Status at Last for Charley the Tuna : Proposed Museum Would Preserve Heritage of Industry

The design is bold: flanks of curved concrete ribs and glass strips, wrapped together in a primordial shape that juts out over a pocket of shimmering San Diego Bay.

Charley the Tuna never looked like this, but the design is for a museum that would honor Charley and the local industry that grew up around all those chickens-of-the-sea.

Say hello to the San Diego Tuna Museum.

“It gives the aura of vertebrae, and the ribs are cantilevered like the prow of a tuna clipper,” said Mission Beach architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, who designed the structure.

Ship models and fishing equipment, a miniature cannery, old photographs and movies, and a snack bar “serving tuna sandwiches or tuna salad” will help preserve the heritage of the San Diego tuna industry, said August Felando, president of the American Tunaboat Assn.

“New Bedford has a whaling museum,” he said. “Tuna is a staple of the American diet and part of the unique maritime heritage of this country.

“No other port in the country can identify itself with the American tuna fleet like San Diego can. The vessels and the fishing techniques that have evolved here have been copied the world over.”

The museum, still in the planning stages, would cost more than $3 million to build, said Kellogg, whose father-in-law owned a tuna boat.

Felando says he is not looking for any city money for the project, which has been tentatively approved by commissioners of the San Diego Unified Port District. Instead, he is hoping for contributions from tuna companies and ethnic organizations whose memberships includes many of the owners of tuna clippers.

The museum is planned for the G Street Mole, near the Tunaboat Assn. offices. It could be built by the end of 1987, Felando said.

Immigrant fishermen from Portugal and Italy dominated California tuna fishing during the early part of the century, said Felando, a descendant of Yugoslavian seamen. Most of the big canneries were in San Pedro, but the tuna clippers and the men who worked them were centered in San Diego, he said.

The development of “purse seine” fishing in San Diego--a technique in which a large nylon net is closed around a school of tuna--revolutionized the industry after World War II, and tuna seiners are now used by major fishing nations such as Japan, France and Spain.

“Today, about 70% of American tuna boats are San Diego-owned and -controlled,” Felando said.

While tuna consumption in the United States is at an all-time peak, low world prices caused by competition from Asian tuna canneries have hit American boat owners hard in recent years. The number of tuna boats based in the United States has dropped from 133 in 1982 to 91 in 1985.

San Diego lost its sole remaining tuna cannery last summer, when Van Camp Seafood transferred its canning operations to Puerto Rico and American Samoa, leaving about 1,200 workers jobless. Bumble Bee closed its San Diego tuna plant in 1982. Two canneries remain in California, both of them in San Pedro.

“Unless we try to retrieve a lot of this heritage right away, we’re going to lose it--we’ve lost some of it already,” Felando said.