Del Mar’s Past Was Colorful, Checkered

It is curious that this tiny seaside town, known for its snobbish citizenry who want to keep the rest of the world out, should pick a land speculator and suspected arsonist as its founding father.

Why not choose rancher William S. Weed? He was college-educated and spoke four languages, a well-loved man by whose name the village was known for many years.

But then, if they had chosen Del Mar’s first settler and postmaster to honor, residents now would be known as Weeders instead of Del Marians, or Del Martians as some jealous outsiders have tabbed them. Perhaps that is reason enough.

So Del Mar has launched into its centennial celebration this year, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the date that Col. Jacob Shell Taylor filed the first plat map--No. 368--of Del Mar on Oct. 7, 1885.

Taylor, who bragged he had been a Buffalo Bill scout, already owned the famous Stonewall gold mine near Julian and the 8,800-acre Rancho los Penasquitos southeast of Del Mar. But, in 1883, when the railroad built its Los Angeles-to-San Diego line along what is now Stratford Court, Taylor wasted no time in buying up 160 acres of oceanfront property and announcing plans to turn the sagebrush and sand into a fashionable watering hole.

True to his word, Taylor opened Casa del Mar in 1886. It was a 30-room resort hotel complete with two open-air dance halls, acres of gardens with Castilian roses, a “natatorium,” fed by the ocean surf and protected by Del Mar’s first seawall “from the dread stingaree.”

But, only three years after it opened with a speech by the governor, band concerts and ostrich egg omelets on the menu, the hotel burned to the ground following a season of particularly heavy rain that washed out the train tracks and highway, leaving Casa del Mar with very few paying guests.

Talk around town about the fire turned to anger and later to lawsuits when tradesmen and residents learned the seemingly-prosperous hotelier had been the victim of other mysterious fires in the past and that he had purchased a hotel in Texas only a few weeks before the Casa del Mar fire. Taylor left town permanently, hounded by lawsuits. Before he departed, however, his Del Mar home also burned down.

Del Mar, after 15 years of doldrums that followed Taylor’s hasty departure, numbered less than 100 residents at the turn of the century and had very few prospects. The town’s rebirth came courtesy of a group of wealthy businessmen who followed Taylor’s formula of turning Del Mar into a tourist playground. In 1905, the group began their project by dynamiting what was left of Taylor’s hotel complex between 10th and 11th streets, moving the center of town half a mile north and then starting the Stratford Inn, which dominated the community and its architecture for the next 60 years.

The hotel, with its Old English board-and-stucco style, spawned a dozen smaller facsimiles around town--a bath house, a carriage house, a power station, shops, hotel cottages and outbuildings. Several of the Stratford Inn look alikes still stand and commercial buildings built later have mimicked the Stratford-on-Avon look.

But the hotel, renamed the Hotel Del Mar in the 1920s, was torn down in 1968 after yet another attempt to modernize and market it fell flat. The town made an event out of the hotel razing, staging parties on its ocean-view patio, allowing school children to spend the night in sleeping bags just to say they had slept in the old landmark, and selling all the memorabilia salable before the bulldozers and wrecking bars moved in, scattering the structure’s rats, mice and fleas about the town.

The Stratford Inn group outdid Col. Taylor and his Casa del Mar. Instead of a natatorium, which was nothing more than a protected tide pool, the group built a “plunge,” an enclosed saltwater swimming pool right on the beach, and a “pleasure pier,” for promenading and fishing but not too useful for docking boats.

Time and tides took their toll on the pier built in 1908 but not before it served patriotically as a training facility during World War II. Thousands of Army recruits in full battle gear jumped (or sometimes were pushed) off the end of the pier. A prelude for the D-Day invasion at Normandy? Del Mar never knew.

In 1958, a Navy demolition team blew up what remained of the battered pier, leaving only portions of the pilings that can be seen at low, low tides when winter waves have eroded the beach.

During World War II, Del Mar was ready. Anti-aircraft batteries were hidden in the the eucalyptus groves, sandbagged lookout posts were scattered in niches down the hillside. A reconnaissance blimp was tethered at the Del Mar Airport (long gone) in the river valley and a training depot was established at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. History, however, does not record a single enemy sighting or a shot fired.

