Life’s a Beach for $17 a Night at Recreational Vehicle Park

Looking for dirt-cheap accommodations by the glistening Pacific?

At Dockweiler Beach Recreational Vehicle Park, in its first year as the county’s only utility-equipped RV-by-the-sea facility, visitors pay $17 a night to sleep as close to the waves as Johnny Carson, Barbra Streisand or Pia Zadora.

Of course, there’s always a price to pay for breathing such rarefied air--in this case, the stench of the adjacent Hyperion sewage treatment plant and the bone-rattling vibrations of jets taking off from nearby Los Angeles International Airport.

“The smell is outrageous some nights,” said Pat Salts, who, along with her husband, Duane, spent Christmas week at the Playa del Rey-area park in their 36-foot motor home. “I buy some spicy stuff you boil to use as room freshener.”

Located about 100 yards from the shoreline at the foot of Imperial Highway, Dockweiler is a melange of sights, smells and sounds--and has a story for every parking space.

Here, gleaming $100,000-plus motor homes loaded with TV satellite dishes and bathtubs commingle with rudimentary campers and ramshackle buses that look as if they might crumble when moved. And here, on the sand by some RVs, aging living-room furniture occasionally accompanies the more traditional beach chairs, set in place by long-term visitors who are allowed to stay a maximum of 120 days a year.

One recent visitor, incredibly enough, housed five Hungarian sheep dogs in her rickety trailer. The middle-aged woman exercised the massive animals by chaining them to a bicycle and having them pull her around the parking lot.

Four months after the dedication ceremony for the newly refurbished park, statistics show that, despite of its nagging problems (“They say they get used to the noise but, God, I don’t know how,” said Ted Reed, county Department of Beaches and Harbors director) Dockweiler is becoming increasingly popular.

Last August, for example, the year-round 118-vehicle facility boasted a 70% occupancy rate, double that of the previous three Augusts when no electricity, gas or water hookups were available.

And as the weather grew cooler in October, the park maintained much of its business, grossing $35,000 with a 63% occupancy rate. That compares to a total revenue of $43,000 and an 11% occupancy rate in 1982, the year that Dockweiler opened.

County officials are counting on even healthier numbers this summer when indoor showers, a coin laundry and a community room will be opened. The additions will complete a two-year, $2.1-million improvement project.

At this point, tenants say Dockweiler is a kind of cozy microcosm of Los Angeles, with an ever-changing population and a widely diverse housing stock. The difference is that people of differing backgrounds and financial means live side by side.

Visitors range from local retirees and families spending a weekend at the beach to college students and contract construction workers staying for the four-month annual limit. Some say they would stay indefinitely if there were no time limit.

There is even a smattering of foreign guests at Dockweiler--from West Germany, Switzerland, England and more exotic locales like Zaire--who have rented RVs for a grand tour of America.

On a recent weekend, Dockweiler visitors ranged from a Glendale land developer and his wife, residing in a comfortable 30-foot vacation home, to a jazz musician, his wife and four children, ensconced in a graffiti-covered 12-foot truck.

The developer, Bernard Mazur, and his wife, Marion, were at the beach for a brief holiday getaway with another couple, Garland and Margery Smotony, who traveled all the way from El Segundo and who were parked a space away in their own RV.

“We used to go boating together but now we have campers--they don’t rock as much at night and we don’t have to make sure the anchor is holding,” Margery Smotony said as the four warmed themselves by an afternoon campfire they had built between the shore and the Redondo Beach-to-Santa Monica bicycle path.

Pat and Duane Salts, a retired South Bay couple who now reside in Baja California, had come north to visit relatives for the holidays. The Salts were so comfortable in their motor home, which they draped with festive Christmas lights, that they persuaded their two skateboard-equipped grandsons to spend part of their school vacation at the beach with them.

At the other end of the scale was jazz bassist Quandors Williams, who, along with his family, calls his cramped truck home.

“I came to Los Angeles to seek my fame and fortune and, rather than separate from my family to do that, I brought them with me,” said Williams, 38, from Columbus, Ohio.

Now, his sons, Farron, 9, and Jalani, 8, supplement the family income by staging weekend break-dance performances on the Venice boardwalk.

Although their living quarters are, to put it mildly, snug, “God blessed us real good; he’s given us enough,” said Williams, who usually parks the truck on quiet city streets.

While some visitors grouse about the time restrictions on visiting, and some contend that the nightly fee is too high, most long-timers appear to either love Dockweiler or, at worst, adopt a “make-do” attitude.

“All in all, if you’re going to stay somewhere, this is a nice place to stay,” said Ty Zavorski, 42, an oil refinery worker who recently moved here from Texas with his wife and two children. “There was no work there and I went broke like everyone else. So I said the hell with this, I’d take the trailer and we’d go out to California. The problem is, the landlords here are real proud of their real estate. I can’t believe the prices.”

Saving for Apartment

Zavorski said he hopes to come up with the security deposit soon and rent an apartment by selling a litter of Lhasa apso dogs born in his motor home.

Other long-term guests have turned the problem of screeching airliners into a plus, becoming amateur sky-watchers who study the flight patterns. “We love the planes--we have binoculars and we just watch them fly by,” said Valerie Austin, a waitress from Kentucky who has been residing at Dockweiler with her husband and two children. “When all the windows are closed, we don’t hear the noise very much.”

Then there’s Skip Melton, 18, whose trailer home makes the Williamses’ truck seem like the Taj Mahal.

Melton lives in a rebuilt 1955 Teardrop trailer, 6 feet by 9 feet, which he must crouch down to enter. Although the price was right--he bought it for $80--the Teardrop could be described as a walk-in straitjacket.

Nonetheless, Melton, a sales clerk, says that camping at Dockweiler is a convenient way to save money while living within view of South Bay beach cities where apartment rents are excruciatingly high.

Melton, in fact, insists that he is better off than those living in their mobile mansions during winter cold spells.

“I have a kerosene heater and this is so small, I’m warmer,” he explained.