The ocean has been a powerful influence in my work. I lived two blocks from it (one block from the beach) in Sunset Beach, California, from birth until I was 13.
Depending on how much actual beach there was, many houses in Sunset Beach, and in neighboring Surfside, found themselves too close to the waves, and sometimes fell victim to beach erosion and high surf. My mom took this picture of Surfside around January of 1956, when we had some severe storm surf and high tides. I used to walk down there all the time to check on the damage, and was in awe of how powerful the ocean was.
Surprisingly, my mom (and most of the other parents in our neighborhood) let us kids wander freely when we were quite young. I know I was only seven or eight when I started wandering over to this nearly destroyed neighborhood at “the end” of Surfside, and I would spend hours poking around to see what had happened. I guess we had enough sense to stay off the rocks and away from the big waves because I never heard of anyone getting seriously injured or killed. My older brother Dave, on the other hand, got caught “inside” while trying to surf near here, and came home pretty banged up, and with a broken surfboard.
I also thought Surfside’s houses (the ones that weren’t wrecked) were really cool. I found out later that they were a series of designs based on early 1900s-era New England beach cottages, but built on a tiny scale, some on lots only 30 by 30 feet in size! "Surfside Colony," as it was officially called, was laid out in 1930 as a private beach town, complete with a store, café, and a post office. It grew slowly because of the Great Depression, but it enjoyed a spacious beach. Soon after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, a huge Navy base was built just north of Surfside, and the natural ocean currents were disrupted by a stone breakwater built for the base. It wasn't long before the beach began washing away and by the early 1950s, it looked like the photo above. Luckily, the Army Corps of Engineers, who had built the base, were forced by litigation to pump sand back onto Surfside’s beach every few years, so Surfside is still there, but now full of newer (and ugly) square-box beach houses. The original 1930 post office (zip code 90743) is still there.
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