L. B. Slogan Touts ‘Most on the Coast’

There was a time if you wanted “Fun in the Sun,” you went to Las Vegas. Nowadays, for “The Most on the Coast,” stay right here.

Long Beach business and tourism promoters unveiled the new city slogan and logo last week at a ceremony aboard the Queen Mary. It marks the first time that major organizations involved in promoting the city have vowed to work together using a common theme.

Past efforts have been “a fragmented approach on how to market Long Beach,” said Joseph F. Prevratil, executive director of the Port of Long Beach and chairman of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. “The most important thing is that everyone is behind this 100%.”

Groups participating in the campaign include the port, the chamber, the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Council, the city Department of Community Development and the Downtown Long Beach Associates business organization.

The mutual campaign also represents the fulfillment of recommendations from two study groups. Both the Mayor’s Task Force on Strategic Planning and the Task Force on Retail and Auto Sales in Long Beach have recommended joint marketing.

Hank Schwarz, president of the Haller Schwarz advertising agency in Los Angeles that cooked up the campaign, said the “Most on the Coast” signifies that Long Beach is a self-contained city.

He said he was impressed at how the city melds shopping, business, residential and recreation. Schwarz acknowledged that the new slogan is a bit generic for a California coastal city, but said that it especially fits Long Beach. Few other seaside municipalities offer the same amenities that could give them the same claim, he said.

Just how much “most” does Long Beach offer on the coast?

The city Convention and Visitors Council, taking a light approach, boasts that Long Beach, more than anyplace else in the nation, has:

* The most beautiful oil islands, where lighted towers and waterfalls disguise working wells along the waterfront.

* The most Cambodians this side of Cambodia.

* The most grueling water ski race, a 62-mile annual trek to Santa Catalina Island and back.

* The biggest concentration of Art Deco and streamlined modern architecture, mostly in downtown.

* The most ingenious use of plastic seaweed, which is used as artificial kelp scattered along the shoreline to protect against beach erosion.

* The most floating Christmas trees, placed during the holiday season in Alamitos Bay.

* The most Italian-style gondolas, which cruise the canals of Naples.

* The biggest seaborne crane, used in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

And that does not even include the most bananas. The Port of Long Beach unloads enough bananas every week to make a banana split for every resident of California, according to the tourist organization.

Long Beach officials hope their new theme will point out that “The International City” is a complete, varied mini-metropolis no longer caught in the shadow of Los Angeles.

And, said chamber President Brent Hunter, it will raise awareness that Long Beach does, in fact, have a long beach. There are six miles of wide, sandy oceanfront--even if the surf is more like a lake than an ocean along most of it, thanks to a breakwater constructed years ago.

Other Slogans Compared

Long Beach is not the only city to adopt a catchy slogan. Over the years, the bumper sticker “P.S. I Love You” has hyped Palm Springs and even prompted a motel owner in the desert town of Borrego Springs to print, “B.S. I Love You.”

Las Vegas developed its gaming economy during the 1950s under the slogan “Fun in the Sun,” but nowadays promotes itself as offering “The American Way to Play.”

Bellflower, “The Friendly City,” once billed itself as the place of “21 Churches, No Jails.” Then there was “Tan Your Hide in Oceanside” and “Where the Hell is Norco?”

To the latter, a church group launched a counter bumper-sticker campaign that “God Knows Where Norco Is.”

Long Beach’s “The Most on the Coast” campaign is not expected to provoke such heated controversy.