loren Coburn, got around in one.
Burt and me, sad that we couldn’t watch “The Godfather”, (Part I) w/o commerical breaks. We’re going to lobby the Mafia about this!
