Pescadero Memories

Image from “The Illustrated History of San Mateo County,” Moore & DePue, 1878, reprinted in 1974 by Gilbert Richards, Woodside

1960s: From the Half Moon Bay Review

“Mrs. Nita Spangler, president of the S.M. County Historical Association, said that ’she personally favored the preservation’ of the old Tunis School.

“‘It is my personal feeling that the Old Tunis School should be preserved because of the historical interest. The association has visited the place, and articles and pictures of it have been published. It is the only one-room schoolhouse in operation in San Mateo County,’ said Mrs. Spangler.

“It was pointed out that the ‘economics of preserving it are a matter of concern to the coastside’.

“An organization has been formed for the preservation of the old Tunis School. It consists of a group of people who”….[rest of the article is missing, doesn't it bug you?]

To see a photo of the Tunis School, scan down to the post below.

From “Place Names of San Mateo County” by Dr. Alan K. Brown

Tunitas: The name has see occsional use in the last ninety or a hundred years as a designation for the ranching district at the lower end of Tunitas creek.

Tunitas Beach: (mouth of Tunitas creek) The older name of the placer is Potters beach, for the T.F. Potter ranch nearby in the 1860s and ’70s. Apparently the present name was first used when the Ocean Shore Railroad had a bus stop here, in the 1920s.

Tunitas Canyon: (Up Tunitas creek. This is one of the group of canyon names around Half Moon Bay. For the first twenty years, until around 1870, the Americans called it Tunitas gulch.

Tunitas Creek: “A small bush…grows super-abundant at and near its mouth, and its fruit is known to the present generation as sea apples.” The arroyo de las Tunitas (Beach-apples creek) is on two 1839 sketch maps. An alternative Spanish form without the diminutive, arroyo de las Tunas, appears in deeds of the 1850’s, was sometimes translated into Tunas creek, and survives misspelled in the Tunis School. (The misspelling is said to be due to the fact that when the school district was set up, in 1866, the clerk who drew up the papers was unsober.)

(Photo: Coastside artist Galen Wolf’s students sketching the scenes along Tunitas Creek Road. To the left, you’ll see the old, one-room Tunis School)

The East fork of the Tunitas (unlike most of the so-called forks on the maps has been so called for a hundred years. The upper portion was sometimes Harry’s gulch, for Henry Trebilcock, an Englishman who had an orchard there for forty years from the middle 1870’s. The Tunitas creek road was until recently still officially the Froment road: the Froment Mill interests built most of it in 1875, but ran out of funds in Smith Downing’s barnyard. The county opened the last half through to the coast in the early 1890s.

more to come

Story by John Vonderlin

(email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,

On Friday I returned to Tunitas Beach to do my version of a Nautilus workout, rescuing tires from the surf and lugging them around.

I added six to my pile at the bottom of the hill, making a total of twenty there, and upped my caches north of the creek to 17. As I was resting, sitting on the pile, a gentleman walked up carrying a tire that I had bypassed, that he’d somehow freed from its sandy prison near the surf-line to add to my pile, making the total 21, that most fortuitous of numbers.

We struck up a conversation during which he revealed he’d been cleaning up this beach for over twenty-five years. It seems that Tunitas Beach’s tires are a long- term phenomena. One that had previously been cleared up regularly by a nearby resident who would use a front loader to accomplish what I’ve been doing with sweat, persistence and clackety knees. Unfortunately, the loader broke down, as I probably will do one of these days.

He also dropped some interesting names of visitors to Tunitas at one time or another; the name Baba Ram Dass sticks in my memory. He also gave me leads to local oldtimer’s names that might have some interesting tales to tell about this most interesting of beaches. The gentleman is a very interesting oldtimer himself. George Cattermole is the longtime owner of the San Gregorio store, an avid environmentalist, and a prolific explorer of the beaches and hinterlands of the south coastside.

We’ve exchanged emails and I’m eager to drop by some Saturday when there’s usually music at his eclectic store/bar and share a beer and some stories. Hopefully more on that soon.

There were other items of note on this trip: I collected more tar balls to add to the crate I left by the tire pile. The previous ones, heated up by the warm temperatures of the last week, had melted and were trying to escape through the grating of the crate, but I thwarted them.

At the southern end of the beach, near Mussel Rock, the waves have removed more sand than I can remember, revealing a new group of concretions.

While not as attractive as the others I’ve photographed, and written about, they still were interesting and add one more facet to the buffet of oddity that very strange locale offers.

The 150- gallon gas tank I mentioned in an earlier post, possibly from the sunken “Good Guys,” was still there, so I photographed that too. As well as a massive tangle of ropes that was so heavy with wet sand I could only, with great effort, roll the ropes over and over, up the beach, beyond the waves for later recovery.

I’ll attach some photos. Enjoy. John

P.S. While this was a pleasant trip to the beach, more interesting then many, I’m impatient to hurry through my description of it so I can start describing yesterday’s adventure, one of the most enjoyable, exciting, trying, and productive trips I’ve ever made to the coast: My wild trip to Acid Beach. That’s coming next.

A few times Bryant Wollman invited me for dinner when he lived with his companion, Gene Fleet, in one of the funky cabins that used to overlook the Pacific at Tunitas Creek– one of the most breathtaking places on the Coastside.

This is near the enigmatic place where Supervisor Alexander Gordon built his amazing shipping chute in the 1870s. This is where the Ocean Shore Railroad’s iron road stopped. This is where Sybil Easterday, the eccentric sculptress lived until she moved to El Granada where she died in the 1960s.

I remember Bryant telling me about a woman, an artist who lived near his cabin. She’d been the famous but controversial poet Ezra Pound’s mistress, he told me. I heard the story more than once, each time a little more embellished. At one point I even thought Pound might have visited Tunitas but that was impossible since he was sitting in a mental ward.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t follow it up. Maybe I was too shy to pound on this woman’s door and ask her to reveal her private stories to me….maybe I was skeptical….maybe I was plain old afraid.

When I mentioned the mystery artist to John Vonderlin, he did some research and said: “Hi June,
I suspect Ezra Pound’s connection to Tunitas is through Sheri Martinelli. She lived in one of the cabins at Tunitas Beach for twenty years and had many famous visitors. There is an outstanding article by Steven Moore in Gargoyle Magazine that covers her amazingly creative career. I wonder if Sybil Easterday was the draw to this place for her? You can reach the article by websearching “Sheri Martinelli: A Modernistic Muse”

I read the thoroughly impressive article by Steven Moore (and I hope you will, too) about this remarkable woman and artist who lived on the Coastside and realized how much I had missed by not having the courage to pound on her door.