We were a Tribune family. In other words, we got San Diego’s afternoon daily, the Evening Tribune. A high school kid rolled down our sidewalk on a cool old bike with extended front forks and flipped the Trib onto our driveway. I didn’t know the guy, but as a second- or third-grader, I thought that looked like a sweet gig.
Many homes had televisions by that time, black and white portables mostly, but news consumption in the early 1960s was predominantly the domain of print media. We subscribed to Life magazine, which was still a weekly in those days. National Geographic came every month, and twice a week — Thursday and Sunday mornings — we got the Peninsula News.
Very local coverage was the calling card of the Peninsula News. “Serving the 60,000 population in Ocean Beach, Point Loma, Loma Portal [and] Midway,” the Peninsula News claimed to be “the only newspaper 100% interested in San Diego’s Peninsula area.”
Sound familiar? It should. The Peninsula News was a new moniker for the publication originally known as The Beach News.
The paper’s transition was noted in a July 8, 1950, blurb in the Tribune: “A new weekly newspaper, the Peninsula News, serving the Ocean Beach, Point Loma and Loma Portal areas, made its appearance this week as a merger of the Ocean Beach News and the Point Loma Light. Nate Terrill, former editor of the Ocean Beach News, will be managing editor, it was announced by Clyde Wood and William R. Rose, publishers. Miss Alyce Rosa, former editor of the Light, will be associate editor.”
The Peninsula News certainly continued The Beach News’ tradition as fun and topical. If it was happening on the Point, you read about it in the PN — every Scout troop, PTA, new business, fishing contest or youth sports league found coverage in the Peninsula News.
“Annual Kite Festival is brilliant success,” read a nice 30-point headline on the front page of the Peninsula News of March 18, 1954. That would have been the seventh annual Kite Festival, for those of you keeping score at home.
“The annual Ocean Beach Kite Festival was only a memory this week — but it was a bright memory of a color-splashed Friday afternoon filled with happy kids and soaring kites. Weather conditions were perfect. Sun and wind combined with a lazy surf to provide an ideal setting for at least 900 kids who launched their stick and paper creations in a spectacular massed flight.” Is that not great?
“O.B. Moose Lodge installation set,” read an April ’56 headline. “Newly elected and appointed officers of Ocean Beach Lodge 1775, Loyal Order of Moose, will be installed at 1 p.m. Sunday, May 6. The announcement was made by Duke Ramsey, secretary of O.B. Lodge, at the district meeting held here last Sunday, attended by upward of 200 Moose and Women of the Moose of five lodges in the area.”
Accompanying stories on the same page included “18 local boys, girls in rip-roaring melodrama.” The San Diego Junior Theatre’s newly formed Teen Players were “busy putting the finishing touches” on “Love Rides the Rails,” or “Will the Mail Train Run Tonight?”
There also was “Three local anglers among qualifiers in Yellow Derby.” “Three Point Loma-Ocean Beach-area anglers still are holding strong positions among the 150 first-period qualifiers in the $25,000 San Diego Yellowtail Derby, even though minimum weight is climbing daily as heavy fish continue to furnish a good share of the action at the Coronado Islands. At the close of the third derby week last Saturday, minimum qualifying weight had risen to 20½ pounds, and the same sort of action this weekend should take it well into the 21-pound bracket.” The Yellowtail Derby was a very big deal.
The earliest Peninsula News we have in the archives of the Ocean Beach Historical Society is an edition from Thursday, Feb. 11, 1954. “Local university to expand,” was the headline. “Ocean Beach expected to become college town.”
You read that correctly. “Plans for a $1,500,000 building program at California Western University, which is expected to make Point Loma a cultural center and Ocean Beach a college town, were announced this week” by university President William C. Rust.
Rust added that “within the next few years we expect to build a new science building, library, auditorium and dormitories.”
Cal Western’s student body numbered only 210 full- and part-time students at the time, but the enrollment was “expected to reach 300 by September and 400 in the fall of 1955.”
“Situated on a beautiful 112-acre campus overlooking the Pacific, California Western already is a tourist attraction and will become increasingly so. Its further development is expected to boost nearby property values.”
A proposal for a sewage treatment facility — possibly in Point Loma — was a hot topic in the Peninsula News for months in the early ’50s.
“Sewage plant fight looms — some Lomans oppose it, but others undecided,” read one headline in February 1954.
A couple of months later: “Ocean Beach chamber and Legion oppose Point Loma sewage plant — others write letters against the proposal.”
As luck would have it, that proposed plant eventually went in at Imperial Beach and the Point Loma-OB community collectively exhaled.
In 1956: “Plans for a 50-acre, $157,000 public playground and recreation area in Ocean Beach were approved this week by the Mission Bay Park Commission.”
Can you guess? This nugget foretold what would become Robb Field.
The ads in the Peninsula News also were wonderful. Sure, it’s an opinion. Oliver “Ole” Medina invited the public to visit “the Peninsula area’s finest cocktail lounge,” the Pacific Shores.
