I guess I’m really going to do this. Consider this a soft announcement with a more “official” and splashy announcement coming at the end of October.
Starting today, I’ve embarked on a project of writing and scheduling a brand new year’s worth of posts of the This Date in Seal Beach History blog to launch on January 1st, 2026. The plan is to publish a fresh daily Seal Beach historical post for each date in the 2026 calendar, barring health issues, disasters, credible criminal threats, torrid, distracting affairs with showgirls, and, of course, real paying writing work.
The daily posts on the blog will be free and available to the public.
However, all this historical research requires subscriptions to online archives and editing software, and all of that costs. It costs a lot for what is essentially just a hobby that involves a lot of time and work, not a professional business. With that in mind, I’m renewing my usual pitch for donations:
If you enjoyed these This Date in Seal Beach History posts over the years and are looking forward to the new posts coming in 2026, please consider making a small donation of five dollar or more to help defray the costs that make this blog possible. Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal, Venmo, or Apple Pay by clicking here.
As a thank you for your support, I’d like to invite donors to a live online event next month.
A New Video
I’m currently working on a Seal Beach video that will be posted publicly to commemorate the 110th anniversary of Seal Beach’s incorporation on October 27, 1915.
The video takes one vintage Seal Beach photograph as a launching point for an imaginary time travel tour to the day the photograph was taken to visit various landmarks in the photo. There will be plenty of photographs and some Seal Beach History information I don’t think has been shared before. I’m not going to share any more details, but I think it will be lots of fun for people who love the Joy Zone era of Seal Beach History.
I haven’t scheduled the actual date yet (probably during the week of September 8-14), but I’ll be hosting a private live online sneak peak preview of this video exclusively for donors.
A recording of the sneak preview will be available to view for the rest of September with a private password provided to any donor who misses the preview (or wants to see it again.)
Other Plans and Possibilities
I’m considering other ways to fund this project for the next year or so, including starting a Patreon page with exclusive content for monthly subscribers, “brand” merchandising, marrying into money, or reluctantly accepting advertising on individual dated posts or weekly runs of posts. I’m open to any ideas or suggestions you make in the comments or via e-mail. I’ll share more details when everything is all worked out in September.
I will also be migrating this blog to it’s own dedicated web site and adding a This Date in Seal Beach History YouTube site later in 202
I’ve spent the past week organizing and labeling the image files of Seal Beach aerial photographs that I’ve accumulated over the past 25 years. This chore requires my reviewing every aerial photo scan I made or used in the early 2000s for the newsletter of the now shamefully defunct Seal Beach Historical & Cultural Society, various historical slide shows that I’ve given over the past two decades, and the thirteen years I’ve been doing this blog.
In the process of formatting and reformatting these images for these various projects, I’ve amassed a monstrous number of duplicate image files in different sizes and file formats. All of these have to be pruned from the collection and care must be taken not to dump any unique images, so this has been a slow and methodical process.
The ultimate long-term goal is to have an organized, dated, and annotated archive of the highest quality version of all the Seal Beach historical image in my collection (not just the aerial shots) preserved and available for future generations and researchers in Photoshop, TIFF, PNG, and JPEG formats.
The short term goal is to have all these Seal Beach aerial photographs prepared and consistently labeled for use for the new blog posts I’ll started writing next month to stockpile for the relaunch of fresh daily This Date in Seal Beach History posts on January 1st, 2025. I’ve been researching different dates the past six months, and it’s now time to add a writing schedule to the research so that I’m not rushing to write a new post every single day in 2025.
This is the point where, once again, I must switch into pledge drive mode. My bare minimum costs for the rest of 2023 for research subscriptions and photo editing software comes to $200 — more if I can afford to add a genealogy subscription for research and/or a Zoom subscription for monthly online Seal Beach history slide shows.
If you’ve enjoy the work I’ve done here in the past, attended one of the slideshow I’ve given for Founders Day celebrations or the Woman’s Club, connected with me on social media with questions about Seal Beach history, and you want to see more, please consider making a donation of five dollar or more to help defraythe cost of my doing more Seal Beach history research and posts. Your name will be featured on a list of 2023 sponsors here on the blog (unless you request it be kept private.)
Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.
(To make up for my crass solicitation for funds for this project, here’s an examination of one the aerial photos I worked on this past week.)
