Merchant Marine Memories, 1943 - 1946
In 1943 I joined the U.S. Maritime Service, the training arm of the Merchant Marine. I was 21.
From San Francisco I arrived in Wilmington to board one of the steamers to Catalina Island. It had been selected by the government as a California site for trainees. As the boat arrived, experienced trainees came down the gangway and saw us. They all hollered, "Go back, you'll be sorry!"
Were they right?
With my group we were taken to the Atwater Hotel and given stacked berths. We had classes in basic seamanship at the hotel. We also spent time in the harbor. To acquaint us with the danger of flaming gasoline, a bucket of fuel was poured into the bay and we had to jump in. The secret was to push the flaming gasoline away with your arms. One bucket did not reflect what thousands of gallons on a burning tanker would equal. I remembered this when my first job was on a tanker. We also had seamanship aboard the two steamers as they continued to ply to the mainland and back bringing supplies and new recruits. As "old timers" we got to yell "Go back!" and "You'll be sorry!" to them.
After a few weeks at the Atwater Hotel my class moved to the St. Catherine Hotel, beyond the Casino. It was much bigger than the Atwater and had an outdoor swimming pool, a gym and a beach.
We also went to sea for the first time on an old Hog Islander ship for a week cruising as far as Santa Barbara and back. They were so named because they were built at the Hog Island emergency shipyard in Philadelphia during WWI. Men who wanted to be in the engine department would work below; those for cooking worked in the galley and deck hands like me scraped the rust off the ancient decks.
None of these jobs interested me. I wanted to be a radio operator.
At the St. Catherine Hotel in Avalon, Maritime Service trainees received advanced training in seamanship with ample time to enjoy the activities still available at the hotel.
But what really interested me was a notice that we could try out to be radio operators on a ship. We were given a series of tests to determine if we could learn the Morse Code and other technical information.
To see if we could understand the Morse Code we listened on ear phones to a series of dots and dashes in pairs. We had to write down if each pair was the same or different.
I passed that and the other tests and one day I received notice that I was to be transferred to the Radio Officers Training School in New York City. What a thrill, I was to go back to the city I was born in for the first time.
With six other trainees we left Avalon for the last time and in Los Angeles boarded a train for New York.
- Bill Roddy (Click here to learn more.)
In 1986 Denise Burns, founder of Plein Air Painters of America, approached me at a show that I was in, in Scottsdale, AZ, and asked if I'd join a group she was putting together that would paint on Catalina Island annually. She wanted to revive the interest for artists on the island, like "the good ol' days," early in the 20th century.
Months prior to the show,
Denise asked me if I would
prepare an ad for the major
art magazines, to promote
the first exhibit, held one
Saturday afternoon, on the
board walk. I told her I
would, provided one thing:
That she allow me to set up
an ad campaign, that ran ALL
YEAR, in as many magazines
as we could fill. She said
"go for it"...
So, from 1986 to 1996, I set up an ad campaign, that included such publications as: Southwest Art, Art of the West, Artists of the Rockies, Art Connoisseur, and a few times in Architectural Digest. I think we did a minimum of 2 or 3 ads every month for those first 10 years...
At the time, I lived near my hometown of Manhattan Beach...and then within the year, moved to a 200 acre ranch, north of Sandpoint, Idaho. So my sojourns to the Island went from a 30 mile drive to a 3000 mile drive! BUT, those were the most precious years of my art career!! There was NOTHING that I did all year, that I felt so much passion for... than to capture the beauty of the Island, during those 2 precious weeks!
(It was also a great "revival" for me, for as a young kid, my family would go over to the Island and camp out up behind Avalon, but mostly at the Isthmus...VERY treasured memories!!
But, all good things come to an end. Around '96, Denise got exhausted from the work setting it up, and turned the whole organization over to a "board" that she set up... and since then, which totally changed "our family of artists"!
Included are a couple of the paintings from the Island for your enjoyment!
- Betty Jean Billups
It was before the heyday of the glamorous casino (built in 1929), but Santa Catalina Island already had a reputation as "an island of romance" when my maternal grandparents, Edith Ott Muncey and Frederick Bingham Muncey made a honeymoon visit there in 1924.
