Finishing up my autobiography and of course fishing plays a large part in the story...
1962 — Lean Times — Our time in Costa Mesa was fairly dull at first with Mom working, me going to school, and [my brother] John spending time in a nursery school. Money was tight and we didn’t do many activities. To make matters worse the van quit running that December. Mom had to buy a new car and luckily she found one but the $150 setback for the car meant it was a lean Christmas with few if any gifts.
Knowing money was tight I decided to find a job. One day, when Mom had taken Johnny and I down to Newport Beach, I noticed a help wanted sign at the Coffee Haven Café near the front of the Newport Pier. I applied for and got the job as a dishwasher making $1.00 an hour. I now had a job so I could help supplement Mom’s income and I was provided the perfect place to go fishing. Life, at least for me, would become much more exciting.
Only later did I learn how tight the money supply had really been. I knew that the fish I brought home made up a large portion of what I’ve called our military diet—fish and macaroni and cheese (at least two or three nights a week) but I didn’t know why. In time I would find out that Jack [my Marine stepfather in Vietnam] was still gambling, losing much of his paycheck in Vietnam, and Mom was receiving little or no money from across the Pacific. Looking back, I guess the three of us were lucky we even had a roof over our head but we never were homeless and Mom took the worries upon herself. But, thank God for the fish!
One benefit of those days was that I did eventually learn how to clean and cook fish and discovered that not all fish taste the same—halibut good, hake bad, croaker good, mackerel not so good, and so on. I began a life-long interest in cooking and eating fish that parallels to some degree my larger interest in fishing.
Coffee Haven Café — I enjoyed my job at the café even if it was a somewhat menial job. I still remember the owner, Marion, and Eunice Hartley the main waitress and the one on whom I had a crush but who was far to old for me. I also remember Bill, the assistant manager and main cook who would arrive early every morning and cook up a huge pot of clam chowder. It was Manhattan-style and pretty much identical to the chowder served at the famous Crab Cooker that sits just across Newport Blvd. I’ve always wondered if Bill migrated across the street at some point and taught them how to cook their chowder (or if he learned it from them).
An interesting lesson I learned from listening to Bill, and watching the customers at the café myself, was that people are often not as they seem. Newport Beach is a town with many wealthy people (millionaires and billionaires) and even though we were a simple little coffee shop, many of our customers were wealthy. Bill knew many of them on a first name basis. One day we were discussing some of the people I had met and Bill was listing millionaire after millionaire. Bill felt that the truly wealthy were often some of our friendliest and most down to earth customers. Unless you knew them you wouldn’t have guessed they were wealthy. The less pleasant group was the newly rich, the ones moving up the ladder of wealth, the ones who now had some money and seemed to want to show it off, ones who had, to use a quote from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world.” They were often our most obnoxious and demanding customers. It was an observation that may be over simplified and certainly is not true for all.
It does however remind me of a fishing trip at the Balboa Pier many years later. The day saw me fishing out at the end of the pier next to a very pleasant Asian angler. We shared fishing space, stories of fish, and some fish. I noticed his top grade equipment that was far better than mine. Later, while fishing near shore with my friend Snookie, he stopped and said good-by as he was leaving the pier. Snookie said, “do you know who he is?” I had no idea. She said he was a very wealthy man who was the neighbor of basketball legend Kobe Bryant who lived in Newport Beach before his death. I never would have guessed.
The Coffee Haven Café is no longer in the spot, instead having been replaced by Charlie’s Chili in 1972, but the Crab Cooker is still across the street and it remains one of my favorite restaurants. In fact, it is a restaurant I almost always visit when I am in Newport Beach.
Across the parking lot from the café and McFadden Square was the Newport Fishing Supply and it was there that I got my first rod and reel. The reel was a large Penn Spinfisher 700 that could handle most fish while the rod was an 8-footer that was also designed for big fish and heavy sinkers. It was great with about a 3-4 ounce sinker but today I know that lighter tackle would have gotten me many more fish. But, you live and learn. Of course in those days bonito were one of the main fish, some were good-sized, up to 6-8 pounds, and you needed something heavy enough to bring them up to the pier. Most popular, and better eating, were the halibut, and some of them also reached a good size.
As for bait, just two doors down from the café was Baldy’s Bait and Tackle, an old-time shop that had been in the same spot since 1922. It had all the tackle you could want as well as a big variety of bait—frozen, salted and live. Frozen, salted anchovies; frozen, salted or sugar-cured mackerel; frozen bonito, flying fish, squid and mussels. Live bait included clams (a couple of different varieties), ghost shrimp, blood worms, mussels, and mudsuckers, I’m not sure why I didn’t buy my rod and reel at Baldy’s but I certainly bought a lot of bait.
