Exploring the Lighthouse Legends : Romance Flourishes Anew in the Guiding Lights of Old

Standing in the tower of the Point Fermin Lighthouse in San Pedro, Julian Jimenez can look to his right on a clear winter day and see Santa Barbara Island, and straight ahead, Santa Catalina Island looks close enough to touch.

When it comes to rooms with a view, you might say Jimenez has one of the best. As park maintenance supervisor for Point Fermin Park, he has resided for seven years in the Victorian lighthouse, built in 1874 at the tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Though the gingerbread-style residence with its attached lamp house is only open to visitors for occasional tours, it stands on an acre of land that is the centerpiece of the public park belonging to the Los Angeles City Parks and Recreation Department.

Point Fermin is one of many lighthouses on the West Coast that is accessible, or can be approached by visitors who want to learn more about another life and time.

The days of the revolving glass beacon atop the little white house, where the lightkeeper and his family lived an isolated life on the edges of the earth, are nearly gone.

Of the 12 remaining manned lighthouses in the United States, the last is scheduled to go out of service in 1989. All of the West Coast lighthouses already are automated.

“They’re something you’ll never see again. We’re moving on. Nothing is permanent except change and, of course, the lighthouse now is outmoded,” said Bill Olesen, 83, who along with John Olguin, 66, a San Pedro native, formed a preservation committee for the Point Fermin Lighthouse.

“Automation has taken over. There’s no need to have people sacrificing themselves out on lonely outposts when an automatic beacon can take care of it,” he said.

Today, Olesen, Olguin and others have organized to provide lighthouses with a new kind of keeper. These citizens’ groups are mobilizing to restore favorite lighthouses and open them to the public.

Many have been given new lives as bed-and-breakfast inns, museums and hotels, and some, like Point Fermin and Point Vicente, which is also on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, are part of state, city or national parks.

“The lighthouse has always been a symbol of hope, salvation. It illustrates the better side of mankind’s concern for his fellow man. It is the result of a humanitarian impulse that dates back to the days when Pharos was established at Alexandria,” Olesen said, referring to the ancient Egyptian lighthouse.

In 300 BC, Ptolemy I, a Macedonian general under Alexander the Great, constructed a 450-foot tower on the island of Pharos near Alexandria in Egypt. The tower, toppled by an earthquake in 1340, held an ever-burning fire that could be seen for miles out to sea.

The first American lighthouse was built in 1716 on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor. It was not until the 1850s, during the Gold Rush, that California developed a need for lighthouses.

By 1852, Congress had authorized 16 lighthouses for the Pacific Coast, among them Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, which was the first to be lighted in 1854, and Point Loma in San Diego in 1855.

Alcatraz Island Lighthouse, today a lofty concrete sentinel, is automated and closed to the public. Restored to its original condition, the Point Loma Lighthouse is visited by thousands of tourists each year as part of the Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego.

After several decades of service, the Point Fermin Lighthouse is now cared for by the Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, a group dedicated to the preservation of historical data and artifacts. But Olesen and Olguin are credited with saving it from demolition.

Lighthouses began losing their battle with progress in the ‘50s. One example was the spike-like Mile Rock Lighthouse that once stood in the shadow of the Golden Gate in San Francisco Bay. Its tower was removed to provide a helicopter pad for maintenance crews and an automated beacon.

Original lighthouses were almost always white, to stand out against the land and sea. But each was different, reflecting the time and part of the country where it was built.

“Those in the Carolinas and Virginia are brick, and here on the West Coast they’re wood, or brick, or poured concrete, depending on the era,” said Wayne (Lighthouse) Wheeler, president of the U.S. Lighthouse Society.

Greater Public Interest

Wheeler said his 3,700-member, nonprofit organization is partly responsible for the renewed interest in the landmarks.

“Public response started up in the ‘70s and has continued to spread all over the country. The Fire Island, N.Y., Lighthouse Preservation Society has raised $2.5 million to save the Fire Island Lighthouse, one of the tallest in the country. They’re doing it at the grass-roots level and doing it very, very well,” he said.

“Lighthouses are very romantic symbols of our maritime heritage, a kind of picket fence at the edge of the continent, dividing home and hearth and terra firma against that dark, evil sea.

“In the 19th Century, everything moved by water and there were no other aids to navigation. In 1888, Lloyds of London recorded that 800 ships it insured never made it to port. If 800 of the thousands of ships they insured never made it--and they were only one of the many insurers--then there must have been hundreds of thousands of vessels on the open seas,” he said.

Today, a light on a pole is all that is needed to guide ships. Each year more of the familiar, romantic sentinels are abandoned to automation. It has been a gradual process over the last 100 years, and almost all of the changes have involved the lighting mechanism.

While the earliest lighthouses used reflectors that intensified light from a whale-oil lantern, the 1850s saw the U.S. government-authorized use of a multiprism lens invented by Augustin Fresnel (pronounced Fray-nell) of France.

The imported Fresnel lens, a complex design of glass prisms mounted in a brass framework, had five times the power of the reflector system and cost as much as $12,000.

The pride of all lighthouse keepers was the lens and lighting apparatus. Keepers continuously polished the brass and bronze, and cleaned the residue from whale, olive, coconut, kerosene or lard oil used to fuel the wicks. These duties led to a basically routine existence.

“Those people worked for very meager salaries and a great deal was expected of them. Devotion to duty was one of the great characteristics of the lightkeepers, who were often engaged in rescue work,” Olesen said.

Not all of the dangerous heroics were by men. Women often accepted the task of lightkeeper, or inherited it from their husbands or fathers. If a keeper was married, his wife often acted as an assistant keeper.

The first keepers of the old Point Fermin light were women. Mary L. Smith and her sister came to the little-known fishing village of San Pedro in 1874 because they thought the climate would be healthy. They resigned shortly afterward because of loneliness.

The Men Took Over

By the 1930s, most keepers were men and most lighthouse lenses were illuminated by electric lights. “Lighthouses went to commercial power in the ‘50s and ‘60s in a big way, depending on how remote the site was and how accessible commercial power became,” said Lt. Bill Meyn, 32, aide to navigation projects manager for the 11th Coast Guard District in Long Beach, which controls all of California’s lighthouses.

“Where commercial power is readily available it’s by far the better way to go, but where it isn’t, solar power is the most economical alternative. It has provided us with the opportunity to increase the range available at minor lights,” he said. Solar-powered lights not only are brighter and easier to maintain, but also are less costly to operate.

Every step to update the lights is a step away from the era when the lightkeeper climbed the spiral stairs to clean the lens, polish the brass work, wind the clockworks, refuel the lamps, trim the wicks and log his duties.

Today, most lights are operated by automatic control and monitoring systems. “We can have a watch stander in Long Beach remotely monitoring and controlling lights as far away as Point Conception and Anacapa Island,” Meyn said.

Recent changes in Coast Guard policy have made it easier for outside groups to lease and restore lighthouses. To learn more about lighthouses awaiting restoration, contact the U.S. Lighthouse Society, 964 Chenery St., San Francisco, 94131; (415) 585-1303.