Together Again: Seal Beach Pier Reopening Today

After his retirement, Vincent Oliver took to walking along the Seal Beach pier, where he would strike up conversations with fishermen as they cast their lines and studied the horizon.

“I knew one man for months before I even knew his last name,” recalled the 68-year-old Oliver. “It turned out that I had known his father, his grandmother, a couple of (his) uncles and that I’d visited the house he was raised in.

“You never know who you’re going to meet on the pier.”

Oliver, who has lived in Seal Beach 20 years, was a regular on the pier before it shattered into three pieces during a violent storm on Jan. 27, 1983. Two months later, the pilings and decking were all but destroyed by the roaring surf of a second storm. When the weather cleared, all that remained was an island stub at the far end and a battered abandoned restaurant atop it.

But on a recent morning, Oliver watched workmen put finishing touches on Seal Beach’s reconstructed pier.

“He hasn’t been back since the pier washed away,” Oliver said of his fisherman friend. “Maybe he’ll come back now.”

Today--two years to the day after it was destroyed by crashing waves--the Seal Beach pier will be reopened amid dancing in the street, bands in the park and politicians making proclamations. At 1 p.m., the official ribbon-cutting ceremonies get under way, though a Marine Corps band will begin playing patriotic music about noon. The merrymaking is expected to continue to dusk along Ocean Avenue, which will be closed from 8th to 10th streets to accommodate dancing and food booths run by merchants and service clubs.

But after the hoopla dies down, Vincent Oliver and countless others --fishermen, joggers, strolling oldsters and romantic couples--will return to their pier and life will pick up where it left off in the driving rain two years ago.

“People didn’t know how sentimental they were about the pier,” said Oliver, who, like hundreds of Seal Beach residents and out-of-towners, contributed $100 to a private fund-raising effort that collected $140,000 of the $2.3-million reconstruction cost.

The 77-year-old, 1,800-foot pier has been rebuilt about three feet higher as a precaution against destructive waves. It features all-wooden planks (instead of the old asphalt covering) and new ornamental Victorian-style benches and street lamps.

Similar reconstruction jobs are being completed in San Clemente and Huntington Beach, where piers suffered $1.4 million and $450,000 in damage, respectively, during the 1983 storms.

In Huntington Beach, insurance paid most of the repair bill, and federal, state and county funds picked up most of the cost in the other two cities. But it was the spunky Seal Beach fund-raising effort spearheaded by three local women--Emily Frazier, Daisy Funk and Mayor Pro Tem Joyce Risner--that drew most of the attention.

With the removal of the temporary security fencing that has blocked public access to the rebuilt pier, one of the Seal Beach’s lesser secrets can now be told:

“We snuck out there in broad daylight,” Emily Frazier revealed recently to a reporter. “I’ve been all the way to the end, and we wrote our names in a very secret place. It says ‘Emily and Daisy were here, Jan. 5.’ ”

Perhaps the free-spirited Frazier, a kindergarten teacher, and her friend Funk, a college student and former preschool teacher, had earned the right to a premature walk on the new planking. Both women whiled away many weekends at the foot of the pier hawking fund-raising T-shirts (emblazoned with “a sad little seal with sad little eyes”) and singing songs of their own composition.

“People would pay us $1 to sing or $2 not to,” Frazier recalled.

“But the city told us we can’t sing at the grand opening,” she said--a rejection for which Frazier has made no attempt to collect her customary $2 charge.

Frazier said she landed a “tall, dark and handsome” catch at the pier last summer. An old flame, she said, “came back into my life and proposed to me on the pier” when the rebuilding was still under way.

“He said he fell in love with me on the pier so he stood me right next to it--it was all fenced off--and he proposed to me,” she said. “We were married in August. It was very romantic.”

The destruction of the Seal Beach pier was an emotional loss for people like Frazier, Funk and Oliver, but it may have touched others, like Sharon Leonard, even more directly.

Leonard is a co-owner of Seal Beach Pleasure Fishing, which before the 1983 storms had run charter fishing boats from the pier’s landing and had operated the city-owned restaurant at the pier’s end.

“We hope to be back shortly after the grand opening,” said Leonard, whose fishing boats have since been operating from the Belmont pier in Long Beach. The Seal Beach pier’s restaurant, however, remains ravaged by the elements and by remarkably determined vandals.

The restaurant was “broken into a couple weeks after the storm and then it was an ongoing thing, more than a dozen (break-ins), adding insult to injury,” she said. “Some of them swam and some of them took little boats out there.”

Seal Beach Pleasure Fishing leased the restaurant from the city, which intends to demolish, then rebuild the building by summer, said Assistant City Manager Dan Joseph.

The reconstruction of the rest of the pier took longer and was costlier than expected, in part because one of the contractors defaulted on the job, Joseph said. The city now hopes to recover in court “a couple hundred thousand dollars” it was forced to spend for work that had to be redone, he said.

While the pier was unusable, Joseph said, “visitors to the beach area declined. The fishermen have disappeared. They went elsewhere.”

Mabel Shaw agrees.

“We sell fish bait and that’s down to nil,” said Shaw, who for 37 years has owned Seal Beach Liquor, located across the street from the foot of the pier. “Business is off about 2% in the fall, but as much as 10% to 15% in the summer,” she said.

Shaw said “everybody seems real excited” about the reopening, including her counter clerk, Gary Versyp, who said he intends to fish from the pier “every day when I get off work until sunset.”

“The pier,” said assistant city manager Joseph, “lends a lot of character to the community. It’s our city monument. It’s something citizens can point to and say: ‘That’s unique to Seal Beach.’ ”