Note: It’s not an unfamiliar thing, to hear someone reminisce about their time in Coronado. More and more, and especially with the popularity of vehicles like Facebook, we get to hear these special memories. Kim Harris is just one of those guys who took time out from growing up to recognize there was something special about his surroundings. We are fortunate to have his remembrances to share with you, along with some special images. -Thanks, Kim. It was around 1959 and I had lived in Coronado a few months when I watched a USN jet crash on the beach near North Island. I ran from my house toward the billowing black smoke in time to see Navy fire crews douse the flaming plane with foam. Pretty exciting stuff for a 10-year-old boy. Coronado was a true village and the perfect place to grow up. Neighbors could be enlisted Navy families, active and retired Officers, or just normal civilian folk. A bicycle was the best form of transportation although I contributed to the development of the skateboard. Our version was a 2×4 about 18 inches long with metal roller skates (the kind you attached to your shoes with a skate key) nailed to the bottom. You could go pretty fast and turn ok. Metal wheels on the concrete made almost as cool a sound as baseball cards on the spokes of your bike, but, if you hit a rock or a large crack the skateboard would instantly stop and you would fly through the air. That was my first introduction to physics. The beach was an entertainment Mecca. Surfing was starting to take root as a popular sport. Surfboards were long boards of nine feet or more, and made of wood and/or fiberglass. They were too heavy to handle until I got older and then kids made trailers to tow them behind bicycles if they didn’t have a car. One activity at the beach was exploring the rock breakwater wall on Ocean Boulevard. At a young age you could get way deep inside and between the boulders. You could find old newspapers from the 1930’s with cartoon pages of Buck Rogers. There was always an old bottle or can and sometimes I found money. Very often my friends and I would haul a wagon down to the beach and collect soda bottles worth a nickel each, and more for big ones. We would get a wagon full and head up to Free Brothers Market (where Washington Mutual now sits). They advertised “Ice Cold Ice Cubes” but we were more interested in the penny candy aisle. Our work would yield a huge brown paper bag full. Then we would head over to Napolitano’s Grocery store (where Wells Fargo Bank sits today) and browse the comic book rack. If we had any money left over it always went to comic books. Exploring tide pools or fishing off the breakwater at the Hotel Del was one of my favorite pastimes. I would dream of catching a giant grouper like in the pictures along the walls of the Hotel Del’s Hall of History. Mostly I caught Corvina and sometimes Buttermouth Perch. Once my sinker snagged, so I jerked my pole really hard, the weight came loose and went whizzing by my head. I started reeling in my line and saw another 10-year-old boy who was hopping across the rocks yelling something at me. I couldn’t understand him but as he got closer I realized I had hooked him in the mouth. Not knowing what else to do, I took him to my family doctor who removed the hook. I haven’t caught anything that big since. Off the beach was equally entertaining. I would faithfully cruise the alleys with my wagon before trash day. It was amazing to me the neat stuff people threw away. Most of it was trash in retrospect, but to a carefree kid in Coronado it was all treasure. One of my best finds was some parchment Naval Commissions signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. There was an old drunk, named Mickey, who lived in a tire bin behind the Shell gas station. I wasn’t allowed to talk to him, but he gave me a nickel for Playboy magazines I found. Saturday I would do lawn work at the Presbyterian Church for Reverend Carson. When I was finished he would take me and any other kids working that day to the Circus Drive-In for burgers and fries. Sunday I sang in the choir or with the John Calvin Boys. Construction sites were a must on the things to do list. You could get scrap lumber for “projects,” lead from the plumbers for fishing weights, or just watch the action. When they excavated the foundation for the Safeway store there were hundreds of old ceramic beer bottles dug up that had been used as ship ballast. It puzzled me why they would haul empty beer bottles around but I still have one. You also had to stop by the fire house to see if the antique Edison light bulb hanging in there had burned out yet. Local merchants were friendly and would give you old boxes, carpet tubes, displays and other neat stuff. We would build a fort out of them or make a tank on top of the wagon. Sometimes they would have small jobs for you to earn money and could buy anything you needed right in town. It was a wonderful time! Every boy was a Cub Scout or Boy Scout and every girl was a Girl Scout or Brownie. We went to Cotillion class and learned to dance and we all took tennis lessons. We played golf with tennis balls at night on the golf course and hide and seek in the fog. Everyone had a library card and knew not to walk on the lawn bowling green behind the library, or the old people would yell at you. I was fortunate to grow up in those times in Coronado. With all the changes and growth over almost half a century in Coronado, I am glad to see a young person could still pursue some of these same activities in the village. Now that I am older I think I might walk on that lawn bowling green. Photo Caption: A young Kim Harris found Coronado in the late 1950s to be a paradise for children, whether it was fishing off the rocks or garage “sailing” on Thursdays.
Bart Tucker’s childhood photos of Coronado kids and longboards typifies a scene at Center Beach in the early 1960s, before the wind came up.
The rocks in front of the Hotel del Coronado, once an experimental harbor for small boats called “The Harborette,” was the perfect place for Coronado’s youth to cast out a line. At low tide you could pull mussels from the rocks – arguably the best bait in town!
Free Brothers Market was such a Coronado institution. Hard to believe we let things like this escape from our landscape, and our daily lives.
Day & Night Market was another staple of Coronado life. This shot, showing a young Michel Napolitano standing on the sidewalk, arms crossed, is from his father’s collection of images. The store was located in the 800 block of Orange Avenue, across from the Coronado Department Store.
To a kid (and in this instance, in the 1950s and 1960s), the ferryboat meant an escape to adventure. Those of us fortunate to have ridden the ferryboats in our youth remember jumping from Dad’s car even before it came to a stop, running up the metal stairs, and exploring the upper deck of the ferry from one end to the other, peeking inside the lifeboats, and up into the pilot house, before a honk on the horn meant it was time to get back in the car. Remember the adrenaline that built up in your little body as you heard car engines starting before you had descended the stairs?
Another view of the Harborette with Point Loma in the background. Such a place of mystery, of hidden treasure, and always, always the possibility you might catch a large Corvina, Halibut or Perch to take home.
Kim Harris and his wife, still attracted to the waterfront, still mystified by history and far horizons. Look closely. The little kid with the fishing pole is still in there somewhere.
Many thanks to Kim Harris for writing and submitting this content for eCoronado.com. Let him know what you thought of it!
