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.
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
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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.
I still won’t be resuming “This Date in Seal Beach History” daily posts until 2025, but I also don’t like leaving such a large gap of time without some historical Seal Beach content. Ideally, this content would not require time and labor intensive research or writing on my part because I’m devoting most of my free time to other writing projects. It took a few months, but I think I’ve stumbled upon a plan that fulfills these requirements.
The solution came in the form of an e-mail from Dave Gibbs, son of former Seal Beach mayor, Norma Gibbs. Back in January, Dave was kind enough to send an e-mail to me with some Seal Beach photographs from his mother’s estate. I’m sure you agree that these are fantastic photos.
Looking at these photos, I realized they’d make a great post just on the visual appeal of the images. I also realized that there must plenty of unique and personal photos like these tucked in the photo albums and boxes of current and past Seal Beach residents that can be shared with a minimum of research or writing from me.
So here’s the experiment. 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.
For lack of a better title, I’m calling this new feature, “Take a Look at Historical Seal Beach. 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 November and December 2020. That leaves forty-eight months to cover from January 2021 to December 2024. With luck, there will be enough interest and response to fill those thirty-six months.
If not, it will be a long content-free hiatus of no posts until 2025.
So without further delay and in celebration of Seal Beach’s 105th birthday today, here’s our inaugural “Take a Look at Historical Seal Beach” with a few words from Dave Gibbs:
I thought you would like these…check out the guy with the duckfeet fins ready to go body surf the big swell, love it! I appreciate all the work you do on the Seal Beach blog on Facebook. I put these on my Facebook and I also shared the article you posted about my Mom Norma from 1960. I was born in 1959 and Mom climbed over these sandbags to get to the hospital. I think my Mom or Dad took these pics, not sure who but I found a ton of them in her estate. Feel free to share these and if I find any other gems I’ll send them to ya. Dave
Note the serene Sphinx surveying the surf it has bestowed upon the Seal Beach shore.The aftermath of an East Seal Beach storm flood – A Seal Beach tradition since before it was Seal BeachAnother iconic Seal Beach moment
On this date in 1949, Seal Beach residents woke to discover that during the night frigid fifty miles per hour winds and rough waves had torn the Super Express fishing boat from its moorings at Seal Beach pier and smashed the boat upon the Seal Beach Naval Ammunition Depot breakwater, leaving a gaping hole in the hull.
As dramatic as this event was to the normally sedate Seal Beach, it was just one of many similar incidents spread across Southern California. Flights at LAX airport had been grounded. Boats had been beached at Santa Monica and Redondo Beach. The Monstad Pier in Redondo Beach had a section torn apart by waves. Several inches of sand had blown on to Pacific Coast Highway, stranding automobiles and buses. Trees were toppled, and some communities went without electricity for a few hours. Daylight brought calmer weather, and repairs and clean-up efforts began.
In Seal Beach, the Super Express was beached, and the hole was repaired with a temporary canvas patch to make the vessel seaworthy enough to be towed to the San Pedro Boat Works. The canvas patch prove too temporary for the entire trip and peeled, and the boat sank in what must have been shallow water. It was re-floated, re-patched, and towed to safely to San Pedro for more substantial repairs.
– 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.
On this date in 1957, the Long Beach Independent published the following black and white illustration of the proposed Bank Of Belmont Shore branch to be built in Seal Beach in early 1958.
The footprint of the property the bank would have stood on would have encompassed the lots where Brita’s Old Town Gardens (225 Main Street), The Flipside Beach Boutique (231 Main Street) and the First Team Real Estate (245 Main Street) now do business. It might have also included the land where Nick’s Deli now serves breakfast burritos, but it’s difficult to tell just from the illustration.
Seal Beach history is filled with ambitious proposals that never became a reality, and this is one of stranger ones.
