The Beach

Along the sandy verge of the Pacific Coast Highway back in the 1960s and ‘70s, the remains of a railroad track were hidden in the ice plant adjacent to Huntington Beach State Park. Originally the track made up a section of the Pacific Electric Line running from Newport Beach to Los Angeles.  The last passenger train made the trip in June of 1950, three months before I was born. In the 1960s when I was old enough to drive my Volkswagen to the beach, a person could park on the edge of the highway on either side, thereby saving the parking lot fee. It was easy enough to drop your surfboard, wetsuit, and towel over the chain link fence and then climb the fence and jump down to the sand.   

I sometimes went to the beach alone in the early morning to walk along the torn-up track, sifting through sandy ice plant and picking up rusty iron debris.  After five or ten minutes of this, I’d climb the fence and go surfing, or else discover that the waves were no good, in which case I’d climb back over the fence and head home again.  For years I had a small, useless collection of rusty railroad spikes – there’s still one in my garage these fifty-plus years later – but what I was looking for were date nails, heavy steel nails with a raised numeral stamped into the head, marking the date that the tie was laid or inspected.  The oldest of the nails that I saved from those days is dated 1940.  I discover while I write this that date nails are available on e-Bay for as cheap as three dollars, discounted if you buy in quantity, any date you please, but I have no interest in nails that might be from anywhere.     

This idle wandering on the edge of the Coast Highway is one of the things that comes into my mind when I think of “going to the beach,” something that has been in and out of my thoughts since I was a kid.  I also think of paddling out into the ocean at dawn, sandy hot dogs and flaming marshmallows on summer nights around a bonfire, collecting aquarium creatures from tide pools or from around the pilings of boat docks with a slurp-gun or a net, or just driving down to Huntington Beach in days before the downtown redevelopment, eating breakfast at Terry’s Café with friends or pre-surf doughnuts at Supreme Doughnuts or post-surf hotdog burgers and tortilla strips with red sauce at Wimpi’s drive-through.  

It was good simply to kill time loafing around on the pier or stopping into the head shop on Main Street to buy the latest copy of the L.A. Free Press or the San Francisco Oracle.  Later on Viki and I (both before and after we were married) found ourselves at the Surf Theater whenever a new surf film came out, or at the Golden Bear to listen to music – these attractions long torn down now, replaced by nondescript clothing stores and frozen yogurt shops.  The beach, in my case, was evidently a state of mind as well as a mere destination.   

The last time I picked my way through the ice plant and hopped that chain-link fence along the Highway was on Thanksgiving morning in 1973.  My friend Neil and I parked on the dirt shoulder near Magnolia Street, climbed the fence, and walked over the sand far enough to get a good look at the waves.  A big set was just then rolling through, breaking over the outside sandbar. The tide was high, the water was glassy, and no one else was out surfing.  We were in the water as quickly as possible, where we sat on our boards for twenty minutes talking and waiting for another set.  A sizeable wave reared up finally and I took off, dropping down the face, the wave not bothering to break.  It simply faded away in deeper water inside the bar.  Neil caught the second wave in the set with the same result, and after that we sat on our boards for another half hour, knowing the tide was rising but waiting hopefully for a bigger set to roll through, talking about this and that and kicking ourselves for not having been there two hours ago. That empty-ocean, high tide, Thanksgiving memory finds its way into my mind now and then these fifty year later.   

It’s hard to imagine living more than fifteen miles from the Pacific Ocean, mainly because the beach and the ocean have occupied so much of my life and my time (as if those were two different things).  I’m fortunate enough to have a number of Happy-Memories bins in my head, and the Beach Bin, like the ocean itself, is vast enough so that it seems bottomless. 

My earliest beach memories are of fishing off the Huntington or Seal Beach piers when I was a child – the 4:30 a.m. shave-and-a-haircut wakeup knock on the bedroom door and another at my sister Lynn’s door down the hall.  My mother and father would already be dressed to go, coffee and hot chocolate in the thermoses, jackets out of the closet, my dad loading the car with fishing poles and tackle.  His old tackle box inevitably held Mounds bars, bought yesterday or last week or last month, which smelled of bait shrimp and anchovies – nothing better when it came to early morning snacks.   