It's a trip that I had heard mentioned by my grandmother several times but when I interviewed her in 1981 it was the first time she'd given me all of the details.
Edie and Fred were married on November 1, 1924 in the rectory of Mission Dolores in San Francisco. My grandmother wore a red, sequined silk-like dress at her wedding in typical flapper-style dress of the time.
"After the service we had our honeymoon supper at Tates-at-the-Beach in San Francisco and then we drove down to Santa Cruz that evening. We had a model T. Ford and it took us about three hours to motor down to Santa Cruz. From there, the next day we drove all the way down to LA."
Using Los Angeles as a home base they spent a few days touring around locally and as my grandma said, "Of course, we had wanted to go down to Catalina."
On November 4, they boarded one of the big steamers, probably at San Pedro.
"We left the dock early in the morning and reached Avalon around noon. We weren't planning to stay overnight but were just going over for a one-day excursion. The crossing was very rough; not rainy, but windy and stormy out and a lot of turbulence. There was an orchestra on board. Boy, were they terrific!
Your grandfather and I were the only ones that did not get seasick. We were up on the deck dancing the whole way. Everyone else was downstairs in the bathrooms. There were no drinks; remember, honey, this was Prohibition."
According to my grandmother, the band on board played popular songs of the era like “Avalon”, “Who’s Sorry Now”, “Whispering”, and “The Rose Room." They played mostly all two-step numbers like the Rose Room. That was our favorite-- absolutely. They played all the songs that I fell in love with your grandfather to." (They had originally met at a dance in San Francisco.)
They arrived in Avalon around noon with the weather there clear and pleasant. "We walked around the town for awhile and had a good meal at some little restaurant in the town. We watched the divers down in the water at the harbor and went on the glass bottom boat. By late afternoon it was time to go back to the mainland." When I asked my grandmother if she had any photographs of the trip she replied, "No, honey, we didn't take pictures. We were too poor to own a camera."
All in all, the honeymooners had a pleasant excursion to Catalina and back. "It was a short visit, but it's one of the nicest memories from my past," my grandmother reminisced.
Denise K. Fourie, granddaughter of Edie Muncey
"Our family's memories of Santa Catalina Island go back more than seventy years: my father first visited the Island as a Sea Scout in the Thirties and my mother worked several summers for the phone company in Avalon in the late Forties. They honeymooned on a boat in Avalon Bay in the early Fifties and began taking me and my sister there in the late Fifties; in the Sixties, after my brother was born, the whole family spent weeks at a time boating around the Island, with several weekdays moored in Avalon Bay a feature of the cruise.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties Avalon seemed to be a sleepier place than today. I can remember going ashore to find Crescent Avenue quiet and lazy; then, when the steamer arrived to the sound of Mariachi music, the town exploded as tourists filled the streets. And again, at day's end, when the steamer left, the town again became quiet, with only residents, yachtsmen and hotel visitors enjoying the dusk and dark.
Starting in the late Seventies my parents spent anywhere from a week to four weeks in Avalon, first in homes on the Flats and later in a home up on Maiden Lane above El Encanto. My wife first became an Island visitor at that time, and my sister's children, born in the Eighties, have grown up with Avalon as a summertime backdrop to their lives. My father passed away in 1989; my mother is still living but rarely visits. Yet my sister, her children and my brother try to get back to Avalon every year, as I do.
There are so many memories: watching the seaplanes and the big Sikorski flying boat taxiing across Avalon Bay; going to the Casino Theater for a movie and hearing the organ serenade us before the film, finishing up with "Avalon;" enjoying weekends up the Island at Cabrillo Cove near Little Gibraltar Point or in Emerald Bay west of the Isthmus when I was a Sea Scout myself. But a great memory was a dinner up on Maiden Lane where John and Jeannie Windle and Doctor Staff and his wife--all gone now--sat for hours on a late August evening and reminisced about their histories on the Island.
Santa Catalina Island is so much a part of our family's lives, and now for thee generations. How wonderful it is that the Museum and the Conservancy work so hard to preserve the history of this special place."
- Chris Ericksen, Long Beach, California