The bank building was scheduled to be opened on the southwest corner of Electric Avenue and Main Street on the inauspicious date of April 1st. Charles L. Green, the member of the bank’s board of directors in charge of planning the new branch told a Los Angeles Times reporter on June 29th that architects’ plans were to be completed in two months. And what plans they were!
The architectural style eschewed the traditional bank design of classical marble columns in favor of a more modern and open look with plate glass walls on two sides and a nautical theme for the interior decor. This was not an unusual aesthetic for the mid-fifties. What took the design on a Mr. Toad’s wild ride into wonkiness was revealed in seven words that were part of the caption for the illustration: Live seals will swim in a pool.
I assume that the smaller structure that runs from inside the bank building out into the landscape in front of the bank is the pool for the seals. It’s hard to tell from the grainy illustration taken from a newspaper page that was poorly scanned for microfilm archives, but there does seem to be at least two seals featured in the architect’s rendering.
LIVE SEALS WILL SWIM IN A POOL
Now, please. I ask you to pause and take a long moment to imagine the entirety implied in the concept of “Live seals will swim in a pool.” Close your eyes if it helps you imagine — but only for a moment. You’re going to have to reopen them to read the next paragraph.
First, think about what it would be like to do your financial business in a building with a pool of seals. Could you go over the details of a home mortgage, a business loan, or a deposit error with a bank officer or teller while playful aquatic mammals splash around and grunt a few yards away? If you were a teller or vault manager, could you concentrate enough to balance out your drawers at the end of the day after listening to that cacophony for eight hours? Who feeds the seals? Where’s the closest veterinarian who can treat sick seals? What does it smell like in the bank? What do you do about all the kids and oddballs who show up just to watch the seals and get in the way of your actual customers? On a practical level, the seals would be cute for about a day, and then they would become a banking nightmare.
I found this news item only a few hours ago, and these questions immediately occurred to me. Who came up with this idea, and why didn’t he reject it for instantly apparent practical reasons?
Did Charles L. Green visit Marineland (which opened in 1954), see a crowd of tourists around the seal tank, and say to himself, “Boy, if only we could get a crowd this size into our bank. We’d make a fortune! Wait a minute, we want to open up a Seal Beach branch! This is genius! I can’t wait to tell the guys!”
This was during the economic and real estate boom brought by the construction of the Long Beach Marina, so maybe this aquatic scheme seemed… on brand?
Whatever sparked the inspiration for this idea and whoever pitched it, Not single member of the Bank of Belmont Shore’s board of directors objected to this lunacy. What I would give to be a fly on the wall when these solid community leaders and supposedly sensible businessmen decided to pass the idea on to an architectural firm.
I don’t blame the architects. If the check clears, crazy people’s money spends just as well as sane folks’s cash.
If I’m flippantly casting aspersions of the sanity of someone’s kindly grandfather or beloved relative nearly two-thirds of a century later, please forgive me. Whatever their finer qualities and life achievements might have been, you have to admit that approving a tank of live seals in a bank was crazier than a soup sandwich.
Or maybe it was all merely an elaborate April Fool’s Day prank The Bank of Belmont Shore was playing on the City of Seal Beach. It was due to be opened on April 1st, after all. Who knows?
Please forgive this self-indulgent digression. Sometimes the ideal of objective history telling must set aside for a good “What were they — nuts?” rant.
——————-
Luckily for whatever unsuspecting seals might have ended up in such unpleasant captivity, the branch was never built, but the reason remains elusive. According to city council minutes, the City of Seal Beach did business with the Bank of Belmont Shore between 1955 and 1958, but there is no mention of a potential bank branch in the city. The likely reason for plans for the proposed branch being abandoned had less to do with impractical building designs and more to do with internal issues within The Bank of Belmont Shore that become public in December 1957.