In 1936, the state fairground at the north end of Del Mar and the Del Mar Race Track within it, first brought the seaside city to the attention of Hollywood. The Del Mar Hotel, still a first-class hotel in the 1930s, was crowded with stars and hopefuls during the summer racing seasons, lured there by Bing Crosby and Pat O’Brien, who were investors in and promoters of the track.

Some of the film stars bought homes in Del Mar and returned for each racing season. Jimmy Durante was named honorary mayor and further honored by having the winding road from the town to the race track named after him. Desi Arnaz bought a beach home where he has lived quietly for decades, except when his temper flared as it did in the late 1960s when he fired shots into the asphalt pavement to scare away vandals who were carving up his garden hose.

The rich and famous still come to Del Mar for the racing season but now they rent beach homes or condominiums at outrageous prices from residents who take their vacations on the profits.

The locals describe their town with humor and with pride. There are no two houses alike in Del Mar, they brag, and no two people who agree. For example, the townsfolk 26 years ago celebrated the 75th anniversary of Del Mar in 1959, which, by logic and mathematics, would place the city’s 100th birthday in 1984. No matter.

Former newspaperman Kenneth C. Reiley composed a “new” history of Del Mar in 1958, in time for the 1959 diamond anniversary of the town and also for its incorporation, which occurred the same year.

His slightly irreverent history (from which this shortened version was spawned) generated a controversy over the original name of the community--Weed or Del Mar--which has been rekindled for the 100th anniversary of the town. Reiley’s tenacious research also produced a comprehensive set of photographs spanning the town’s first three-quarters of a century.

Some of the less noteworthy Del Mar residents and some of not-for-print scenes captured in Reiley’s history included:

- The colony of nudists who lived just north of Del Mar Terrace shielded from the ocean breezes by stands of cypress trees and ancient Torrey pines.

- John Bludworth, a tough Del Mar lawman of some sort or another in the town’s early days. No one knew exactly where he gained his authority to enforce the law. And no one had the temerity to ask him.

- The thriving hog farm that existed in the San Dieguito River valley during the early days. When winds were out of the northeast, pungent barnyard odors wafted through the town. It was later replaced by a golf course and is now the site of the Del Mar Fairgrounds and Race Track.

Since Reiley’s history of the town was written, city officials have earned more local headlines than have Hollywood notables or hotel builders. For instance:

Tom Douglas, the city’s first mayor, promised his constituents that they wouldn’t have to pay property taxes because fees and taxes from the race track and fairgrounds would easily support the city. Later mayors had to renege on Douglas’ promise though for many years Del Mar property tax levies were among the lowest because of the fair and racing subsidies.

Another mayor, Earl Maas Jr., now a Superior Court judge, often appeared still wet from surfing and a hasty shower, to preside over council sessions. And, at the annual end-of-summer community beach parties held to celebrate the departure of the tourists, the popular mayor sometimes could be persuaded to hotdog a wave or two wearing formal attire--tuxedo jacket and a top hat.

Everyone in town knew Mayor Nancy Hoover, now under indictment in connection with the failed J. David Dominelli empire and the campaign finances of San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock.

Hoover and another former Del Mar mayor, Tom Shepard, figure not only in Hedgecock’s current legal troubles, but also in Hedgecock’s political start. They led a successful attempt to win the San Diego mayor his first civic post as city attorney of Del Mar.

In May, 1972, county sheriff’s deputies placed the entire town of 5,000 under house arrest, using helicopters and bullhorns to warn residents not to venture outside their homes.

When Del Marians recovered from the shock of what they thought was the start of World War III, they learned that a team of 200 riot-equipped deputies had pounced on a group of Vietnam War protesters who were bent on halting a train at the Del Mar station to demonstrate their opposition to the mining of Haiphong harbor by the United States.

Entrances to the town were blockaded and residents ordered indoors, deputies said, in order to prevent a full-scale riot. One deputy sheriff confided afterwards that the action was taken, “because you never know up here in Del Mar which side people are going to take. We didn’t want to be outnumbered.”