Huntington Beach was populated by oil derricks and constantly moving grasshopper pumps in those days, and the early morning air was perfumed with the smells of crude oil mixed with dirty sand, of perch and smelt and mackerel and bonito being fileted on the pier by lucky fishermen, the smell of frozen anchovies and shrimp hacked up on the wooden curbs along the railings, and of the mussels, barnacles, and kelp growing on pier pilings exposed at low tide.  And of course there was the smell of the ocean, sometimes the distinctly different smell of a foggy ocean – all of these smells being outright intoxicating to me all these years later.  As unlikely as it sounds, that smell of crude oil and sandy dirt – still available if you walk past one of the handful of backyard wells left in Huntington Beach – recalls memories of my childhood that I wouldn’t sell at any price. 

I have clear childhood memories of Tin Can Beach, up at the north end of the eight-and-a-half-mile Huntington Beach strand.  It’s difficult to imagine today that the “fun” part of Tin Can Beach in the 1950s had to do with throwing one’s trash, bottles, and cans onto the sand.  There might have been oil drum trash cans, but if there were, few people bothered to use them, although my parents had a leave-it-cleaner-than-you-found it mentality, which meant bagging up trash and hauling it home again.  An internet search reveals that there were upwards of 300 tons of trash on Tin Can Beach when it was in its full, infamous glory.  I’m not certain that’s accurate, since I can’t imagine anyone weighing the stuff, but it corresponds with my visual memories: bottles and trash half buried in sand, the jagged disks of can tops and rusted, stomped-flat cans and broken bottles waiting to cut your feet open.  Trash floated in the surf, washing up onto the shore along with small children when a wave broke, drawn back out again when the wave receded. 

Blobs of tar spotted the beach, and on some days the ocean had an unattractive tarry flavor.  Beach tar glued itself to the bottom of your feet and was instantly covered with a layer of shelly sand.  I can remember trying to scrape the heavy tar off with a broken clam shell.  Peanut butter or vegetable oil worked to clean your feet before you got back into your parents’ car and messed up the floor mats.  There was every reason not to go to Tin Can Beach, and yet the place was packed on summer afternoons, people sleeping overnight in shanties built of discarded lumber, cardboard, and sagging canvas, squatters living on the beach for a week or a month or an entire summer.  Tin Can Beach disappeared in the late 1950s.  I didn’t witness the disappearance, being seven or eight years old at the time; it simply vanished out of my life and out of the world, one of numberless disappearances converted to living memories that will themselves disappear in time. 

Somewhere along the line my neighborhood friends and I started begging rides to the beach from our parents, and, although my family was still fishing together now and then on Saturday mornings, I was becoming more interested in the pier and the beach as a place to escape to.  I asked for a Pendleton shirt for Christmas in the early 60s and tried to comb my hair like the Beach Boys.  Being an introverted bookworm with a cowlick, I couldn’t pull it off.  I looked like the “before” photos in the then-ubiquitous Charles Atlas ads.  Old photos of Alfalfa come to mind.   

I had surfed a couple of times on family trips to Morro Bay circa 1960 when I was ten or eleven years old, along the jetty near Bird Rock.  My dad would pay for a rented board on the Embarcadero (along with doughnuts from the shop next door), and I’d talk Lynn into helping me lug the board the half mile or so to the beach.  She’d sit on the sand while I “surfed,” which meant I sat on the board thinking of sharks every time a cloud shadow moved over the cold water.  When I managed to paddle the heavy board into a wave, I generally fell right off again.  After a cold, exhausting hour or so I’d give it up, and Lynn and I would haul the board back to the surf shop.  I remember this in multi-sensory detail – always as great fun and adventure, which is perhaps a matter of selective memory.  If it is, I take my hat off to whoever invented the marvel of selective memory.   

By the time I was a teenager I’d learned to bodysurf and was riding my bike to the beach with various friends, up Brookhurst or Magnolia Streets through bean and sugar beet fields (Fountain Valley being a rural, infant city at the time), a thirteen-mile trip from our neighborhood in Anaheim.  We would spend a few hours in the water and horsing around on the beach, leaving for home exhausted in the late afternoon.   

