Editordude: The following is an unsolicited manuscript involving a personalized account of locals and our history, and especially that of the famous “Osprey Mansion.”
By Steven Franklin
Margaret McIntosh, the flamboyant, beautiful and emotionally demonstrative mother of a close friend and a woman who was very kind to me when I was a child while living in difficult circumstance, died last week at 85.
Margaret´s death sent me searching nostalgically into our common past, where I found this photo of the historical Osprey Mansion taken from where Sunset Cliffs meets the Pacific in Point Loma, California, a place where Margaret´s family once lived.
Despite the great distance between us, I was able to remain close with Margaret on-line these last few years, and we communicated often. Just before she passed away Margaret shared a post about her favorite musician. I commented, recounting the day her fourteen year-old son saved that musician´s life after he had suffered a long fall from Sunset Cliffs onto the rocks and into the tidal pools below and was seriously hurt and drowning during a daring rescue in front of the old mansion, and how that musician recovered from the fall and went on to become a member of one the greatest rock and roll bands in history.
My recalling to Margaret what I had largely witnessed pleased her immensely, and she responded to me how proud it would make her if I wrote down what happened that day and shared it with our many mutual friends, which I promised Margaret I would do. Margaret died, however, just a few days later. I am fulfilling the promise that I made to her here.
The year was 1973. The unexpected hero´s name is David, but I understand that these days he goes by his middle name “Granger.” I´ve called him plenty of other names also, over the years, as young boys and men are often fond of doing. But back then we knew him mostly as David…David Granger Faulk.
I spent thousands of hours of my youth at David´s house, as his mother Margaret had generously given me a safe harbor in her home while escaping my own alcoholic and broken family circumstance. During this period Margaret remarried a local Ocean Beach lifeguard turned lawyer, then judge, Robert “Bax” Baxley, and the family moved into the immense old mansion on Sunset Cliffs, a place where Margaret allowed me to spend my weekends and summers vacations with David and her family.
The Osprey Mansion, or “The Pink House” as it is also called, is both a registered historical San Diego landmark, as well as a profound work of art. But more importantly to David and I back then, it was a place out of a young boy´s adventure dream.
Built during prohibition, the mansion hides enticing mysteries of that era. There is the false wall built into a mahogany closet under the stairs, for example. When you push one side, just like out of Count Dracula or some international spy and intrigue film, the entire wall rotated with a creaking sound, exposing a dark stairway leading down to the entrance of a secret tunnel below. The tunnel, although no longer accessible to the ocean and cemented closed, had previously led under the Sunset Cliffs BLVD to a large ocean cavern “Pirate´s Cave” beneath the seaside bluff that filled and emptied with seawater during the changing tides, and that we often explored. It has been alleged that during prohibition alcohol secretly came ashore there and was carried through the tunnel and into the mansion, the ill gotten gains of which were then spent on the opulent and grand Cliffside home.
The front entrance is flanked with towering white pillars. As you pass between and enter the immense front door, a 20-foot high ceiling made entirely of antique stain glass depicting angels and clouds is suspended above and from which hangs in the center an enormous antique crystal chandelier. Facing the door is a vast staircase, ten feet wide with mahogany banisters that elegantly curve upward together, splitting in opposite directions at rise, connecting the open second floor of the house to the first, and creating an immense open space between floors beneath the stained glass. There are grand mahogany and stone fireplace mantles in different rooms, antique toilets with suspended water closets in the baths, decades old, ornate hand painted murals and gold leaf adorning the walls, and a complete antique diving bell suit that stands erect in one corner of the entry that seemed to look at you as you entered as if a ghost from the past lived inside.
The mansion is in fact a truly magnificent work of art. Painted pink on the exterior, the interior has the sort of ambiance one might feel in the finest of rare item antique shops; a timepiece perfectly preserved from The Roaring 20´s that you might expect to see in a Humphrey Bogart film. As a young teen I remember lying in bed there at night, feeling the mystery of the mansion´s history mixed with the sounds of the doves and pigeons cooing outside and the surf crashing against Sunset cliffs just across the street.
