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This is the stretch of Morro Bay I used to play on as a kid. This postcard view of the cove is from before I grew up. In the 1960’s a motel resort called “the Golden Tee” was built on the southern edge of this cove. It’s now called “the Inn at Morro Bay”.

Just North of this spot was Orval Leage’s oyster processing operation and fish market. We locals called it “the Oyster Plant”. The entire stretch of shore here was covered in left over oyster shells… millions of them probably 6 feet deep. Occasionally we would find a huge abalone shell amongst the oysters… probably 10″ or more across. Orval lived in an interesting mid century modern redwood house designed by George Nagano three blocks away…. but we never called it “mid century modern” back then.

Along this stretch of the bay were dozens of small row boats. We kids would take our oars down and “borrow” these on occasion. Much easier to just own oars than the whole boat. We would go over to the sand spit to play… and then return the boat to wherever we had found it after a hour or two.

There was a small fuel dock pier you could walk out on… with adjacent docks for a few dozen fishing boats. It had a small snack bar sort of place with drip coffee and crappy potato chips and stale candy… and scruffy fishermen in old Ben Davis Jeans bought from Giannini’s Marine Supply and navy blue knit caps from Horton’s Army Navy store. We fished off the pier here… mostly caught perch. Gilbert’s market was up on Main Street in front of the Oyster plant. You could smell the chickens he roasted daily at our school bus stop out front. Gilbert and Diane Chan lived about 300 feet away from their store.

A silent film star named Gladys Walton lived next to Gilbert’s Market. She covered her house in shells… sort of like what you see in the old southern Florida Keys area. She also later built a fake lighthouse on the edge of her bluff. Her weird boyfriend stared at the girls at the bus stop through a hole in the fence.

The oldest house on the hill we lived on belonged to an old Portuguese fisherman named Mr. Molina. I never knew his first name despite living across the street from him for years. His house was probably from the late thirties… it was painted that same red you see in a lot of Portuguese villages. You used to see it all over MB too… Nadine Richard’s house down on the parking lot of the boat launch was that color… and the house with the wooden tower in the Eucalyptus trees on Morro street too… the one that hotel got built in front of and ruined it’s view. These Portuguese red houses always had white trim…. board and bat… probably old redwood. He built walls and pathways around his property out of old concrete chunks and rocks and shells and old broken plates set in mortar… and an old cement pond, now cracked, that no longer held water but instead was filled with too little dirt and succulents and scraggly flowers.

Mr. Molina had an old VW beetle that was missing first gear. He would drive it around the block several times gathering his wits until he got it just right so he could swerve up the hard left to his drive and just barely make it up to his garage at the top of the property in second gear… the old bug struggling mightily the last few feet.

He had a huge old apricot fruit tree just down the hill from his garage and every winter he would get a length of chain and beat the tree with it. I finally gathered up the courage at the age of about 8 to ask him why he did this. “Makes it think it’s had a bad winter so then it produces more fruit to make up for it” he said. It was true… that tree was heroic in the amount of fruit it produced. Never the less I felt sad for it when he whipped it with that chain every winter. After he died the tree never produced again. I sorta figured it was relieved to finally get to retire.

Condos got built above the cove… on the north part… lots of them. The contractors unknowingly supplied plywood for a few skateboard ramps in the neighborhood. A little park was made under the trees at the bluff edge in front of the condos… and a public restroom. And a set of stairs now leads you down to the water where you can still find a few old rowboats… but mostly it’s plastic kayaks now. Most of these condo’s sit empty because they are second homes… so the park feels a bit desolate. Almost the way the empty lot that preceded it did… but not.

In the 60’s a character named Sandal (he evidently made sandals at some point in his life and the name… well you get the idea) lived on a scrappy boat of his own making. He skirted the law by dropping anchor here and there along this cove. Much to the chagrin of the Golden Tee motel/resort’s owners. He was a hippy of sorts. He called himself the “baykeeper”. He was a naturalist in various interpretations of that word. His boat was like a Japanese junk made from plywood. He was well known around town… and people just sort of accepted his raggedy presence and thus the city manager and police and harbor patrol just sort of ignored his illegal harbor residency. His son Paka would follow him around and their plight was the worry of empathetic mothers all around the area. Later in life he left Morro Bay’s jurisdiction for reasons I am unaware of but can guess… and anchored off of baywood… in the area patrolled by “the baywood navy” who’s slogan is “we won’t sail in water any deeper than we can stand in”. Today Sandal would have been dealt an altogether different set of circumstances by a variety of public agencies.

The hill we lived on was called Cerrito Peak. But we kids all called it eagle rock. I’m not sure where that name came from… but later in life I found out that an artist named Aaron Kilpatrick had formerly lived in the little Spanish house on the corner of Main and Olive and he had, at one point in his life, lived in Eagle rock California. He and William Wendt… another now famous Plein Air Painter had spent a lot of time on Cerrito Peak painting various views. I dunno if there is any connection but if I speak with enough authority in my voice about “the origin of eagle rock” people believe the story.

We kids had names for all the rocks up on Eagle Rock. “Sleeping Beauty Rock, Squeeze Rock”, “Death Rock”, “Butt Rock” etc. This hill was our other playground. It was in semi neutral territory between three distinct neighborhoods as defined by the “gangs” of kids in them. I suspect probably at least 20 kids called that hill theirs. Many swings were hung… until parents got wind of them and the fact that the swings usually swang out 40′ over various cliff faces. Good stuff. Many treeforts were built too. One particularly heroic undertaking involving several stories and at least 12 kids to build over the course of three months and many trips to the aforementioned condo contractor’s storage yard in the late evenings.

I left MB as a college kid… off to San Luis Obispo and jr college and then regular college. Then life. Most of the old families I knew have left… or the folks died and the kids had to sell the house because none of them could afford to buy it from the others. A few of them are here still. I got lucky and was able to return. I have coffee mornings with old friends downtown. We talk about real estate… or skateboarding… or goofy things we used to do.

The French have a saying, “je ne sais quoi” which translates to “I don’t know” but really means something like “a quality which cannot be named”. I think this quality describes a place you instinctually know… but are unable to describe properly. It is how I feel about this place.