By Eric Duvall / P0int Loma-OB Monthly (SDUT) / October 16, 2024
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.” ----- Ernest Hemingway, “The Old Man and the Sea”
On the day before Halloween in 1936, the front page of The Ocean Beach News carried the following headline: “Fishing pier question again to the front.” Over 100 people had turned out to hear a representative of the Works Progress Administration discuss a plan to build a fishing pier at the foot of Point Loma Avenue as part of work proposed for Sunset Cliffs Park. The proposal called for the city and county of San Diego to come up with only 25 percent of a $211,000 project. Plenty of free loot from Uncle Sam! Did the city jump on that potential windfall? No. Did that deter persistent pier proponent Carl Schroder? No again. Schroder had first come to Ocean Beach “when the old Cliff House [Hotel] was the only building on the beach.” That was not even in the last century.