Margaret herself was a woman difficult to forget. Strikingly beautiful, elegant, and overtly affectionate, she was also a strong and fiery Aries woman who possessed a great love of style and art. She was a woman who could hug you with immense affection one day, then break through the glass of the bathroom window with a hammer when she caught the boys smoking inside the
next. What was most obvious to all, however, was how much Margaret loved David, and how she protected him as the youngest of the several children living in the house.
David himself was a lot like his mother too, an attractive and talented boy who took keen interest in projecting his own unique style and personal image at an early age. It was also precisely his good looks, pursuit of style and discerning eye for art, however, that could make David a fastidious little booger too. I remember once, for example, finding David like Narcissus himself,
admiring his new hair style in the reflection of one of the tide pools that lie at the foot of the bluffs facing the mansion when we were supposed to be there searching for abalone, moray eels, baby octopus, hermit crabs and other adolescent treasures. So, perhaps to remind him of the virtue of humility, or then again simply to harass him like the little brother he essentially was for me, I stealthily sought out a palm sized and slimy sea slug from a tide pool and lobbed it like a soldier does a grenade in David´s direction. To my amazement the hefty slug smack landed directly on top of David´s head nearly fifteen yards away.
It was a spectacular shot, a precision strike and moment of childhood glory that I still relish today half a century later. I felt no guilt about the unprovoked assault either, and nor should I have; because had David looked up long enough from his reflection in that tide pool its likely he´d be the one chucking the sea slug first. At least this rational justifying the pre-emptive strike this seemed obvious to me at the time as I saw him standing there with slimy, purple sea slug ink splattered all over his new hairstyle and running down the side of his face. So I considered myself free of any blame for my attack based upon this reasoning I had acquired watching the news of adult wars in the Middle East on T.V.
I remember that it was there, beneath the steep cliff trail leading to where the surfers hike down to paddle out into the channel between Osprey Point and Bird Shit Rock; in the shallow tidal pools where I pelted David with the sea slug and so launched the bilateral gastropod and rotten sea weed artillery battle between us that erupted that day, that David later made the dramatic rescue on the future famous rock and roll star.
Not long after David and another friend named Jason went surfing with some other kids. As its name implies, Sunset Cliffs is a place where the Pacific Ocean meets high rocky bluffs. There are no beaches. Instead, the waves beat against the 15 to 20 foot high sandstone stone bluffs, making it a very dangerous place to enter and exit the water. That day, while the group of boys were climbing back up the bluff trail, Jason slipped suddenly on the wet sandstone, then free fell over the cliff side a free fell down at least 15 feet, landing hard on the barnacled, low tide exposed rocks and shallow water below. Jason had broken his hip in the fall, and was lying in face down in a tide pool filling and emptying with whitewater from the incoming and receding surf.
Because David was just fourteen and the youngest, we often treated him like the runt we big kids perceived him to be. But while the older boys stood frozen in shock at what had just happened, it was David who sprung into action. As Jason was lying face down in the water there was no time to run back down the steep, switch back trail and across the granite boulders and tidal pools to the spot where he had fallen. So David, who had always been scaling things monkey-like back then and was widely renowned by the other boys as the best tree climber in the neighborhood, lowered himself over and down the steep edge of the wet sandstone bluff high above the tidal pool and rocks while clinging to the pickle weed that grew there above the tide pool into which Jason had fallen. It is not so much of a pool, actually, but more like a crevice between the bluff and boulders with a group of small, barnacle covered tidal pools at bottom. And just as a wave came rushing in and filled the crevice with whitewater, David launched himself off the bluff, falling deep down into that narrow crevice and into a tide pools flooding with seawater below.
