Hermosa Beach reminiscence

Last week when I was sorting through old photos to scan I ran across this one-- my first home away from home.   I think that's skinny, young Jerry posing with his giant surfboard.  We lived upstairs, and for a short while in 1968 my mother lived in the first floor apartment below with my brother Dave.  As I remember, he had a bed in the closet. 

If you walked up those rickety stairs and opened the door, you would have found a dingy studio that rented for $78 a month, utilities included.  It was damp with fleas in the carpet and the only heat was the kitchen oven, but it was just a sweet block away from the ocean.  The Los Angeles beach cities like Hermosa, Redondo and Manhattan were the epicenter of the wacky 60's hippie and surfer lifestyle, exactly where we wanted to be. 

This 1970's photo of a Hermosa Beach back street is from a blog called Mindwrecker. I don't remember this dude in the cool vest, but he might have been a friend! Our street (an alley, really) looked exactly like this, littered with Volkswagens parked in every crevice.

The one room apartment came furnished with a rusty dinette set and a Riviera convertible sofa bed upholstered in turquoise leatherette.  Riviera Manufacturing Co. in L.A. was known for stylish, sturdy sofa beds designed not to sag.  It was hard as a rock.

Along with the private roof for sunbathing, the sofa was the status symbol of the apartment, although it had already seen some heavy wear by the time we moved in.  It was the source of many jokes, because everyone at the time knew the commercial slogan “Live on the Riviera…Convertible Sofa, That Is."

You could walk everywhere in Hermosa Beach-- the post office, library, five and dime, free clinic, bakery and Bank of America (not that we had much business there.) One of the first Taco Bells opened along the beach strand, and the four items on the menu were all 25 cents: taco, burrito, tostado and the unforgettable Bell-Beefer. Many a cheap supper.

Best of all, Hermosa Beach was home of the quirky Either/Or bookstore, the radical counter-cultural center of the L.A. beach cities.

It was nice to mill around and read books you couldn't afford to buy. After many decades on the same street,  Either/Or finally closed in 1999.  Some of us will always remember it as the best independent bookstore ever, along with a California beach lifestyle that seems almost unbelievable now.