A LOOK BACK:Beach suggestions of the past

New ideas make life interesting, especially when they involve ways to improve our beach.

Some of these suggestions have become realities while others are still waiting for a chance.

For example, Rusty Shepard had the idea to build a bridge from our pier to Catalina Island, but it was really just part of a joke he played on an aunt. He convinced her that a bridge connected Huntington Beach to Catalina Island and that cars could drive back and forth from our pier.

That idea, of course, will remain on history’s drafting table.

On a more serious note, in 1941 former city councilman Arthur W. Morehouse proposed a way to make it safer for pedestrians to cross Pacific Coast Highway to the pier from end of Main Street.

During the Feb. 3, 1941, City Council meeting Morehouse suggested that the city set aside money in the next year’s budget for an underground pedestrian tunnel from the business district to the beach.

He told his fellow council members during the summer at least a million people cross the highway to get to the beach and that a tunnel would be safer.

Now we have a safe passageway, but it’s a bridge across the highway at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa.

In 1941 the old Pacific Electric depot was moved from in front of the Pavalon (pavilion) at the pier. That gave the city a wide view of the popular entertainment spot.

Minnie Higgins suggested a circular drop-off driveway be built there to let drivers drop off beach visitors, fishermen and dancers going to the Pavalon.

She proposed a 20-foot-wide driveway with the entrance at Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway that would have an exit west of the pier.

Higgins suggested giving drivers 10 minutes of free parking. That would make it easier to drop off disabled seniors, she said.

She even suggested naming this circular road Reed Drive in honor of her pioneering parents James and Mary Reed.

Prior to Pier Plaza we had a circular parking lot with a turnaround similar to Minnie’s idea.

When Cora Craig opened her Island View Inn where the Huntington Inn was in 1941 negotiations began in order to establish a steamship terminal at our municipal pier.

Our chamber of commerce, then-Mayor Marcus McCallen and Orange County officials wanted the Catalina Island Steamship Line to have an auxiliary line from Avalon to Huntington Beach to relieve some of the heavy summer traffic at its Long Beach terminal.

This “hands across the sea” proposed route would save six miles off their Long Beach route between the mainland and the magic isle.

Not a bad idea having a Catalina terminal, and if Balboa can have one why can’t Huntington Beach?

In 1941 we almost got into a tanning war with our neighboring beach city of Santa Monica.

That year our city purchased a spray gun that lifeguards could use to cover beach visitors with a solution that would help yield a deep tan in just a day.

Capt. George Watkins, head of the Santa Monica municipal lifeguards, didn’t think that was such a bright idea. He figured a natural tan from the sun along Santa Monica’s coast would be the finest anyone could want.

He thought those instant tans weren’t authentic and didn’t have the fine depth of color as the more organic sun worshippers could get in Santa Monica, so he threw down the gauntlet to Huntington Beach’s chief lifeguard Bud Higgins.

Watkins had no objections to Huntington Beach’s one-day tans so long as the lifeguards stenciled “Purely Artificial” on beach visitors signing up for the instant toning.

Otherwise, Watkins warned Higgins, Santa Monica’s lifeguards might start their own wholesale sun-tanning program that Huntington Beach could not compete with.

Watkins noted Santa Monica had a Douglas Aviation plant and it wouldn’t be difficult to get a plane to fly up and down the beach every hour and spray bathers with a walnut brown dye and that Santa Monica could spray more people in an hour than Huntington Beach could in a week.

Thankfully, this nutty idea of mass tanning never came about and today’s sun bathers in Huntington Beach are developing finer tans than Santa Monica could ever dream of.