NOMAD’S LAND : Ah, a Little Cottage by the Sea--for a Few Weeks in the Summer, Anyway

For months it was cold along Orange County’s coastline. For weeks it rained. Shops stood shuttered and streets stayed empty. It was winter at the beach.

But now the days grow longer, and the sun shines brighter. Across the country men and women pause in their work to gaze out the window and think of summer by the shore. They fantasize about lazy days and starlit nights in a magical atmosphere where the food tastes better and the beer is colder.

“It’s just a whole different atmosphere,” said Lornie Jacobs, who lives in Fountain Valley for 50 weeks of the year and rents a Newport Beach house midway between the ocean and the bay for the remaining two weeks. “It’s a vacation even if it’s only five miles from home.”

Roc Arnett has a longer journey but the same feeling for the beach. Arnett will head from Phoenix to Capistrano Beach in August, renting “three or four” places to house his family, his brother, two sisters and their aggregate 20 kids.

“You throw your Rolex in your suitcase, and you just don’t look at it for a week,” Arnett said.

The summer rental season starts next month and lasts until mid-September. From June 18 onward, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, San Clemente and points in between will witness a rite of summer in which families tumble out of cars in front of real estate offices, grab maps and keys and head for their temporary digs.

Arrival day traditionally is Saturday, and Newport Beach real estate agent Helane Joy says her office alone is likely to tally 100 arriving families a week. In all, there can be 1,000 families or more arriving at beach communities in the county.

They will pay anywhere from $650 to $2,400--per week. That works out to seven days at $342.85 a day at the high end, lodging only, or $14.28 an hour.

But for every person coming to a summer place at the beach for a week or two, there is another person outward bound, heading for a land where the rents are cheaper, the skies less blue and the surf only a memory.

Patrick Glance, for instance.

Last summer Glance, 25, and his 19-year-old brother, Michael, bade farewell to their home on Seashore Drive in Newport Beach for eight weeks. While renters paid $2,000 a week, Michael stayed with friends further south in Newport and Patrick rented a two-bedroom apartment in Huntington Beach.

“It was typical suburbia,” Patrick remembered. “Everyone had a station wagon, nights were quiet, it was a quiet neighborhood.” His time as an inlander taught him one thing, though: “It does tend to make you miss (the beach) a little more. I never realized how lucky I was.”

Yet the Glances again are getting ready to turn their house over to renters. One unit has four bedrooms, the other one three. The large one has spectacular 20-foot-high cathedral ceilings, mirrored walls in the living and dining rooms, and a marvelous view that makes Catalina--on a clear day--look as if it is in swimming distance.

What Patrick Glance calls the “A unit” is done in black and white, with original serigraphs and lithographs by Erte and Patrick Nagel. Glance figures the duplex could fetch $1 million if he put it on the market.

Then why are the Glances renting the house out?

“The cash flows aren’t as great as they used to be,” Patrick said. Come again? “Money,” he explained.

Glance said that his father’s death in 1979 resulted in an inheritance for him and his brother of the house “plus small investments.”

In the winter, Glance and his brother “rent out rooms we’re not occupying.” But “our trust funds are getting low, and we don’t want to keep digging out of the trust fund moneys like we have been,” said Glance. A December graduate of Cal State Long Beach with a business major specializing in real estate, Patrick Glance does not work, though he spends three hours or more daily working out at a gym. With money less than abundant, he is looking for tenants, hoping to get $2,450 a week for the “A” unit and $1,850 for the three-bedroom, two-bath “B” unit “for the prime months”--July and August.

But where will he go this year?

“That’s a good question,” he said. “We don’t know now. I know of short-term tenancies at Oakwood apartments, so that would probably be our last resort if we don’t find someplace else.”

Ron Miller is leaving Newport Beach for the summer, too, but at least he knows where he is going--Maine.

“We’re going to leave June 1 and come back Sept. 15,” said Miller. “My wife runs a ‘pet crisis hot-line’ business and she’s going to run it from Maine. And I’m basically, I really don’t know, if you want to know the truth. I’m effectively semi-retired. I’ll probably help her.”

Miller, who spent 20 years in the Marine Corps and then worked in real estate and insurance, was married a year ago and moved into his new wife’s house. Since they are heading for Maine anyway, they decided to rent the one-bedroom-and-den Newport Heights home--which is not on the beach--for $850 a month. With some beachfront homes going for more than 10 times that price, Miller said he expected no problem in finding a tenant.

Pam Wald could stay in Miller’s home for nearly three months with the rent she is paying for one week at the beach: $2,400.

“It’s a real little tiny beachfront house,” said Wald, who like her husband is a pediatrician. “It doesn’t have a pool, but it’s right on the beach . . . so (the children) can go play in the ocean and they don’t have to cross streets or anything.”

Wald and her husband live in West Covina. Many summer renters come from the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys to trade the heat and smog for ocean breezes and cleaner air, real estate agents said. Others are fleeing the 100-plus temperatures of Palm Springs or Phoenix.

Wald said her family has been coming to Newport Beach for the past six summers. They share a four-bedroom house with another couple who also have two children.

The $2,400 weekly rent “is a lot,” she conceded, “but if you think what you would pay in a hotel for eight people, it probably adds up to the same thing. And this is right on the beach, and it’s really comfortable.”