The photo below is an early aerial photographs of Seal Beach taken from an airplane banking over the Crawford Airport that once stood at the State Highway (now Pacific Coast Highway) and Bay Boulevard (now Seal Beach Boulevard.) Along the top of the photograph, you can see a bit of a pre-Navy Anaheim Bay with scores of cottages and homes along the shore. In the top right you can see the Pacific Electric bridge that the P.E. red cars used to cross Anaheim Bay from Electric Avenue on their way down the coast to Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, and Balboa. Just past that, you can barely see a second separate bridge that made the same crossing for auto traffic.
One might assume that this is one of the earliest aerial photographs of Seal Beach. The original photo which was in the historical society’s archive had a simple unsourced notation on the back of “1920s” on the back in pencil. Personally, I’ve never found any Seal Beach aerial photos that can be definitively dated to the teens of the Twentieth Century, so this being one of the earliest aerial shots of the city is an easy assumption to make.
Ah, but if you look closer, you can spot the original location of the Glide ‘er Inn at the corner of Bay Boulevard and Coast Highway.
(It may be my imagination, but I see the faint shape of an airplane atop at derrick-like structure on the corner. Could this be the original spot where the icon Glide ‘er Inn airplane was set up before being moved to the top of the restaurant building?)
Now, as anyone with a scan of a late 1970s/early 1980s Glide ‘er Inn menu on their hard drive can tell you, the restaurant was launched in 1930. So this photo couldn’t have been taken in the twenties.
This means the photo was most likely taken in the thirties, and definitely before the Navy took over Anaheim Landing in 1944. So we can date this photo in a range from 1930 to 1944.
Other details in the photo stand out and are worth a closer look.
It’s hard to make out details in such a dark and murky resolution, but the airport appears to be busy. There are three airplanes on the ground outside the hangar, plus the one in the air used to take this photograph. I count five cars parked along a railing that runs parallel to Bay Boulevard and then turns to meet hangar. It’s hard to tell what the dark patch that the hangar stands upon — it could be asphalt or some sort of grass. In the upper left you can see curved grooves made by wheels where airplane turned on the dirt runway before take-offs and after landings.
The hangar in this photo is not the same on seen in later photos of the airport. The Seal Beach Airport shut down in 1933, and this hangar was removed and reinstalled in Long Beach. When the airport reopened (possibly as late as 1937!), a new hangar was built closer to Bay Boulevard, and the dirt runway was paved as seen in this earlier post from 2010.
Based on the presence of the Glide ‘er Inn and the first airport hangar, we can now narrow the date range for this photo from 1930 to 1933. I don’t think it’ll be possible to pinpoint the year or date any more accurately than that.
On the right edge of the photo, you can see a teeny speck of a car driving down Bay Boulevard where, in less than forty years, second-stage Apollo Saturn rockets will be trucked to Anaheim Bay for sea transport to Mississippi for testing and then onward to Cape Kennedy to launch Apollo missions to the moon. It’s possible that the pilots at the airport and the driver of the car in this vintage photograph lived to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in 1969 on color televisions.
Finally, let’s pause to look a little closer at two building along the bay and next to the Pacific Electric bridge.
You might recognize these two buildings from a different angle in famous Seal Beach panorama shot from 1917.
Or you might not. A WordPress blog is probably not the best way to present details in a panorama photo. Let’s take a closer look at the righthand side of the photo.
Note the Anaheim Landing Bowling Alleys building behind the bathing beauties. This is the same building on the right highlighted in the oval from 1930s photo blow-up three images up. Just past it, you can see the top of the roof of the second building.
And here’s a pre-1913 photo featuring the front of the two buildings facing Anaheim Bay from before Bay City was rebranded as Seal Beach.
We’re looking at the Anaheim Landing Bowling Alleys and the Anaheim Landing Pavilion where the locals and tourists went to have a good time before the roller coaster and the Joy Zone amusement attractions were built in 1916 along the beachfront.
The Bay City name was a reference to the convenient access to Anaheim Bay on the east and Alamitos Bay on the west. Part of the competitive advantage the Bayside Land Company was pushing to visitors and potential real estate buyers was that Bay City offered not one, but two bays to fulfill their aquatic recreational needs! (Take that, all you crummy single bay towns!)
As charming as that notion was, the name was too generic to make much of a promotional impression and only lasted from 1904 until 1913 when the area was rebranded as the more romantic “Seal Beach.” The Seal Beach name became official when the city incorporated in 1915.
