Abalone

When I was a kid abalone were plentiful enough that there was a season when you could take them, abalone irons were regularly on sale in stores around town, and if you were under 16 which I was at the time you could take them without having a fishing license.  Everybody in town went for them.  Which is why they are basically extinct today.  The population could hold on, expand, even, when just the local indigenous people were taking them, and even when the white people had moved into the area with a population of 4 or 5 thousand or so.  But much beyond that, the taking exceeded the ability of the abalone to sustain.

I remember a time as a kid when my mom and I were walking along the cliffs in LJ, near Boomer Beach, and Glen Brown was cooking up some freshly taken abalone on a fire and invited us to join for breakfast, which we gladly did.  Brown was one of those ultimate water guys, surfed, dived, swam, he was riding a bike into his 90's.  In construction.  He built his own house overlooking Windansea and it stood there from when it and Dicky Van Doren's and his place were the only ones in the neighborhood, until it was surrounded by giant condos 40 years later.  The Browns had the neighborhood's first TV and all us kids would gather round the TV at 4 in the afternoon when channel 2 in LA signed on and we'd watch Captain Zoom.  Last time I was in the neighborhood I saw that the Brown house had finally come down to be replaced with yet another giant condo.  I guess the family wanted or needed the money.

When I was a kid in the neighborhood the entire block between Playa del Sur and Playa del Norte was vacant, just a giant field except for the ruins of a restaurant on Neptune Place that had burned down in the '30's or '40's.  And that is where we'd play.  My mom never let me go in the water at Windansea, said to be too dangerous.  So I never did.  I saw Dicky van Doren's dad surfing there.  How hard that must have been on big unmanuverable long boards.  So you aren't allowed to hunt abalone in La Jolla any more and you can't have fires on the cliffs any more, either.  The luaus went by the way long ago, they were huge drunken parties, I guess kind of like the Potlatch parties on the coast at U of Oregon, they went from being reasonable parties to giant out of control bashes, binges.  Ugh.