Sixty years ago today — the Ocean Beach Pier first opened on July 2nd, 1966.
And OB photographer, Steve Rowell, was there to snap this famous photo of opening day. (I wasn’t there — I was away at college.)
The photo appears to show people lining up at the pier’s gate, with the parking lot packed.
All those years the pier was being built … kids on the beach used to tell the passage of time by what number of piling was currently being built, such as ‘my girlfriend and I broke up on the 14th piling but we made up on the 17th.’
Thanks for the memories, so long ago!
Happy Birthday to the pier that is sadly now closed. Miss Steve Rowell – would really enjoy viewing his archives of photos!
Sadly, the pier didn’t even make it to 60 years.
I really have to laugh, as history come and goes, even in Ocean Beach. When I arrived in 1955, Ocean Beach was where we bought our groceries, clothes, shoes and found endless delights in stores like Coronet, Ma & Pa Zeke’s, and various 5 and dime stores where I could get cheap balloons, rolls of caps, agate marbles, plastic soldiers, candy, bubble gum or comic books at Para’s Magazines. For real fun, my buddies and I would scrounge among the discarded inner tubes behind the Mobile gas station to find tubes with tiny leaks, then pump air and haul the hissing tubes down to the beach for raucous body surfing. We always tossed the tubes back behind the Mobile before walking home. And in those days, the history that came and now has gone, there were no palm trees down Newport…. and the Ocean Beach Pier was a thing yet to come.