Although my primary fishing spot was the Newport Pier, I did scrape enough money together to go on a couple of Sportfishing trips in the spring of 1963. Both were on boats out of the local Davey’s Locker, the Seahorse and the Thunderbird. Both were excellent fishing trips with lots of fish (20 each trip), the first a mix of bass and barracuda, the second a mix of bonito, bass and barracuda. The barracuda on that first trip were good sized fish (up to 9 lbs. 2 oz.) and I still have several pictures of me holding up those fish with Johnny pretending to take pictures of the fish that looked almost as big as him. The trips were my introduction to fishing at Catalina Island, a place that would become a favorite fishing spot forty years later.
Me, my brother Johnny, and some Catalina barracuda
The Newport Pier — I date my true addiction to pier fishing to the year that I spent at the Newport Pier. The routine varied little: during the school year I was on the pier during the weekends, during the summer it could be several days a week.
The bike would be parked in back of the restaurant and then I would head out to the end of the pier and the coveted right corner spot, Mecca to the regulars. That spot presented access to the deepest waters and the biggest fish or so we thought. It certainly was a top spot for the bonito, the fighting boneheads that were so common in those years.
What fish I caught were stored in the café’s cooler and sometimes I was also able to get in a few hours of fishing both before and after work. Of course the ride back home wasn’t nearly the same exhilarating ride that I had experienced in the pre-dawn hours. The ride was now up the hill, fighting the traffic, and (hopefully) carrying home a bag of fish for dinner.
All summer long I was out on that pier fishing and watching the “old pros” aka regulars or pier rats and their techniques. I did catch fish but it took some time before I became proficient. My first few trips saw an occasional small halibut or more often a sculpin (scorpionfish). It wasn't until my seventh trip that I caught a decent-size fish, a barracuda, and it wasn’t until the tenth trip that I caught as many as ten fish. However, I soon began to understand the needed baits and proper presentation and with those skills began to catch a variety of fish: bonito, mackerel, jack mackerel, halibut, queenfish, jacksmelt and perch. Deep-water fish like sanddab and Pacific hake were added to the mix. I was finally becoming an angler.
At last, on an early September morning, I had my first “big day.” I had arrived, as usual, at the crack of dawn, and was fishing just down from the northwest corner. I was using squid for bait and had experienced very little early success. However, around 5:30 a.m., I had a strike and pulled in an ebony-colored fish, a type I had never seen nor caught before. The next cast yielded two more of these strange colored fish and I continued to catch fish, nearly every cast, for the next two hours. Strangely, only two other anglers were having similar success. Most were going fishless in Newport.
Later, I found out the fish were sablefish, a deep-water fish more common to northern waters and a fish sold as black cod by the dory boats headquartered near the entrance to the pier. The pier fronted on the deep-water Newport Canyon and apparently the fish had moved up from the canyon during the night. Upon cleaning the fish, I also found the reason for my success. The fish were stuffed with squid that were schooling in the waters near to the pier. Anglers who were using squid for bait, and there were only a few of us, were catching the fish. I caught 47 sablefish that day, but it was only a start. I continued to catch fish: large jacksmelt, Pacific mackerel and jack mackerel—77 fish in all (together with one squid). It was, mirabile dictu, the best day I ever had at the pier.
However, the sablefish would prove a disappointment on the dinner table. Sablefish are a species that has a very high oil content in its flesh; it’s a reason why their third name is butterfish. They are simply too oily and strong flavored to fry up like white-fleshed fish that contain little oil. Given that Mom’s modus operandi for cooking fish was to fry them, the results were, to put it mildly, disappointing. They are excellent when broiled and one of the very best fish when smoked, but I didn’t know that then. Years later, when I worked in the corporate world for Jack in the Box, one of the areas I visited was Seattle and one day I had dinner at Ivar’s Acres of Clams, a fish restaurant on the waterfront. They served smoked sablefish. That one dish prompted several additional visits and whenever I am lucky enough to find a place that has sablefish, broiled or smoked, it’s an easy choice for a meal.
I had, by September, put in the time at the pier to be considered a regular myself. I had also developed the addiction, “the Jones,” to call myself a true pier rat (and I note with some satisfaction and bemusement that today some of my Pier Fishing in California regulars use the term Jonesin’ to indicate that they are going pier fishing).
1962 — Lean Times — Our time in Costa Mesa was fairly dull at first with Mom working, me going to school, and [my brother] John spending time in a nursery school. Money was tight and we didn’t do many activities. To make matters worse the van quit running that December. Mom had to buy a new car and luckily she found one but the $150 setback for the car meant it was a lean Christmas with few if any gifts.
