Hot Start for Summer : Season Hits Beach During ‘Primo’ Conditions

The first day of summer was hot and nearly flawless, like the bodies on Huntington City Beach.

“It’s great. Hot. No school. Long-haired guys everywhere,” said Mariah Wolfe, a 15-year-old stretch of tanned, oiled limbs in a peach-colored underwire bikini. On top, a sheaf of blondest blond hair with a Daryl Hannah perm and a pair of Oakley sunglasses completed the look.

That’s the sunglasses brand to have in Summer 1990, according to Wolfe and some of the 20,000 others who opened the season Thursday in Huntington Beach. Also in vogue: roller blades, bikes, Jeeps and Four Runners, boom boxes and Panama Jack suntan lotion.

“It’s expensive,” Wolfe advised. “It’s the best.”

While posing agreeably for the camera, Wolfe said she had wanted to be a cheerleader at Garden Grove High School, but the uniforms were too expensive. Maybe when she graduates, she’ll try modeling, help run a restaurant or just “kick back for a few years.”

Wolfe lifted her sunglasses to get a closer look at a deeply tanned young man. Someone she knows? “No, somebody I want to know,” she said.

A few minutes later, a 19-year-old who gave his name as Rob Noxious asked to borrow a pen and a piece of paper. He walked back to Wolfe and wrote down a phone number.

“I just seen her and I said, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ ‘cuz she was being photographed,” Noxious explained. “And she said, ‘Yeah, if I can have your phone number!’ ”

The season opener was marred, however, by two small brush fires near Laguna Hills High and an El Toro creek bed. No one was injured, officials said.

Otherwise, Orange County welcomed summer with conditions that were, well, “primo”: clear skies, 68 degrees at Newport Beach and 75-degree water at Huntington State Beach. For the weekend, meteorologists predicted more of the same.

“Globally, I guess it might be a bad day, but locally, it’s a great day,” said Ken M. Kramer, 27, a lifeguard supervisor for the Department of Parks and Recreation.

A few blocks up Beach Boulevard, the crowd at The Playpen bar was a bit older and not quite as upbeat. Outside, a sign read, “A Lingerie Cafe” and advertised “Food, Beer, Wine, Pool, Girls.” Inside the soothing darkness, a customer seemed surprised to hear that it was, in fact, the first day of summer.

“Is that just in California, or all over America?” he asked.

He ordered a wine cooler from a waitress wearing a corset, a pink aerobic G-string over white aerobic tights, and four-inch heels. Then he advised a true seeker of summer to go elsewhere. Try a bar in Balboa, he said.

“You’ll get the true meaning of summer there,” he said. “Guys in shorts, girls in bikinis. You walk across the street and there’s sand. That’s summer. This is a toilet.”

Bob Baker, a 34-year-old bricklayer, offered a similar definition of a Southern California summer.

“Sex and sun. Sun and sex. And food--can’t forget about food,” he added. “For me, Newport Beach is out. I don’t blend in with the yuppie crowd. The women on Huntington Beach are more my type.”

For Baker, summer had started on a sour note.

“Me and the foreman had a little tiff. He didn’t like my attitude, and I didn’t like his, either,” he explained. “Me being hung over is irrelevant.”

Even on the first day of summer, plenty of people were working. Benjamin Gonzalez, for example, said he was earning $7 an hour for mowing the grass at the Sea Breeze Pet Cemetery. Before he mowed each section, a co-worker carefully removed the artificial flowers from cat, rabbit and monkey graves with such inscriptions as, “Pincus Nero, 1972-1983,” and “Mama’s Baby Tasha, 1975-1985.”

He shrugged when asked about the first day of summer, but said he did intend to take his family to the beach on Sunday, if it wasn’t too crowded.

Across the street at Beach Yamaha, salesman Mike Sadowski was thinking up ways to sell his “toys”--motorcycles and water skimmers that aren’t moving as fast as last year.

Sadowski, who likes to spot a trend early, had heard on the morning news that it was the first day of summer. He hoped that meant business would pick up.

“People aren’t buying enough toys,” Sadowski complained. But he didn’t seem too depressed. “It’s always summer around here.”

Times correspondent Shannon Sands contributed to this story.