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Tag: McGaugh

  • September 11th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1960, the Los Angeles Times ran a short article on Phyllis Jay and the Seal Beach Marina Players.

    Bruce Jay looks on as his mother Phyllis Jay prepares for a performance
    Son Bruce looks on as his mother Phyllis Jay prepares for another performance

    In March 1959, Phyllis Jay produced and directed a 30-minute parody of South Pacific for a Huntington Beach High School PTA benefit. The performance was to be for one night only, but the response was too good to stop at one performance. As high school trustee Willard Hanzlik put it, “It’s so good it ought to hit the road.”

    Jay’s group of amateur players did just that, performing the piece 26 times locally at various benefits for PTAs, scout groups, veteran hospitals, senior citizens, and the mentally handicapped.

    Cooperation and adaptability was the key ingredients to the Seal Beach Marina Players success.

    Marge Tozer, one of the players designed and built the sets to fit into one station wagon with three different backgrounds to be used depending on the size of the stage. The players had to be flexible enough to perform with or without curtains, on small, medium, or large stages, and sometimes at floor level where the actors could literally “reach out and touch” the audience.

    A major highlight for Mrs. Jay was a Seal Beach Chamber of Commerce hosted “welcome neighbor” party night. The Seal Beach Marina Players gave three performances in one night in a 300-seat school auditorium (probably the J. H. McGaugh School Auditorium). 

    At the time of the article, the group had raised $3,000, approximately $24,000 in 2016 dollars.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • August 5th in Seal Beach History

     On this date in 1978, the Alliance for Survival staged a protest outside the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. The protest was against the purported storage of nuclear weapons at the station, but the stockpiling of nuclear weapons in Seal Beach has never been confirmed by the Defense Department.

    Aug 6_1978_Nuke_Protest
    Photo Credit: AP Laserphoto

    Out of town protesters, some from as far away as Santa Barbara, were bussed in from Cal State Long Beach to join local activists at J.H. McGaugh Intermediate School. Police closed off Seal Beach Boulevard for about two hours to allow an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 marchers and picketers to peacefully demonstrate along the perimeter of the Naval Weapons Station. After the march, a picnic was held at McGaugh with anti-nuke speakers and a rock band.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • May 23rd in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1954, a story ran in the Los Angeles Times announcing that a second school would soon be built in Seal Beach.

    Seal Beach Superintendent of Schools Jerry H. McGaugh had been planning the new school since 1948 to accommodate rising student enrollment. It took some strong arm tactics and behind the scenes wheeling and dealing, but ultimately land bordering between Bolsa Avenue and Bay Boulevard (later renamed Seal Beach Boulevard) was purchased in 1952 for an new intermediate school.

    This was the second time McGaugh had spearheaded the building of a Seal Beach school. When the original 1913 Seal Beach elementary school at Twelfth Street and Pacific Coast Highway was severely damaged in the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake, he guided the construction of a new school on the same grounds to completion in 1935.

    The new school must have been a dream project for McGaugh. Beyond adding twelve new classrooms for grades six to eight, the layout and facilities seemed more appropriate for a high school with a spacious gymnasium, auditorium, music room, cafeteria shop building, and spacious playground.

    When McGaugh retired in June 1955 a few months before the new school opened, the school board surprised him by naming it “J. H. McGaugh Intermediate School,” a fitting honor for a gentleman who guided Seal Beach’s education for nearly three decades and whose influence continues to be felt today in the form of the first-class school he gave the community.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • May 21st in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1984, the Los Angeles Times ran a feature on the 3rd annual Pageant of the Arts at J. H. McGaugh Intermediate School the previous week.

    On May 2nd, 1984 Jame Lapine’s and Stephen Sondheim’s audacious musical, Sunday in the Park with George premiered on Broadway. The first act told the fictionalized tale of how impressionist painter Georges Seurat created his 1884 masterpiece, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” The act climaxes with Seurat bringing all the characters and landscape he’s been sketching into order on the stage “through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony” to create the painting. The musical won two Tonys and a Pulitzer prize.

    On the west coast a few weeks later, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” was also recreated on stage — this time inside the J.H. McGaugh Auditorium and without a big Broadway musical budget or Sondheim score. Students from Kindergarten through the fifth grade had spent a couple months painting the set, and nine and ten year olds in full costume played the roles of the figures in the Seurat painting. Art teacher Shirley Johns and music teacher Sara Magana guided the project with choreography by Jean Parks.

    The Pageant of the Arts has become an annual tradition at McGaugh, and the 37th annual show was staged at the end of March this year. No doubt inspired by Laguna Beach’s annual Pageant of the Masters, the Seal Beach Pageant of the Arts is not satisfied with static recreations of works of art with living actors posing in tableaux vivant (that’s French for living pictures). Our Pageant of the Arts will usually focuses on on a single artist each year and combines music, dance, and spoken commentary. The result is ambitious, colorful, and great fun.– Michael Dobkins

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  • May 10th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1940, District Superintendent of Schools Jerry Hickman McGaugh gave Seal Beach schoolchildren extra cause to celebrate. Since the Memorial Day holiday fell on Thursday, May 29th that year,  McGaugh announced that the school district would make Friday a day off and thus giving students a four-day weekend. Surely they must have spent the extra free time studying for their upcoming end-of-the-school-year final exams.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

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  • Now They’re Just More Bricks in The Wall

    Images of The Week

    Seal Beach Elementary School – March 11, 1933

    Thus far, March has brought Seal Beach tsunami warnings, flooding, destroyed piers, and now earthquakes.

    77 years ago this Wednesday, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake shook Southern California at 5:54 P.M., killing 115 people and bringing an estimated 40 million dollars of damages and destruction to homes, businesses, buildings and roads.

    The heaviest damage was in Long Beach, but Seal Beach was also hit hard on Main Street and, as you can see below in these photographs taken the day after the earthquake, at Seal Beach Elementary School, later renamed Mary E. Zoeter School.

     

     

    One of the gentlemen surveying the damage in the third picture is Seal Beach school district superintendent, Jerome Hickman McGaugh, one of the truly great personages of Seal Beach history.

    McGaugh went to Sacramento and successfully lobbied for funds to rebuild Zoeter school.  Bricks from the damaged buildings were used to build a brick wall around the rebuilt school, and it still stands around the Zoeter property today.

    Blowing up a portion of a 1931 aerial photo doesn’t give us many details, but it does offer a glimpse of the pre-earthquake layout of Zoeter school.

    Shifting tectonic plates couldn’t shut down Zoeter School, but dwindling student enrollment in the 1990s lead to the grades being consolidated at J. H McGaugh School (named after you know who), and Zoeter’s administrative offices were then converted to retail use, leaving the playground for recreational use.  In 2007, the remaining empty Zoeter classrooms were razed due to asbestos concerns.  The asbestos-free Sun-N-Fun Preschool classroom at 12th Street and Landing Avenue is now the only part of the property still used for education.

    Time permitting, I’ll share some more photos of earthquake destruction in Seal Beach (and perhaps an ironic tale of Seal Beach’s sinful past) later this week.

    We’ll share more historical pictures and photos of Seal Beach as the year progresses.   Be sure to check back every Monday for a new Seal Beach image.

    – 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.

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