The Bank of Belmont Shore always had a troubled history. The original Belmont Shore branch building still exists at 5354 East Second Street and is a familiar landmark to anyone who visits Belmont Shore regularly. The building was built in 1929 and spent the good part of two decades as a location for a variety of short-lived restaurants. In 1950, Pasadena investors bought the building and commissioned Francis Gentry to design and remodel a state-of-the-art banking facility tucked stylishly inside a distinctive Spanish Colonial Revival exterior with drive-thru teller windows. That remodel was completed in 1951.
Then the $200,000 building remained unoccupied for more than a year and a half. The venture was originally to be funded by a half a million dollar stock offering to local investors, but only $35,000 was raised. Soon, the Pasadena investors were beset by liens against the building by Gentry, the Herman Safe Co., and speedboat race champion Richard Loynes, owner of the land leased to the investors. When the bank finally did open on December 14, 1953, none of those original Pasadena investors was listed among the names of new bank’s leaders and officers.
For the next few years, news articles about the bank were favorable, mostly highlighting community involvement or meetings held in the bank’s popular community room. The bank was even a sponsor of The Miss Universe contest and often hosted appearances of individual contestants.
This image of civic virtue came crashing down when it was revealed that the bank’s president and vice-president had embezzled from the bank numerous times to a staggering total of $305,000, starting a mere month after the bank’s grand opening. The two bank officers were forced to resign to face an indictment with seventy counts of embezzlement, conspiracy, misapplications of funds, and making false entries. They were also forced to sell their shares in the bank, giving more honest investors control of the bank.
By all accounts, the new management ran The Bank of Belmont Shore honestly and well, and the institution’s prosperity grew year-by-year. Unfortunately, at the same time the two resigned officers were in and out of court for their crimes from 1958 to 1960, constantly tainting The Bank of Belmont Shore’s reputation with news stories of fraud, embezzlement, and dishonesty. In May 1960, The Bank of Belmont Shore was renamed Coast Bank the day before the former bank president was sentenced.
That’s not really Seal Beach history, but it does explain why none of us will ever ask on social media if anyone else remembers the bank on Main and Electric that had a tank of seals.
– 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.
On this date in 1976, The Rossmoor Shopping Center celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a dance contest featuring a variety of dance styles like the jitterbug, the rumba, the shag, the Charleston, the Cha Cha Cha, the fox trot, the Bosanova, the Balboa, and the Balboa.(We’re partial to the Stingray Shuffle here at the “This Date in Seal Beach History” dance academy.)Prizes were provided the mall’s merchants, and the music was provided by Tracy Wells And That Big Band, an eighteen-piece orchestra specializing in music from the Glen Miller era. Tracy Wells was a Long Beach musician and one time Seal Beach resident who came into local prominence in the seventies playing gigs at venues like the Golden Sails Inn, The Lakewood Center, the Edgewater Hyatt House.Wells continue leading Big Band orchestras and bands well into the Twenty-First Century as evidenced in this 2012 Long Beach Press-Telegram interview by Tim Grobaty. He even recorded two albums, “The Tracy Wells Big Band, Featuring Karen Aldridge” (1982) and Tracy Wells and his Big Swing Band’s “Swing is Here!” (2006). You can listen to “Swing is Here!” on this YouTube playlist.
Tracy Wells retired from performing with a New Year’s Eve Grand Finale Party in 2015 at the Long Beach Marriott.If the mood strikes you, you can still dance at The Rossmoor Shopping Center today (earphones recommended), but most of the stores have changed, and the center has been remodeled and rebranded as The Shops at Rossmoor in 2007.
– Michael Dobkins
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On this date in 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan made a speech at a closed-to-the-public campaign stop at Seal Beach Leisure World.
Ronald Reagan greets enthusiastic supporters at Leisure World
Speaking to a crowd of approximately 2,500, Reagan affirmed his support of the Social Security program, promised to tighten Medicare so the elderly could get more benefits from it, and received great applause when he criticized earnings limitations on people drawing Social Security.
This was not Reagan’s first visit to Leisure World. He gave a speech there in 1966 while campaigning for governor.
– 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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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.