I think this demonstrates how invaluable these aerial photos are, not just for capturing a single moment in time, but also for how they connect with other vintage images to create a wide historical landscape of Seal Beach’s past.
Or… that all could just be a fancy and pretentious way of saying, “Mikey like looking at old photos.” I’ll let you decide.
I’ve just received the heartbreaking news that Robin Fort-Lincke passed away on April 4th. If you’ve enjoyed any of the programming on SBTV3, including the televised feeds of the Seal Beach Christmas Parade or city council meetings, you’ve seen examples of Robin’s work. She touched many lives and earned the respect and affection of anyone she worked with. She was the heart and soul of SBTV3.
The Celebration of Life for Robin Fort-Lincke will be on Thursday, April 27 at noon in the Grace Church of Seal Beach at 138 8th Street Seal Beach on the corner of Eighth Street and Central Avenue in Old Town.
It seems fitting that Robin’s life celebration services be held across the street from the old Seal Beach City Hall building where the SBTV3 facilities are housed. Robin loved working in that building and shared many of the images and facts that she had collected about the place for the blog, including the architectural renderings featured in this post for February 14, 1929 and some of the research and images in this October 28, 1929 post on the dedication of the then-new city hall.
I first got to know Robin when we both served on the Seal Beach Centennial history committee. Robin was a behind-the-scenes sort of person, a refreshing quality when so many egos and personalities insist on being the center of attention.
Robin typically standing in the back of a group photograph
This was not shyness. Robin was deservedly proud of her accomplishments and not afraid to share her point of view. She was about the work, not the glory. She had to deal and interact with a variety of personalities in her work, and Robin will always be a role model to me for the patience and equanimity she brought to those interactions.
She was a great supporter of this blog and preserving Seal Beach history in general. I remember with great fondness all the hours I spent with Robin in the SBTV3 offices and studio discussing Seal Beach history during the centennial celebration and on our many phone calls after I left Seal Beach in 2016. And I could always rely on Robin for the latest Seal Beach news and gossip.
Long time Seal Beach resident and Olympic gold medalist Pat McCormick passed away yesterday at age 92.
There will be finer tributes and fuller accounts of her lifetime of accomplishments in the days to come than I can offer here. What I would like to share is the earliest profile of Pat McCormick I could find. This was printed in the July 15th, 1951 San Francisco Examiner when 21 year-old Pat McCormick was preparing to compete in the national swimming championships the year before she won the gold in the 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform diving events at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games.
Her name had been mentioned in earlier sports coverage, but the editors of the paper and writer Gus Steiger choose this time to focus an entire story on McCormick and the commitment required for her to obtain her level of athletic excellence.
Patricia McCormick Eyes New Swimming Laurels
By Gus Steiger
DETROIT, July 14
“What beauty’ What grace! What form!” the appreciative spectator murmur as the young lady zooms off the high dive board, cuts a figure in a flowing continuity of motion and plummets into the water like a perpendicular arrow. Diving, as it concerns the agile female, is the most graceful of sports competition — its participants the most beautiful.
It is assured, there will be the usual quantity of “O-o-o-hs” and “Ah-h-h-hs” emanating from the onlookers when little Patricia Keller McCormick and rivals for her titles display their diving skill at the national swimming championships in Detroit beginning July 25.
But few there will be among the spectators who will possess an awareness of the long years and the many, many hours of practice, the determination in the face of recurrent, and sometime serious, injury and the courage demanded of a diving champion.
It’s something in which you start young and keep everlastingly at it. That is true of Mrs. McCormick and the foes she will encounter in Detroit. Pat presently is a grand slam champion, something never before achieved in her field. She won all three outdoor diving titles — one meter, three meter and platform — at High Point, N. C, last August and followed with victories in the one meter and three-meter Indoor tests at Houston, Tex., more than two months ago.
WON TITLE AT 14
Such eminence was not attained overnight. She was born at Seal Beach, near Santa Monica in California, displayed an affinity for the water as a babe and later on took to diving, showing marked skill for this form of endeavor by the time she was 10 years old.
At 14 she won the women’s one meter diving cup and from mat point on concentrated on her diving career.
Pat McCormick and those of her ilk go leaping off diving boards from 20,000 to 23,000 times a year. A day’s workout means from 70 to 100 dives and it is quite easy to see how this soon runs into thousands, and into hundreds of thousands the enumerating encompasses a career.
Assuming the young lady operates on a six-day diving week, it has been estimated that in a ten year span, she will have made 200,000 dives, floated through more than 350 miles of ozone and made another 625 miles under water.