Wald grew up in New York and remembers occasional summers at the beach in the 1950s with her brother and mother, with her father commuting out on weekends. “I guess that doesn’t happen much anymore,” she said with a laugh. “All the mothers are working and can’t spend the summer at the beach.”

One house swap this summer will involve Greg Heintz and Annette Liles, although they have never met.

Heintz, 23, is one of a number of UC Irvine students who rent houses and apartments along the Balboa peninsula in the winter and head out in the summer--when rents quadruple.

“I go back home” to Northern California when summer comes, Heintz said. He and two roommates pay $1,025 a month for a home “right on the beach.”

“A main thing is we can do what we want here, make noise and things like that, as long as the neighbors don’t mind,” said Heintz, adding that he has “sort of mixed” feelings about being forced to leave the beach when tanning season arrives.

Although summer is an ideal time at the beach, up north there is a good summer job that helps him cover the costs of college in the winter. Plus, based on his taste of spring break at Newport Beach, he figures the streets may be too crowded and the parties too raucous during the summer.

Real estate agent Jay said the home rented by Heintz and his roommates during the winter is taken in summer by Annette Liles of Claremont, near Pomona, and her family.

Liles said she and her family “have been going to the beach all our lives,” first at her in-laws’ home on Balboa and since 1972 as renters.

“We have five children, and we felt that that’s the best place to vacation,” she said. The family generally tries to take the last week in August and the first week in September and tries to get the same house each year.

“We don’t want to let it go because if you’re off the list you won’t get it next year,” she said. Although her children are grown, “they come back for vacations” if they can.

Liles said that her oldest son has just married and that her other children remain single, but eventually, “I can think of nothing better than building sand castles with grandchildren.”

Lornie Jacobs’ children are a bit old for sand castles. In fact, the older two are in their 20s and won’t be with her at the beach this year, she said, but her 9-year-old son will. Jacobs lives in Fountain Valley, which in Southern California terms is just a hop, skip and a jump from her summer place in Newport Beach.

“It’s neat to be able to just walk out of the house and go half a mile and be on the beach and feel the sand, or go half a mile in the other direction and be at the bay,” Jacobs said. And being so close to her winter home, “I can come home and feed my cat. I don’t have to ask the neighbors to do it or board it. And if I forget something, I can go home; it’s no biggie.”

Jacobs, a staff assistant in the sales office of the MCI telecommunications company, said after summering at the beach for two years, she decided to change vacation destinations one year and drove up the coast to visit friends in Northern California. “And boy, I really missed being at the beach.”

Evelyn Callister has not missed the beach much at all in the past 10 years because when summer comes, that is where you can find her and her family, for one week at least.

Callister, whose husband is an eye surgeon, estimates that they have been renting on the Balboa peninsula for at least 10 years, almost all of it on the same block.

She and her husband have eight children, and some of their sons and daughters bring friends, so the Callisters wind up renting two places, one for the older children and one for the younger.

Friends come to the beach and rent nearby places, too, Callister said. They all--meaning 30 or 40 people--eat dinner together, rotating the location between the houses; breakfast and lunch are catch-as-catch-can.

“Generally, we drive down on a Saturday (from home in La Crescenta), park the car in the garage and leave it there until we get it out to pack it and get home. We don’t go to Orange County to do sight-seeing or shopping. We stay at the beach and do everything the beach has to offer and ride bikes or walk if we want to go anyplace.”

Over the years, Callister said, prices have gone up and the one-time half-price days at the Fun Zone are only a memory. Then, too, “we’re always kind of amazed at the dress of the beach-goers. . . . One year the kids have their hair cut off, then they have it different colors. . . . It’s always fun to see what the different fad is. The fads seem to be different than (in La Crescenta), so that’s interesting.”

A key virtue of the beach, Callister said, is its ability to offer something for children of all ages.

“I find that’s a real challenge, to mix toddlers and teen-agers. Each of our kids is anxious to go back each year.”

Roc Arnett, an insurance agent in Phoenix, says the Arizona city “shuts down” come Aug. 1 because of the heat.

“We like to get away and right on the beach is a great way to go. We’ve tried it in San Diego, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, and those are just, well, there’s so many people and it’s just so congested.”

At Capistrano Beach, by contrast, “you don’t have to drive, you just can let your kids play. You throw your Rolex in your suitcase, and you just don’t look at it for a week.”

Arnett also is high on area attractions, including Fashion Island, Disneyland and baseball games at Dodger and Anaheim stadiums.

Still, Arnett has one rule for a summer at the shore: “I wouldn’t rent a place unless I could get right on the sand.”

Mel Fuchs, owner of a real estate agency on the peninsula in Newport Beach, says August is the most popular, and most expensive month. Like other agents, he said his clients insist that he rent their homes only to families. Still, large areas of the beach are known as “party central” during the summer, with teen-agers and young adults delighting in loud music and displays of muscles and curves.

Fuchs said that owners who occupy their homes during the winter and rent them out in summer “get in their camper, they get in their car, they go to Europe, they go to places in the United States.”

He estimates that 75% to 80% of the people renting for the summer have rented at the beach before. “They come from all parts of the United States. We even get some coming from overseas. We get them from Germany, we get them from England, we have one gentleman who comes from Saudi Arabia. . . . He’s a real nice guy, a young fellow, and he comes out here for a month, just raises hell for a month and then goes back.”

“This is a paradise,” Fuchs said. “Moses, I think, made a mistake. This is the promised land . . . the Riviera of the United States.”