First Person

CROWN OF THE SEA: GROWING UP IN 1970S CDM

By Alyssa Swanson Hamilton

Corona del Mar’s signature scent is sea salt. As a child growing up in the 70s, I remember the smell coating everything I owned in the summer. That and Coppertone sun lotion, with the advertisement featuring a toddler-aged Jodie Foster losing her bikini bottom to an overzealous dog. The Crown of the Sea. The wind teased us with beach stories. Seals barked and foghorns blew, warning boats away from the jetties. The folks on the fancier east side of Pacific Coast Highway got the previews; first dibs on the ocean. Those of us west of the highway —many the children of teachers, mechanics, single mothers —lived for that breeze.

I was raised on the flower streets, on Marigold Avenue. My mom planted actual marigolds in our yard. The houses on my block, ours included, were mostly original beach cottages with weathered paint and plentiful cockroaches. We kids met in the alleys behind our houses to ride (and crash) mini motorcycles and skateboards and study discarded Playboy magazines and steal aluminum cans and newspapers out of garbage cans to redeem for cash. My dad, a repair technician for Pac Bell, restored vintage cars as a hobby in his garage, and the alley carried the aroma of motor oil and paint solvents on Sundays. Marijuana wafted from Mike the bartender’s apartment up the street, and cigarette smoke from raspy-voiced Lucille’s across the alley. A grand dame rumored to have been a 1920s silent film star stalked the local streets on her daily constitutional, sporting a bobbed helmet of jet hair and orange caftan and soaring penciled brows. The lots in Corona del Mar, the alleys, and the streets are narrow. Domestic disputes, sex, crying babies: you heard it all. Marguerite Avenue, which bisects the town, led to a different world as you headed away from the beach, up the hill toward Harbor View and Spyglass. Wide lots, large twostory houses, symmetrical lawns. Crystal and silence. I was once invited to watch a Disney movie in someone’s screening room. I walked into bedroomsized pantries and gorged on my hosts’ Oreos and Pringles. My mother was (and still is) a nutritionist, and our 70s health food featured carob and unforgiving bricks of wheat bread. If I was good, my mother would let me have a sesame seed candy from Whipple’s Health Food Store, which was across from Gelson’s market. Every week, we made a special trip to their refrigerated organic produce room, my skin goose pimpled as we chose small hard apples and ginseng that resembled a voodoo doll.

My school friend Laura’s closet dwarfed my bedroom. She had Izod alligator shirts and matching Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in every color of the rainbow. I felt like the girl in the children’s book 100 Dresses: the only finery I owned was imaginary. Laura’s glossy blonde hair hung in a perfect sheet. I lived in fear she would discover I was a veritable cave dweller. A fraud.

With Laura in mind, I tried to steer my mother toward Robinson’s when we would approach the mermaid sign welcoming us to Fashion Island. But it was my destiny to end up at Sears. My mother was not a fan of shopping or wasting money and instead taught me about food, meditation, and astrology. She and my dad had my brother when I was 11, so I also learned about cloth diapers with dangerous pins and breastfeeding. My social life revolved around checking out books from the Corona del Mar library and blowing my allowance on the latest Judy Blume at the Children’s Bookstore or disappearing ink and iron-on T-shirts from Toy Boat.

I developed a hobby that bordered on obsession. I illustrated stories where the protagonist lived wild in the hills, and everyone wore animal skins and rode horses. Or she dwelled in the ocean as a mermaid with waist length hair and impossible breasts, likely inspired by my back-alley Playboy education. I filled pages and pages with the adventures of this fearless feral girl who had no use for Gloria Vanderbilts. Most embarrassingly, I narrated these stories out loud. I can’t imagine what my parents thought as I carried on for hours at a stretch.

As I entered my pre-teens (and gradually left my stories behind), I was finally allowed to cross the highway to Corona del Mar’s Main Beach to boogie board. I’d head out in corduroy OP shorts and a Velcro wallet holding my Gina’s Pizza money, and denim-blue Vans slip-ons. I had my Morey Boogie tri-color board from Hobie Surf Shop, my initials burned into the front with my dad’s soldering iron, and a solitary fin so I could stay anchored to the ground with my other foot as needed. I would paddle out and position myself just right, catching the wave and gliding through the funnel and coast the thunder of whitewater. I took on bigger waves, my fear evaporating. Wipeouts were a learning curve of discovery, how to go limp and hold my breath in the washing machine tumble and trust that the wave would eventually spit me out. I learned the rhythm of the sets. I screamed with laughter, the sharp thrill of going fast and feeling powerful like the wild girl in my head: Medusa sand caked tangles and tar ball feet and a runny nose; a small taste of freedom. In high school, in the mid to late 80s, I stopped boogey boarding and started dating surfers. I watched them with envy and awe, but I stayed on the sand. I wore the right clothes by then, went to the parties, receded. The wild girl dove deep and let someone else take over. It wasn’t safe at the surface.

Like us as teens, our town was trying on sophistication. Fashion Island exploded with new boutiques and added Atrium Court. There was a huge grocery store, cappuccinos and gelato, a baked potato bar with toppings we stole. Beach cottages were increasingly felled in favor of stately homes. Empty lots and hillsides vanished under the jaws of bulldozers and became office buildings. Bank of America got an ATM machine: a “Versa-Teller.” We wore neon and aggressive shoulder pads. Everything seemed brighter, bigger; the extravagant sun warming the passenger seat of a friend’s triple-white convertible VW Cabriolet. We wanted nothing more than to be grown up and leave our childhoods far behind. It’s true that change is the only constant. The sharp tang of nighttime air, with the right loft of breeze, can take a Gen X’er like me (or any generation) straight back to childhood. The rhythmic sea carries the memory of our wildness, our beginnings. I have started craving the depths again. The sharp cold, the crown of whitewater, the unknown unfolding underneath. A christening; a homecoming. The ocean knows who she is. Sometimes, I need her to remind me too.

LAST LOOK

Ed Olen Photograph Sobier Photo Project Series IG:@sobierphotoproject