When preparing for an event of the importance of the forthcoming nationals in Detroit, Mrs. McCormick puts in a six and one-half hour day at the Olympic Stadium pool in Los Angeles. Five of these hours, split into morning and early evening sessions, are devoted to work on the tower, about thirty dives in each period. A ninety-minute post luncheon drill is on the springboards, involving about twenty-five dives.
The late Georgia Coleman, vivacious 1932 fancy diving Olympic champion, was typical of this attitude. “You like to dive, don’t you?” she was asked once by an admirer.
“I just love it,” Georgia responded. “When I am on the high board before taking off, it’s like being on top of the world. Then when I’m in my dive I have the feeling of a bird sailing through the air.”
There are exercises that also are part of the diver’s training program and a girl like Mrs. McCormick must watch her weight continually.
SPECIAL TRAINING
There is torture too to be encountered. At one time Pat’s coach, Rusty Smith of the Los Angeles AC thought she was losing points because she wasn’t pointing her toes sufficiently. He had a board rigged up with two rungs on it.
“Keep your feet in this thing,” he admonished her, “while you sleep through the night it will stretch your feet into shape.” So Pat slept in that unnatural and uncomfortable way just to give her tootsies the proper angle.
Besides torture, this aquatic specie is susceptible to injury. Pat has suffered chipped teeth and a broken rib by hitting the heavy board as she failed to clear on a dive. On one such occasion she almost unhinged her jaw. Other girls have sustained broken noses and have had fractured skulls. The current champion has absorbed welts and bruises on the chest and shoulders by not hitting the water properly when dunking herself at a mile-a-minute speed.
In addition to her own accomplishments, Patricia McCormick was also our one living degree of historical separation from the early heyday of Seal Beach’s joy zone entertainment as detailed in this post covering July 30th, 1916 in Seal Beach history.
– -Michael Dobkins
Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?
If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.
Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.
This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.
I announced this on the disastrous online slideshow earlier this month, but I haven’t share the news widely. Barring unforeseen circumstances, This Date in Seal Beach History will return to daily posts on New Year’s Day, 2026.
It’s been great fun uncovering new information about Seal Beach’s history without rushing to write a daily post these past few years, and my research will continue throughout the next two years while I begin to write and stockpile brand new posts to run throughout 2025. It will be a blast to share some of the stuff I’ve found. The amazing but forgotten life of one of Seal Beach’s early city clerk. A tandem bicycle ride to Miami. Seal Beach’s own move studio. Photographs from the Los Angeles Motorcycle Club’s visit to early Seal Beach. And more.
I’ve been slacking off the past three years on acknowledging the generous donors that have helped fund some of my research during the hiatus. I apologize for my rude neglect to the following people:
As long as I’m expressing gratitude, I need to mention the people listed below for helping fund the research that went creating the posts currently available here on the blog.
– Michael Dobkins
Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?
If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.
Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.
I’ll be hosting a Zoom meeting at 7 pm Thursday, December 15th. This event is free.
The meeting will run approximately 40 minutes to an hour. This slide show won’t be a chronological survey of Seal Beach history through photographs as I’ve done in the past, but will focus on answering some of the questions I’ve been getting about specific Seal Beach history topics with perhaps an update on some of the research I’ve been doing lately.
If this is successful and there’s enough interest, I might make online Zoom presentations a bi-monthly or quarterly event leading up to my resuming daily This Date in Seal Beach History posts in 2024 or 2025.
If you want to attend this meeting, please e-mail me at mike@SealBeachHistory.com, and I’ll send you instruction on how to log in to the meeting.
Around 2:30 pm on the Fourth of July, this blog received its 200,000 view since its January 1, 2010 launch. I’ve been busy on non-Seal Beach projects for the past couple weeks, but I did want to celebrate and offer something in return for all the kind words, interest, and attention the THIS DATE IN SEAL BEACH HISTORY blog has received in all its various formats and purposes over the years.
On social media, I floated the idea of scheduling a Seal Beach History AMA (Ask Me Anything) session, and there seemed to be a little enthusiasm for such an event. So I’m going to do it!
(“It’ll be fun!” he said to himself, nervously wondering if he was making a big mistake.”)
I haven’t decided just yet whether this AMA session will take a form of a Facebook chatroom, a Zoom videoconference, or (as I’m favoring right now) just my writing answers to submitted questions and posting them here on the blog. I’ll have a better idea of what’s doable after I received your questions. Whatever form it takes, I’ll present it at some point in the next two weekends.