In wood shop at Dale Junior High School I built a skimboard out of a round of plywood, belt-sanding the bottom edge to taper it.  I put a decal of Murphy on the top and applied five or six coats of sanded varnish.  (Murphy first appeared in cartoons in Surfer magazine in 1961, and was the patron saint (along with St. Christopher) of surfers everywhere.  I carried copies of Surfer and Mad magazines in a Pee Chee folder for emergency classroom reading.)  A friend of mine offered to pay me ten dollars for the board, a small fortune back then, but someone stole it out of the woodshop classroom over the weekend while the varnish was setting up, and that’s the last I saw of it.  That same year I paid my friend Mark ten dollars for a used 9’ 6” Jeffrey Dale surfboard, which went into the garage rafters at home and didn’t come down again for eight years.  I never did ride it.    

Around that same time, knee-length surf trunks came into fashion, referred to as jams.  Lynn sewed me a pair of reversible jams with a rope tie, garish flowers on one side and some other colorful print on the other.  Lynn was (and is) exceptionally cool, as you might have gathered.  So was my mother, for that matter, although I was sometimes too young and nitwitted to see it at the time.  She was happy enough to haul my friends and me to the beach (double round-trip), but not more than once a week, since she didn’t want me to turn into a beach bum, which by that time was a distinct possibility: to my mind there was no place better to be. 

When I was in high school I bought a belly board (Tom Morey wouldn’t invent the Boogie Board for another five years.)  Later on I abandoned the belly board and learned to knee-ride on a board I bought at the old House of Paipo shop on Main Street in Huntington Beach: I surfed on my knees on a short board that could easily be carried in the back seat of my VW Bug.  Knee-riding wasn’t respectable, but my surfer friends tolerated my comparatively lowly status.   

Around then I pulled that old Jeffrey Dale surfboard out of the rafters, cut it in half, stripped off the fiberglass, shaped it, and produced a kneeboard that I called the purple pickle, due to its artistic swirl of green and purple colors.  It looked good, although it wouldn’t turn, the physics of shaping useful wave vehicles being beyond my knowledge and skills.  I rode it off and on for a few years before giving it to a friend.   

My dad encouraged me in these endeavors, putting up with foam dust settling on garage shelves, blobs of hardened resin on the concrete floor, the dizzying smells of resin and acetone.  He slipped me a few dollars now and then to buy a small roll of fiberglass cloth or a can of resin, happy to see that I was doing something with my hands.  When I slammed into a pier piling on an out-of-control day at the Huntington Beach, I snapped the nose off my board, but fortunately had the odds and ends in the garage to shape a small piece of foam to give the vehicle a new nose.  Equally fortunately, I didn’t have to build myself a new head despite smashing it into the piling along with the board.  It turns out that I was saved by the heavy layer of mussels and barnacles around the piling, which cushioned the blow, but also sliced my scalp open in half a dozen places.   

And before I abandon the subject of my dad’s aiding and abetting my youthful adventures, I’ll point out that he also helped fund the year I spent making leather sandals (my dad being a first-rate leather worker), and teaching me to sharpen a knife well enough to cut huarache-style sandal soles out of tires I scrounged out of trash bins behind filling stations.  He was a woodworker, too, and he came up with pieces of oak and mahogany when I went through my skateboard building phase.   

I recall, again with particular clarity, my dad taking me to a tropical fish shop on Garden Grove Boulevard and Magnolia Avenue when I’d saved enough money to buy a thirty-gallon aquarium and the odds and ends I needed to set it up.  When we had it all compiled – gravel, filtration system, heaters, thermometer, bubblers, pump, etc., he told me that because I’d saved enough to buy the first aquarium, he’d pay for another one.  I ended up with something like 6 running-feet of aquarium on my bedroom wall.  My mom was astounded and a little bit doubtful when I loaded it all into the house and started setting it up.  I remember her holding the end of the garden hose that snaked in through the bedroom window while I went outside to turn on the spigot and then ran back outside to turn it off again when the tanks were nearly full.   

One autumn I slathered silicon sealer over the metal of one of the aquariums, filled it with ocean water that I collected in five-gallon glass water bottles at Huntington Beach (as far out into the water as I could wade and still get back in), and set up an aquarium full of local near-shore creatures, including a small octopus that lived in an abalone shell cave, and which ate its weight in hermit crabs at every opportunity.  The endeavor meant constant collecting trips to tide pools.  A palm-sized crab sneaked out of the aquarium one day and fled into the kitchen, appearing to my mother to be a gigantic spider.  Luckily I was at home and dashed into the kitchen to snatch the crab up before she went after it with a broom.  Not having the money to refrigerate the saltwater, I dismantled the aquarium late the following spring and returned all the denizens to where I’d found them. 

