By Eric DuVall / Pt Loma-OB Monthly SDU-T / April 16, 2025
We were a Tribune family. In other words, we got San Diego’s afternoon daily, the Evening Tribune. A high school kid rolled down our sidewalk on a cool old bike with extended front forks and flipped the Trib onto our driveway. I didn’t know the guy, but as a second- or third-grader, I thought that looked like a sweet gig.
Many homes had televisions by that time, black and white portables mostly, but news consumption in the early 1960s was predominantly the domain of print media. We subscribed to Life magazine, which was still a weekly in those days. National Geographic came every month, and twice a week — Thursday and Sunday mornings — we got the Peninsula News.
Very local coverage was the calling card of the Peninsula News. “Serving the 60,000 population in Ocean Beach, Point Loma, Loma Portal [and] Midway,” the Peninsula News claimed to be “the only newspaper 100% interested in San Diego’s Peninsula area.”
Sound familiar? It should. The Peninsula News was a new moniker for the publication originally known as The Beach News.
The paper’s transition was noted in a July 8, 1950, blurb in the Tribune: “A new weekly newspaper, the Peninsula News, serving the Ocean Beach, Point Loma and Loma Portal areas, made its appearance this week as a merger of the Ocean Beach News and the Point Loma Light. Nate Terrill, former editor of the Ocean Beach News, will be managing editor, it was announced by Clyde Wood and William R. Rose, publishers. Miss Alyce Rosa, former editor of the Light, will be associate editor.”
1950s-era Peninsula News editor Spence Held and his wife, “Beach Town” author Ruth Varney Held, go on a sea cruise in this undated photo. (Ocean Beach Historical Society)
The Peninsula News certainly continued The Beach News’ tradition as fun and topical. If it was happening on the Point, you read about it in the PN — every Scout troop, PTA, new business, fishing contest or youth sports league found coverage in the Peninsula News.
“Annual Kite Festival is brilliant success,” read a nice 30-point headline on the front page of the Peninsula News of March 18, 1954. That would have been the seventh annual Kite Festival, for those of you keeping score at home.
“The annual Ocean Beach Kite Festival was only a memory this week — but it was a bright memory of a color-splashed Friday afternoon filled with happy kids and soaring kites. Weather conditions were perfect. Sun and wind combined with a lazy surf to provide an ideal setting for at least 900 kids who launched their stick and paper creations in a spectacular massed flight.” Is that not great?
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2 comments to this great throwback scene: I knew Steve Johnson at PLHS, in the same class – ’66. Plus, maybe someday Eric can do a piece about the early days of the OB Rag. We have (most) of the first several years in our archives here in our office.