Knowing money was tight I decided to find a job. One day, when Mom had taken Johnny and I down to Newport Beach, I noticed a help wanted sign at the Coffee Haven Café near the front of the Newport Pier. I applied for and got the job as a dishwasher making $1.00 an hour. I now had a job so I could help supplement Mom’s income and I was provided the perfect place to go fishing. Life, at least for me, would become much more exciting.
Only later did I learn how tight the money supply had really been. I knew that the fish I brought home made up a large portion of what I’ve called our military diet—fish and macaroni and cheese (at least two or three nights a week) but I didn’t know why. In time I would find out that Jack [my Marine stepfather in Vietnam] was still gambling, losing much of his paycheck in Vietnam, and Mom was receiving little or no money from across the Pacific. Looking back, I guess the three of us were lucky we even had a roof over our head but we never were homeless and Mom took the worries upon herself. But, thank God for the fish!
One benefit of those days was that I did eventually learn how to clean and cook fish and discovered that not all fish taste the same—halibut good, hake bad, croaker good, mackerel not so good, and so on. I began a life-long interest in cooking and eating fish that parallels to some degree my larger interest in fishing.
Coffee Haven Café — I enjoyed my job at the café even if it was a somewhat menial job. I still remember the owner, Marion, and Eunice Hartley the main waitress and the one on whom I had a crush but who was far to old for me. I also remember Bill, the assistant manager and main cook who would arrive early every morning and cook up a huge pot of clam chowder. It was Manhattan-style and pretty much identical to the chowder served at the famous Crab Cooker that sits just across Newport Blvd. I’ve always wondered if Bill migrated across the street at some point and taught them how to cook their chowder (or if he learned it from them).
An interesting lesson I learned from listening to Bill, and watching the customers at the café myself, was that people are often not as they seem. Newport Beach is a town with many wealthy people (millionaires and billionaires) and even though we were a simple little coffee shop, many of our customers were wealthy. Bill knew many of them on a first name basis. One day we were discussing some of the people I had met and Bill was listing millionaire after millionaire. Bill felt that the truly wealthy were often some of our friendliest and most down to earth customers. Unless you knew them you wouldn’t have guessed they were wealthy. The less pleasant group was the newly rich, the ones moving up the ladder of wealth, the ones who now had some money and seemed to want to show it off, ones who had, to use a quote from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world.” They were often our most obnoxious and demanding customers. It was an observation that may be over simplified and certainly is not true for all.
It does however remind me of a fishing trip at the Balboa Pier many years later. The day saw me fishing out at the end of the pier next to a very pleasant Asian angler. We shared fishing space, stories of fish, and some fish. I noticed his top grade equipment that was far better than mine. Later, while fishing near shore with my friend Snookie, he stopped and said good-by as he was leaving the pier. Snookie said, “do you know who he is?” I had no idea. She said he was a very wealthy man who was the neighbor of basketball legend Kobe Bryant who lived in Newport Beach before his death. I never would have guessed.
The Coffee Haven Café is no longer in the spot, instead having been replaced by Charlie’s Chili in 1972, but the Crab Cooker is still across the street and it remains one of my favorite restaurants. In fact, it is a restaurant I almost always visit when I am in Newport Beach.
Across the parking lot from the café and McFadden Square was the Newport Fishing Supply and it was there that I got my first rod and reel. The reel was a large Penn Spinfisher 700 that could handle most fish while the rod was an 8-footer that was also designed for big fish and heavy sinkers. It was great with about a 3-4 ounce sinker but today I know that lighter tackle would have gotten me many more fish. But, you live and learn. Of course in those days bonito were one of the main fish, some were good-sized, up to 6-8 pounds, and you needed something heavy enough to bring them up to the pier. Most popular, and better eating, were the halibut, and some of them also reached a good size.
As for bait, just two doors down from the café was Baldy’s Bait and Tackle, an old-time shop that had been in the same spot since 1922. It had all the tackle you could want as well as a big variety of bait—frozen, salted and live. Frozen, salted anchovies; frozen, salted or sugar-cured mackerel; frozen bonito, flying fish, squid and mussels. Live bait included clams (a couple of different varieties), ghost shrimp, blood worms, mussels, and mudsuckers, I’m not sure why I didn’t buy my rod and reel at Baldy’s but I certainly bought a lot of bait.