I realize that I’ve strayed some small distance from the beach here, but there seems to be a theme creeping into this batch of memories: I grew up in a wonderful family during a wonderful era.  My bin of beach memories cannot be disconnected from the people I grew up with, family and friends alike, who (now that I look back) seemed to conspire to make my life more interesting.  Because I was young, I didn’t know how lucky I was, but even back then I wasn’t foolish enough to think that everyone was as lucky or privileged as I was, or was born into a happy family.  Life in the 50s and 60s in southern California wasn’t an end-to-end day at the beach by any means, and unfortunately there was a drugs-and-alcohol slacker element to beach life that consumed some of my friends.   

In the mid 1960s the beach was always crowded in the summer – more crowded than it is today despite Orange County having had half the population back then.  My school friends tended to hang out at Huntington Beach State Park, near Lifeguard Station 13 or later on at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach.  There was music playing on the beach constantly, and if you were there with a couple of friends it was a challenge to find ten square feet of real estate to put your towel on.  The surf was equally crowded with people, half a dozen or more taking off on the same wave, colliding at the bottom, shouting and whooping and having fun, then lying on the sand in order to get a first-class tan (which for me meant a first-class sunburn), and then heading out into the water again, getting home burnt and tired and hungry and wanting nothing more than to do it again tomorrow and the next day.  But the next day my face and back were blistered, and my mother nixed the beach until I once again healed up.  I’ve read that the first sunscreen was developed in 1932 in Australia, but it must have stayed in Australia.  In the 50s and 60s and 70s it was unavailable in southern California.  Beach goers were more likely to cover exposed skin with cocoa butter or baby oil to “work on their tan,” a notion that years later would turn out to have been a bad idea. 

Getting to the beach was a perpetual problem in the days before I was driving. On any weekend or summer weekday there were scores of teenagers hitch-hiking to the beach along Beach Boulevard (more often called Highway 39 back then), carrying towels and Duck Feet or Churchill swim fins – groups waiting on every corner or single hitchhikers impatiently walking backwards in the direction of the beach with a thumb out, playing the odds that a solitary hitchhiker might be more likely to cage a ride.  My own pair of Duck Feet tore up my toes so that I had painful, sometimes bloody knots on the toe-knuckles.  It helped to wrap the bad toes with adhesive tape (or electrician’s tape or whatever was at hand), but it didn’t help much.     

My next-door neighbor Jon, when we were sixteen or seventeen, bought an old Chevy for fifty dollars (cheap junkers being widely available in those days) and replaced the brakes and fixed a couple of oil leaks.  I remember the two of us climbing into a trash bin behind the local gas station (which would later supply me with sandal soles) in order to hoist out two tires that were slightly better than the tires already on the car, and then driving around to the front of the station and asking the mechanic to mount them on the rear wheels.  He asked us if we’d just got the “new” tires out of the trash, and we had to admit that we did, but he simply shrugged and mounted them anyway, and told us to toss the bad tires back into the bin.     

Back then gas cost almost nothing, but we often had less than almost nothing and had to improvise.  The Mobil Station on the local corner now and then ran a promotional deal: we’d pay something like 29 cents for a gallon of gas and get a little printed slip of ticker tape paper revealing that we’d won, say, another 25-cents-worth.  We’d drive to the next Mobil station we could find along Magnolia Avenue or Brookhurst Street or Beach Boulevard, pay for another gallon of gas, cash in the coupon for a another quarter’s worth, and move along to the next station, creeping our way to the beach and back on spare change and coupons.  Those were the days, I can tell you that. 

My friend Bob, another knee-rider with a home-made board, bought three 25-dollar junkers.  He kept one at home in Anaheim, parked one in Huntington Beach (the key in a magnetic key box under the fender) and another in Newport Beach.  When one of the cars broke down, he could hitch-hike to the nearest alternate vehicle, fish the key out from under the fender, go surfing, and figure out how to rescue the broken-down car later, the alternative being simply to leave it on the street, unlocked, the key and pink slip visible on the seat.  When the geese of his three junkers were finally cooked, he bought one of those 3-wheeled mail vehicles that had seen its day, and which looked as if it had been painted with a mop.  It was missing a rear bumper, so he bolted on a two-by-four in its place, painted “Smile Away” on it, and used it as his beach vehicle. 

