Pescadero Memories

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…

Invisible Beach: “Not even Big Sur, Jade Cove, or Cambria’s, Moonstone Beach, further south, have such an interesting pedigree or range of attractive stones.”

Part I

Hi June,
I’ve asserted that Invisible Beach is the most amazing, unusual, interesting, etc. place on the San Mateo Coast, if not the California or Pacific Coast. So far, I’ve only nibbled around the edges of the buffet of its wonders.

This assertion is based on three basic claims. One…it is the best rock collecting spot I know of on the West Coast. Two…it is the best small driftwood collecting spot I know of on our coast. Three..it is the best non-buoyant marine debris collecting spot I know of on the West Coast.

I realize that because my travels are limited, I can’t be sure. But thanks to my research on the Internet, various books, newsletters by collectors, and postings on various forums, I’m pretty confident I’m right. Let’s see if I can convince anybody else.

Earlier, I sent you a picture of the many varieties of the quartz family that can be found there. While their monetary value is minimal, their existence as the last significant remnant of the offshore quartz ridge that also created Pebble Beach, gives them some historical cachet.

Pebble Beach was Pescadero’s claim to fame in the last half of the 19th Century. It brought thousands of wealthy tourists and acclaim to sleepy Pescadero, in its Golden Age. to gather those pebbles. The protracted beach access legal battle between Loren Coburn and the townsfolk of Pescadero, with its mob violence threats and his wife Sarah’s subsequent murder as detailed in your book, “The Coburn Mystery,” added an aura of sadness, mystery and legal significance to their existence, carried on to this day by the pebbles found on Invisible Beach.

Not even, Big Sur, Jade Cove, or Cambria’s, Moonstone Beach, further south, have such an interesting pedigree or range of attractive stones.

While almost all the pebbles, despite their colorfulness, are too common to quicken the heart rate of a serious collector, there is one variety that I have never seen elsewhere. Nor have any of my postings of pictures on Rockhound forums produced either an explanation of the details of their origin or any information about the existence of ones like them from elsewhere.

I refer to hollowed out triangular quartz rocks as pictured in the attached photo.

Lastly, beside the pebbles, a few Donut NotRocks (collected and strung with shells in necklaces by the Ohlone natives of this area) and the extensive Tafoni structures on the rocks that bound the beach on its northern end, there is an unusual pareidolic rock, shaped like a whale head, that sits in the throat of Neptune’s Vomitorium, the channel that regurgitates the various oddities onto Invisible Beach. I’ve attached a photo of it.

Have I made my case?

To read more of John Vonderlin (and ‘Invisible Beach’) click here