So between now and Sunday, August 7th at Midnight Pacific Standard Time, please feel free to ask me any question related to Seal Beach history or this blog, and I’ll do my best to research it. Please post your questions either below in the comments or send them to mike@sealbeachhistory.com.
I will compile a presentation answering as many questions I reasonably can.
—————-
Also, I will be resuming my research into 19th Century Anaheim Landing and pre-Seal Beach Bay City next month in preparation of a 2024 relaunch of the blog with new daily posts. A six-month subscription to the online newspaper archive I use costs $75. If you want to contribute towards that amount, donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal.
Merry Christmas to all Seal Beach residents and visitors both past and present, across the planet and on the ships at sea!
There is plenty of work and preparation going on for the site’s relaunch in 2024, but sharing the details will have to wait. We’ve charged up the flux capacitor and are about to pop into the DeLorean for a turkey dinner with walnuts, dressing, cranberry sauce and musical accompaniment by Jimmie Means on the Hammond organ at Sam’s Seafood in 1963.
If you belong to a generation who lived during the era when black and white series still aired on broadcast television, chances are you fondly remember the television show named “Sea Hunt.” This was an immensely popular syndicated half hour action and adventure show that enjoyed a top-rated four season first run from 1958 to 1961 and then went to reruns for decades.
The series starred Lloyd Bridges as hyper-competent ex-Navy frogman and freelance scuba diver, Mike Nelson. Each week (or every afternoon once the show went into reruns), Nelson’s steadiness and ultra-reliability made him the go-to guy for the military, law enforcement, charter fishermen, or anyone who needed assistance with a marine crisis or seabound adventure. For 155 episodes, Mike Nelson tangled with bank robbers and crooks, consulted on top-secret military missions, recovered underwater treasure, fought dangerous sea critters, rescued distressed seagoing folks, and solved other underwater crises. The stories were lean and straightforward pulp narratives with no room for subtleties like deep characterization, subplots, or subtext. Bridge’s gruff and matter-of-fact narration of the underwater sequences makes the series oddly diverting, even when viewed with jaded twenty-first century eyes.
What makes the show especially relevant for local history is that much of it was filmed on location in the Bahamas, Florida, and, for a couple seasons, the Long Beach area — especially Naples, the Long Beach peninsula, Alamitos Bay, and the newly built Long Beach Marina. The above-water locales in many of the show’s episodes serve as a visual catalog of the Long Beach area as it existed in the late fifties. I’ve never seen an episode filmed specifically in Seal Beach, but Seal Beach landmarks are often featured prominently in the background in scenes shot on the Long Beach Marina.
One episode did feature a Seal Beach landmark prominently, so much so that it appears in the episode’s title card.
In the second season’s “Underwater Security,” Mike is hired by the military to go undercover to test the security of a seaside rocket fuel plant and ends up foiling the plans of actual saboteurs. Seal Beach residents tuning in to that night’s “Sea Hunt” episode on January 19th, 1959 would have been surprised to see the Seal Beach power plant passing itself off as the rocket fuel factory. The episode itself was probably filmed in late 1958.
(There’s a very mild irony in that an actual rocket assembly facility would be constructed in a few years on the other end of town to build the second stage of the Apollo program’s Saturn rockets.)
You can watch “Underwater Security” below.
And here’s a link to a YouTube playlist for all the “Sea Hunt” episodes. If you see Seal Beach appearing in any episodes, please share the show’s title in the comments section. I don’t have time to go through all the episodes, but if we all crowdsource the project, maybe we can create a comprehensive index of Seal Beach appearances in “Sea Hunt.”
I won’t resume daily blogging here until 2024, but I’m trying out a new feature that I hope won’t take as much writing, researching, and prep time. For lack of a better title, I’m calling this new feature, “Take a Look at Historical Seal Beach.”
If you have unique photos from Seal Beach’s past that you’re willing share on this blog, please contact me at mike@SealBeachHistory.com. What I’m looking for are high resolution scanned images in either a tiff or jpeg and a few words to provide a little commentary and context on what is being shared.
I hope to share a new post of photos (or just one photo) from a single donor each month. Currently I have images stockpiled for the rest of 2020. That leaves thirty-six months to cover from January 2021 to December 2023. With luck, there will be enough interest and response to fill those thirty-six months.