I can’t conceive of these things happening today.  Back then things were wild and free, comparatively speaking, and there was nothing wrong with being penniless, or at least seeming to be penniless.  In fact, it was hip.  Beach culture required a wardrobe consisting of old jeans, t-shirts, and a couple of flannel shirts.  Money was better spent on a wetsuit or a tank of gas or a coffee shop breakfast with friends after a morning surf. 

As I’ve already pointed out, the beach was, and is, a multifarious place.  In the late 60s and early 70s I was fond of snorkeling and scuba diving in South Laguna.  My pal Mike had a friend with a house near Thousand Steps, accessible by a wooden, gated stairway.  Mike had a key to the gate, the stairs being private, and we’d make the long trek down to the beach with the idea of searching out enough abalone for a barbecue.  In those days abalone were already scarce along the southern California coast, but that fairly private expanse of nearshore reefs in South Laguna hadn’t been fished out yet.   

I was a sightseer rather than a fisherman, and tended to forget about abalone.  On one clear-water day I was stopped in my figurative tracks by a strange cloud of neon blue hovering over a weedy reef.  It turned out to be thousands of baby Garibaldi fish, which lose their intense, electric-blue color as they grow.  I stopped to gape at the phenomenon, close enough to see the tiny individual fish, and was immediately attacked by a parent fish – a solid orange, pugnacious, hand-sized Garibaldi that rushed straight at my mask, turning aside at the last moment, and then rushed at me again.  If Garibaldi had teeth, I’d have been dinner.  I swam off, considering the aggressive fury of a mother fish protecting her ten thousand youngsters against a goggle-eyed monster.  Later on, I read that it’s the male Garibaldi that protects the nest, so to speak, specifically from the female of the species who, like a character out of a Greek myth, tends to eat the eggs soon after she’s laid them. 

I can remember one morning when the ocean delivered up a valuable lesson to me and two of my diving pals.  We’d stopped into the dive shop on Beach Boulevard and paid five dollars to fill our tanks with air, then headed down to Horse Pastures, an often deserted beach north of Crystal Cove in Laguna.  There were actually horses pastured there in those days.  The surf was big and closed out – long, heavy collapsing walls of water thundering through.  In spite of the terrible conditions, we calculated that we could creep out along the bottom, beneath the energy of the breaking waves, and come up beyond them in deep water.  We’d paid five bucks for the air, after all, and we weren’t about to waste the money by wimping out and going home.  We got pounded to pieces, the visibility close to zero, one of my friends dumping his rented weight belt to keep himself afloat.  To say that we crawled up onto the beach on our hands and knees, lucky to save our gear and our necks, wouldn’t be far wrong.  Live and learn, I say, just like I’d told myself when I ran my kneeboard and my head into the Huntington Beach pier.  There was a lot of living and learning going on back then, maybe more of the former and less of the latter. 

Over the years, I found myself heading down the coast with friends on days off from work or school (or simply ditching school if an offshore wind was blowing), to surf or dive, La Jolla Cove being a prime destination for diving.  One time we spent the day in the water until we were exhausted, and that evening we ate as much as we could cram down our gullets at Sir George’s smorgasbord for two dollars before sleeping overnight in the local Alpha Beta market parking lot and waking up with the sun to start again.  We were never bothered by the police or anyone else, those days being (I’ll say again) comparatively free and easy.  An intrepid acquaintance of mine slept in the display tents on top of the Beach Boulevard K-Mart one summer, coming and going in the darkness up and down drain pipes.  He pulled this off until the tents came down at the end of summer.  Summer, it turns out, has an inevitable end, as does everything else. 

In winter, lifeguard stations along Huntington Beach were stowed away and the beach was comparatively deserted.  I liked to drive down alone, especially on rainy days, often having a long stretch of empty ocean to myself.  The surf was likely to be chopped up and blown out by onshore winds, but now and then I could pick up the corner of a wave for a steep, short ride.  Being the only one out, I didn’t have to give any waves away, and there was a romance in the winter loneliness, the choppy ocean, and the cloudy, gray skies, and nothing to hear but the sound of breaking waves and the cries of seagulls.  I’d take a paperback book along and spend another solitary hour or two or three reading The Lord of the Rings or Richard Brautigan novels, now and then walking along the beach looking through tangles of kelp to see if kelp snails or hermit crabs other sea creatures were hiding in it. 