Although my primary fishing spot was the Newport Pier, I did scrape enough money together to go on a couple of Sportfishing trips in the spring of 1963. Both were on boats out of the local Davey’s Locker, the Seahorse and the Thunderbird. Both were excellent fishing trips with lots of fish (20 each trip), the first a mix of bass and barracuda, the second a mix of bonito, bass and barracuda. The barracuda on that first trip were good sized fish (up to 9 lbs. 2 oz.) and I still have several pictures of me holding up those fish with Johnny pretending to take pictures of the fish that looked almost as big as him. The trips were my introduction to fishing at Catalina Island, a place that would become a favorite fishing spot forty years later.
Me, my brother Johnny, and some Catalina barracuda
Still too young to drive a car, my trusty old Schwinn Jaguar bicycle was put to use hauling me down the four mile or so trek to my job and the pier. I would get up very early, gather together the various and necessary accouterments, and head down to the pier. Typically I wore a hooded sweatshirt and it was a good thing due to the moisture that likes to call the seaside its home. Down the street, past the high school, and then down the steep hill that led to the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway). If traffic was light (and it usually was at 4:30 in the morning) a quick dash across the roadway, across the bridge at the arches, and then the morning ride out Newport Boulevard to McFadden Place and the Newport Pier.The bike would be parked in back of the restaurant and then I would head out to the end of the pier and the coveted right corner spot, Mecca to the regulars. That spot presented access to the deepest waters and the biggest fish or so we thought. It certainly was a top spot for the bonito, the fighting boneheads that were so common in those years.
What fish I caught were stored in the café’s cooler and sometimes I was also able to get in a few hours of fishing both before and after work. Of course the ride back home wasn’t nearly the same exhilarating ride that I had experienced in the pre-dawn hours. The ride was now up the hill, fighting the traffic, and (hopefully) carrying home a bag of fish for dinner.
All summer long I was out on that pier fishing and watching the “old pros” aka regulars or pier rats and their techniques. I did catch fish but it took some time before I became proficient. My first few trips saw an occasional small halibut or more often a sculpin (scorpionfish). It wasn't until my seventh trip that I caught a decent-size fish, a barracuda, and it wasn’t until the tenth trip that I caught as many as ten fish. However, I soon began to understand the needed baits and proper presentation and with those skills began to catch a variety of fish: bonito, mackerel, jack mackerel, halibut, queenfish, jacksmelt and perch. Deep-water fish like sanddab and Pacific hake were added to the mix. I was finally becoming an angler.
July 22, 1962 — Three queenfish (aka herring), two Pacific hake (21" and 16"), and one 17" jack mackerel (aka Spanish mackerel)
At last, on an early September morning, I had my first “big day.” I had arrived, as usual, at the crack of dawn, and was fishing just down from the northwest corner. I was using squid for bait and had experienced very little early success. However, around 5:30 a.m., I had a strike and pulled in an ebony-colored fish, a type I had never seen nor caught before. The next cast yielded two more of these strange colored fish and I continued to catch fish, nearly every cast, for the next two hours. Strangely, only two other anglers were having similar success. Most were going fishless in Newport.
Later, I found out the fish were sablefish, a deep-water fish more common to northern waters and a fish sold as black cod by the dory boats headquartered near the entrance to the pier. The pier fronted on the deep-water Newport Canyon and apparently the fish had moved up from the canyon during the night. Upon cleaning the fish, I also found the reason for my success. The fish were stuffed with squid that were schooling in the waters near to the pier. Anglers who were using squid for bait, and there were only a few of us, were catching the fish. I caught 47 sablefish that day, but it was only a start. I continued to catch fish: large jacksmelt, Pacific mackerel and jack mackerel—77 fish in all (together with one squid). It was, mirabile dictu, the best day I ever had at the pier.
However, the sablefish would prove a disappointment on the dinner table. Sablefish are a species that has a very high oil content in its flesh; it’s a reason why their third name is butterfish. They are simply too oily and strong flavored to fry up like white-fleshed fish that contain little oil. Given that Mom’s modus operandi for cooking fish was to fry them, the results were, to put it mildly, disappointing. They are excellent when broiled and one of the very best fish when smoked, but I didn’t know that then. Years later, when I worked in the corporate world for Jack in the Box, one of the areas I visited was Seattle and one day I had dinner at Ivar’s Acres of Clams, a fish restaurant on the waterfront. They served smoked sablefish. That one dish prompted several additional visits and whenever I am lucky enough to find a place that has sablefish, broiled or smoked, it’s an easy choice for a meal.
I had, by September, put in the time at the pier to be considered a regular myself. I had also developed the addiction, “the Jones,” to call myself a true pier rat (and I note with some satisfaction and bemusement that today some of my Pier Fishing in California regulars use the term Jonesin’ to indicate that they are going pier fishing).
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