REMEMBERING LONG BEACH

When my sister and I were little tykes back in the early 1940s our family took a lot of car rides in our local area. In the summer, quite often Daddy would ask where we wanted to go, and Ginnie Lou and I would jump and shout that we wanted to go “round Rainbow Pier.” In those days the big Municipal Auditorium sat at the foot of Pine Avenue on the strand, jutting out into the water on a filled piece of land. Making a wide arc around the outside of the auditorium was Rainbow Pier, which left a quiet salt-water lagoon surrounding the Auditorium. Nearly every child in Long Beach learned to swim in the Rainbow Lagoon. The “rainbow” nomenclature came about because the streetlights lining the Pier itself had colored globes, and since automobiles were allowed to drive around the pier, many Long Beach children learned their colors by looking at the lamps as their folks drove past.

Daddy always timed those summer evening rides so we could first drive past the “Spit and Argue” Club, an outdoor structure built adjacent to the base of Rainbow Pier which had a platform for speakers and benches for listeners. It was an informal meeting place for people who had something to say and needed to get it off their chest. I don’t know that it was formally called “Spit and Argue” Club, but by golly, that is exactly what went on there. We kids would start rolling down the car windows as we headed down the bluff to drive onto the pier, and we would have daddy drive very slowly past so we could hear all the carryings-on, although we were always a little bit afraid of having spit fly into our car.

Then just about at dusk we drove around the pier itself . We called out the color of each globe: red, orange, yellow, green, blue – and maybe purple, although my recollection after 65 years may be a little hazy. At the other end of the pier we drove up the bluff, turned east on Ocean Avenue and headed toward the Currie’s Ice Cream Store out near Belmont Shore. Currie’s had what was advertised as “Mile High Cones,” and illustrated by a huge three-dimensional ice cream cone atop their building. Instead of having round scoops of ice cream topping the cones, they used a conical-shaped scoop that put a cone-shaped scoop of ice cream on top the sugar cone. We always ordered “Chockl-bits” ice cream. Because of the warm summer evenings we had to eat it real fast so it wouldn’t melt down our arms. That was not a problem to do, because it was so good.

My sis and I never got tired of that evening ride. We longed for Long Beach summers to come quickly. We learned to swim in the Rainbow Lagoon, fish off the pier – and later we attended circuses in the auditorium, held beach parties where the “real” ocean water outside the breakwater-sheltered shoreline was, spent our summers slathering our bodies with baby oil and baking in the sun on beach towels – and finally ending our teenage years with the all night dance held in the Auditorium for graduates of all three local high schools – Poly, Wilson and Jordan. I remember in 1953 Ray Anthony played for our dance, and in the early hours of the morning when the dance was over my “gang” of friends, which was composed mainly of high school newspaper staffers, headed to our house on Gardenia Avenue, where my dad and mom were already up cooking a pancake breakfast for us. We ate until sated and then about 15 of us curled up on the furniture with the overflow on the floor and slept away the first half of the first day of the rest of our lives.

I suppose everyone who grew up in a “home town” has a soft spot in their heart for it. I drive through Long Beach now and it is not at all the town I grew up in. But I still see it all in my mind’s eye as I struggle to figure out where it – and where time – has all gone.

Photo taken at Rainbow Lagoon 1940. I am in the middle, my little sister Ginnie Lou on the right. My dad is behind her, his best friend "Uncle" Bill Funk at the left. The oldest girl was a neighbor friend.