 In 1974, Viki and I moved up to Eureka and were away for close to a year, and when we returned and were living in a rented house in downtown Orange, things had changed.  Beach friends had disappeared or “grown up” in some sense of the word, and we had gotten busier ourselves, saving to buy a house of our own, working and traveling.  The world had moved on, and so had the beach as I’d known it. 

Back in late July of 2003 (I keep a journal) I headed down to Newport Beach alone to catch a wave or two, as I fairly often did in those days, often with my son Danny.  The waves were blown out by around nine o’clock, and I gave it up, discovering when I walked ashore that there were squid bodies all over the beach, hundreds of them, all apparently bitten in half – clusters of squid arms severed from squid bodies with big diamond-shaped tails nearly as broad as my open hand.  There were bite marks in many of them, maybe an inch wide, oddly square, as if they’d been randomly whacked-through with a one-inch chisel.  The marks were individual, not from a row of teeth.  To say that the sight of this carnage was bizarre would be an understatement.  When I got home and looked into the matter, I learned that schools of Humboldt squid (such schools being common that year) sometimes went into a feeding frenzy and tore each other to pieces.  The rectangular holes in the corpses had been made by squid beaks.  It gave me a moment’s pause to think that this squid battle, invisible beneath the ocean’s surface, had been taking place very near to where I was surfing.     

One funny thing: On that morning at the beach, when I was done contemplating the squid carnage, I headed on up toward the street, passing three young surfers who were sitting in the sand talking.  They nodded a hello, and one of them said, “It’s good to see old guys on the beach having fun,” or something of that nature.  I called him a whippersnapper, which got a laugh, and after a brief chat about squid weirdness, I walked on, contemplating the word “old,” which was unsettling to me, being only fifty-three at the time.  That was twenty years ago, and given that the three of them were eighteen or so, they’re forty years old now, or close to it.  I hope they’re still going to the beach, maybe surfing or diving or snorkeling with their own kids. 

That beach bin in my mind is overflowing with memories: paddling out into the ocean early enough to see the sun rise and late enough to see it set again; smoke from a firepit following you as you shift from one place to another trying to avoid it; marveling at the way the moon illuminates a path straight toward you if you stand on the edge of the ocean at night; sitting on your board in the water on a foggy morning, the beach invisible, the ghosts of waves appearing outside, the scramble to paddle into them; the way sunlight filters through a kelp forest inhabited by appearing and disappearing fish; eating doughnuts on the beach with friends at five in the morning; my wife Viki and I falling in love when she was fifteen and I was sixteen, sharing the same beach blanket and beach adventures, riding canvas surf-rider rafts at Swamis in Encinitas and at Scripps Pier in La Jolla.   

There was a time when I thought that beach life would go on forever: a time when I didn’t think about time passing, taking along with it the things I loved.  As I’ve grown older, I’ve grown less fond of cold water, and the beach and the ocean and the strange things to be found there have partly become the stuff of dreams.  I sometimes wonder whether “growing” old is a matter of growth at all or is a matter of mere diminishment.  I tend to put that question out of my mind.  I also tend to fly south into tropical waters when I can these days, to see what’s going on beneath the surface.   

And speaking of squid, on a recent trip to Oahu, when we were visiting our sister Judy on Maunalua Bay, I found a clutch of squid eggs on an algae covered rock when I was out snorkeling.  For the next few days, Viki and I went out kayaking every morning to check up on it.  The egg cluster was still thriving on the morning we flew away home, the elongated, balloon-like eggs darkening up with the shapes of tiny squid.  I like to think that those hundreds of squid (like those baby Garibaldi I encountered fifty years ago) are by now going about their squid business in the bay, just as they’ve always done, time out of mind.   

World Fantasy Award-winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has published thirty novels and story collections as well as scores of essays and articles.  Despite his close association with steampunk, most of his work is contemporary, realistic fantasy set in southern California, typified by novels like The Last Coin, All the Bells on Earth, and The Rainy Season, which was listed by Orange Coast Magazine as one of the ten quintessential Orange County novels.  His latest novel is Pennies from Heaven, published by PS Publishing and available from JABberwocky in ebook. A sequel, The Invisible Woman, is due to be published in 2024.