Pescadero Memories

Lizzie McCormick, the hotel owner’s daughter married Herman Frey, the town constable and owner of the Elkhorn Saloon. For ten years the happy couple lived at Lobitos*.

During that time the ship ‘Colombia‘ ran aground and broke-up near Pescadero. The villagers rallied and rushed to the scene where they liberated its cargo of white paint. For many years afterward Pescadero was known as “The Spotless Town” because all the houses in town had a fresh coat of the same color paint.

Which brought Ma Frey back to the topic of her vegetable garden and some practical advice.

“The moles have been bad,” she said. “You have to take the corn and dip it in coal oil–that’ll keep the moles away. And you put mothballs where their runs are.

“There’s nearly an acre,” she went on. “Jim, the deputy sheriff, plowed it. You can’t get horses anymore. You either have to spade it or use machinery.”

There were other things on her mind. “I’ve answered a puzzle,” she said, “and I’m gonna get rich. There’s a contest and it doesn’t close ’til the 31st of May–that’s my wedding anniversary. They sent me a form to fill out and I got it all perfect.

“I’ll get $50,000 for the first prize, I think. When I get it, I’m going to do good. I have lots of friends that need operations.”

And that was just like Ma Frey to care about her friends and neighbors in Pescadero.

——————–

*Lobitos: “The farming district hereabouts was so named from the creek around 1870 (in the ’60s the name had been Bald Knob…) The Lobitos Station of the stagecoach line was established in 1878, and within a year or so turned into the present hamlet. (The 1941 Army map very mistakenly calls the place Tunitas, and the USGS, against the advice of its field engineer, has repeated the blunder.)–From “Place Names of San Mateo County” by Dr. Alan K. Brown

**Lobitos Creek: Land grant records of the late 1830s call this the ‘arroyo de los Lobitos’ (Seals creek). Deeds of the early 1850s have an alternate Spanish form: ‘arroyo Lobos Pintos’ (spotted seals; the two terms mean the same thing, seals as distinguished from the large unspotted sea lions). According to Pablo Vasquez, the name comes from the fact that there were large seal rookeries on the shore here. This would be hard to disagree with. A small branch going off the creek a mile and a quarter below Bald Knob has long been regarded as the South fork.–Place Names of San Mateo County, Dr. Alan K. Brown

***Bald Knob: (West of and above Tunitas Creek road 2.4 W of Skyline…) The name has been in use since the late 18550s. There is now a growth of young pines on the summit which before was conspicuously bare. ‘Knob’ is not a regular word for a kind of hill in this part of California, so the effect is semi-metaphorical; Bald mountain has always been an alternate form. In the 1860s Bald Knob was also used as the name of the ranching district down to the west. Wheeler’s San Francisco County map of 1855 has the name Zaremba mountain, for totally unknown reasons.–Place Names of San Mateo County, Dr. Alan K. Brown

One of the famous landmarks in Pescadero was (and is) “Lincoln Hill,” on the south side of the town. “I’ve been on it enough,” Ma Frey, who tooled around in a 1935 Ford, said. “When I was a kid, we used to run up to see how fast we could get to the top, and when I was grown-up, I used to have to climb it all the way to get my cow. There was a nasty bull up there and I wouldn’t let the kids go up. I never was afraid of that bull.”

Lizzie Frey was born a McCormick [("It's Mick," she interrupted, "We're no Macs; we're Irish."] north of Pescadero, two or three ranches up Pomponio Creek. When she was a teenager, her father, John McCormick, purchased a hotel in town.

Her dad owned the Pescadero House, Swanton House and two livery stables. Both hotels were famous in the 1890s.

…to be continued…

Here it was, 1951, and Ma Frey complained that the only remaining celebration in town was the annual three-day Portuguese Chamarita festival.

“I suppose I’ll march in the parade,” she agreed. “I remember when I used to dance three nights straight at the Chamarita, and work all day–I had boarders and seven children besides–three boys and two girls survived and are living now. We had music and a band and enough people to have a dance.”

There were 500 people that lived in Pescadero in 1951. Ma Frey remembered when twice that amount lived there. Now the town’s biggest buildings, three hotels, were shuttered.

…to be continued…

[I wrote this in 1993]

One of my favorite Pescadero characters is Lizzie McCormick Frey (affectionately known as “Ma Frey,” pronounced “Fry”). But I never met her. Yet I can almost hear the bespectacled 70-year-0ld widow chatting –in her trademark, deep voice–to a San Francisco reporter in 1951.

It was spring and Ma Frey and the journalist conversed outside her 8-room white house located next door to the Native Sons Hall. In Pescadero.

Her garden was “coming up fine,” she said, and she “had chickens and ducks, and I don’t know how many rabbits and somebody threw off two female cts here–and now I’ve got ten cats.”

Ma Frey had five kids and they were still keeping her busy. To help pay the bills, she rented to one boarder and took in the wash.

“I’m washing now,” she told the reporter. “I’ve got two tubs and no time to talk to anybody. A person can’t walk and walk too.”

But talk she did, her choice of words revealing a longing for times past, the way it used to be–apparently an action-filled town. Ma Frey didn’t go so far as to say that Pescadero was turning into a ghost town–but she did say that it wasn’t humming as much as it used to–back when she used to tend bar at the Elkhorn Saloon, today the location of Pescadero’s post office.

“It’s going downhill all the time,” Ma Frey said. “I hate to see it. Why they used to celebrate the Fourth of July and everything here. They’d even shoot off the cannon.”

….to be continued…