Somehow unhurt, he surfaced, swam to Jason, lifted Jason´s head up out of the water, then stabilized and protected him there from the incoming waves while the other boys ran shouting and crying for a neighbor to call 911. It was a spectacular rescue, as each of my several friends who witnessed it later recounted to me these same facts uniformly. Having been tree climbing in the old avocado groves in Del Mar with David long before the other boys knew him, when told of how David had launched himself off of the bluff “like a monkey leaping from a tree,” I was sure that what they said was a statement of fact left unexaggerated too.
It wasn´t just us boys talking up the rescue later in front of the liquor store on our bikes while eating candy bars either. After an official review of the facts, authorities forwarded the report up the chain of command and a few weeks later David received an official letter from the White House thanking David for his courage and service to humanity signed by President Richard Nixon himself. I remember how Margaret, so proud of her youngest son, framed the letter and hung it next to David´s bed.
When I first met Jason he was sitting in a wheelchair and wearing a body cast in the front room of the mansion with an electric bass in his lap. Jason, it turns out, was a gifted musician.
I was also a musician, I played guitar. As we were jamming together, Margaret entered and said, “Come and watch. Jason´s father is on T.V.” We rolled Jason into the billiards room where the TV sat, and there Jason´s father, Jerry Scheff, appeared on the T.V. screen. He was playing the bass on a stage backed by some palm trees. There was a guy with dark long sideburns
and wearing a white suit singing – The singer´s name was Elvis…Elvis Presley. Jason´s father, as I learned in that moment, was Elvis´ bass player!
Years later I was in Lou´s Records in Leucadia, California. I had heard a song called “Will You Still Love Me” on the radio that perhaps my favorite band Chicago had just released. I´d read that Chicago had broken up after Peter Cetera left the group, so I was curious as to what changes the band had made, and I also wanted to buy the album so I could take it home and learn their new hit on my guitar. When I found the new album in the stacks and looked at the credits and the back of the record jacket, it read: “Jason Scheff: Vocals and bass.”
Many years after these events, now at 60 I returned to the spot on the bluff across the street from the old mansion where David rescued Jason. In the time period between, I had worked as a lifeguard and beach police officer for the state of California. My friends from work and I had been sent to the Sonoma Coast in Northern California, 100 miles above San Francisco. It was a place where no lifeguards had ever worked before because it was widely alleged that the coastline was too rugged, the surf was too big, and the water too cold for a lifeguard service to operate.
That part of California´s coastline is a place where beach visitors do not swim, and yet, ironically enough, it is statistically the most dangerous beach in America in terms of death by drowning. These deaths are the result huge waves that rush up the beach and knock beach visitors over, then drag them fully clothed back down the steep thick san berm and into the forty-eight degree deep water. With each successive wave tumbling them in the impact zone, they have little chance to survive.
My friends and I participated in many dramatic rescues, as well as saw many deaths on that job as well. Now, standing on the bluffs where we had spent so much of our youth so many years later and seeing again the distance that David leapt into that tidal crevice with zero margin for error it struck me that David´s rescue was perhaps the most harrowing and courageous of all I had seen or taken part in or heard of since.
As I turned from the bluff and walked away I remembered the letter of recognition President Nixon sent David and was acutely aware after all my experience as a rescue professional that it was in fact appropriate and well deserved, and that David´s mother had every reason to be proud of him. Sitting here now, in fact, after writing this down as I promised Margaret that I would, I almost feel bad for tagging David with that slimy sea slug, like he knows I did, however much I nevertheless relished the act of so doing still decades later.
But what I realize most of all is that, learning of Margaret´s death this week and thinking about how incredibly generous and kind she was to me when I was very young and sorely needed help, I recognize how David inherited a great heartedness and humanitarian spirit from his mother that I admire deeply in both, how grateful I am to have had each in my life and shared so many happy experiences together with the family, how I love them both, and how, due first to distance and now also partially to death, I dearly miss them both today.