“Our beautiful cocktail lounge is the perfect setting for friends to meet,” he said. “You are invited to come in and enjoy the friendly atmosphere that always prevails. Our recently completed new bar, with 22 comfortable stools and seven booths, ensures the utmost in comfort.”
I cut out a cute photo of a couple of kids in a miniature Ford T-bird that their mom had won in an essay contest she entered at OB’s Western Auto. Something about why she liked her Norge washing machine. December 1955. Steven and Susan Jo Johnson were the kids. Four years after this we would move in next door to them and the Johnsons would be our neighbors for the duration of my childhood.
I am going to say I was 12 and 13 when I delivered the Peninsula News. It may have been my first non-weed-pulling, non-lawn-mowing job. So circa 1966 and 1967. I am confident in those dates because there was a three-speed Stingray involved. I ended up riding that thing to junior high.
I did not have the Stingray to begin with — I walked. That was probably better anyway. But mine was a very hilly route, and I started out going uphill for several blocks. I dug the heck out of it though — 5 in the morning, quiet and foggy, I had the whole neighborhood to myself.
I found the experience to be liberating and invigorating, which was lucky, as the job was not particularly remunerative. I’m not saying you couldn’t clear 15 bucks in a good month, but it wasn’t a slam dunk. You had to actually collect in person at the door if you wanted to make more than, say, 10 bucks.
Everybody got the Peninsula News on their driveway or walkway unless they specifically did not want it. The problem was that not everybody paid for it. In fact, if 10% of your customers paid, you had a good route. Let’s say I threw 200 papers and 20 of those citizens took pity on a poor kid and chipped in the 35 cents — seriously, that is what it was — why, you were talking $7! People only paid you out of the goodness of their hearts. I think the circulation guy guaranteed you $10, so you can see how that loot could start piling up. (Not.)
The route only took a couple of hours to collect because you were only going to 20 houses, but not everybody was home, some people didn’t have the 35 cents — “Come back tomorrow night,” etc. — so that could be a tedious enterprise.
What about tips, you ask? Good point, but think about what a non-embarrassing tip on a 35-cent invoice might be. Sure, a kid could hope for a nice round 50 cents in tips, but 45 cents was nothing to sneeze at. Eight or nine solid months like that and I rolled that Stingray out the door of OB Bike and Hobby.
Of course, I modified that thing immediately. Banana seat gone, solo-polo saddle and a nice big newspaper rack (with fabricated cushion) on the back and I was stylin’. I am pretty sure that never, in the long and glorious history of kids and bikes, did a dorkier kid have a cooler bike.
I did eat it on that bike though, on that route, one semi-rainy morning. I had to throw two papers onto two successive driveways on the right side, going down a hill and then make a hard left at the corner. I couldn’t get the second paper out of the bag, so I braked and I went straight over the top onto the palms of my hands, skidding down that hill, papers everywhere, nice and wet. Woops. Unfortunately, that was only about halfway through my route. Luckily, there seemed to be no witnesses.
Now I know what you’re thinking … “Aren’t you the guy who ran into the back of a parked station wagon on that bike another time?”
No, of course not. That was another guy’s bike, and why I had his bike and not mine I can’t . But I must have been looking at my receipts or something because I was out collecting and clipping along down Novara Street, and why somebody would have parked that large station wagon so nicely by the curb there I don’t know.
This bike had butterfly handlebars, way forward, so that my left hand took most of the impact when that vehicle stopped me all of a sudden. I guess I went up over the roof of the car, bounced off the hood and landed on the street. Late afternoon, broad daylight and, again, no witnesses!
But my buddy’s bike wouldn’t roll! So I had to pick it up and make a run for it. Only a couple of broken fingers and a couple of months of the Peninsula News route to repair that bike — mainly a new wheel. I think the frame was OK, and we were able to bend the handlebars back into a semblance of normalcy.
Sometime in 1960, the Peninsula News was acquired by North Shores Sentinel Publishing Co. By the middle of 1970, the Sentinel became the dominant name on the masthead.
We have 237 weeks of the Peninsula News in our collection at the Ocean Beach Historical Society. No complete annual volumes, but a very good selection from 1954 to 1958, a few editions from 1963 and 1967, quite a few samples from 1968 and ’69, and four or five from 1970. A few copies of Scope, the Peninsula News’ bonus tabloid, also have survived.
All of the above are now digitized and available to be viewed for your information and enjoyment in the Internet Archive, the massive free digital public library, at bit.ly/4cAdUD4.
This was accomplished through California Revealed (californiarevealed.org), the wonderful archival digitization program of the California State Library. Added to our collection of The Beach News and the Ocean Beach News — more than 530 weekly editions — we are now able to offer you the opportunity to peruse nearly half a century of excellent, very local reporting.
Many of these stories are found in this collection and nowhere else. If you enjoy this kind of thing, give it a look. You’re sure to be glad you did.
Eric DuVall is president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society. hip in OBHS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $25 annually. Visit obhistory.org.
