Summer Comes to an End in Name Only

Convertible tops were down all over town on Saturday as summer came to an end in Los Angeles on a toasty warm day filled with mixed signals of the changing seasons.

With only a smattering of puffy clouds and the thermometer touching 81 at the Civic Center and 74 at Santa Monica beach, the weather was summer all the way.

Today’s weather is expected to be much the same, according to the forecast from WeatherData Inc., which supplies meteorological information to The Times.

Though a shirtless, barefoot man padded toward the beach in Santa Monica at noon, there were other indications throughout the region that the book was closing on summer.

Petunias were drooping. Crisp apples were crowding out juicy peaches on supermarket shelves. At a Sav-On drugstore on Sepulveda Boulevard, the beach hat shelf was bare, but aisles were overflowing with Halloween candy and plastic pumpkins. There was only one floating lounge chair, but a whole rack of Christmas cards.

In Pasadena, the annual ritual of choosing the 1991 Tournament of Roses Queen got under way. At local beaches, about 2,000 gathered to clean up from what amounts to a three-month beach party, fanning out with blue and green sacks to collect the summer’s discards.

The event, part of the sixth annual nationwide Adopt-A-Beach Coastal Clean Up Day, yielded everything from underwear to an electric clock, said Susan McCabe of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration project, one of the sponsors of the cleanup. The most common item found on the beach was cigarette butts, she said.

According to a spokesman for the California Coastal Commission, 12,000 pounds of trash and 3,000 pounds of recyclable materials were collected from the sand at Los Angeles County beaches.

Another group of about 150 had a heavenly purpose for spending the last day of summer gathered at the water’s edge. The choir, from the Baptist Tabernacle Church in downtown Los Angeles, tried mightily to compete with the sound of the surf, while children frolicked nearby in the sand.

The crowd, which had encircled a portable altar, parted and two men of the cloth waded out into the ocean and turned back toward the sand. Each fully clothed member of the flock pushed past the waves for a baptismal dip in the Pacific.

Across town in Pasadena, the first step was taken in the selection process for the 1991 Pasadena Rose Queen and her court. As birds chirped and pink blossoms fell from a kapok tree, 500 young women, most of them in flowery summer dresses, walked across a curved path in the Rose Garden at Tournament House.

Each had about 15 seconds or so to tell the nine blue-shirted men why she wanted to be Rose Queen. The next step was a photo with one of two bouquets of roses that were passed from candidate to candidate.

Phyllis Bradley, 17, a senior at John Muir High School in Pasadena, got a big laugh from the judges. “I told them if I wouldn’t have come my mother would have had a heart attack,” she said afterward.

At Westwood Park, another group of mothers and fathers were heavily involved in a seasonal ritual. Soccer season was under way and while a swarm of 6 and 7-year-old boys in droopy shorts and knee socks chased a ball around the field, their parents shrieked encouragement from the sidelines. “Come on, Michael,” yelled one mother. “Come on, kick the ball,” said another.

At halftime, the coach let one player know that this is the time of year to get serious. “You’re going to be out the whole second half if I have to yell at you once more.”

Mary Appleton, mother of one of the players, said that for her summer ended when school started. For a volunteer from Heal the Bay, summer’s end was signaled by empty parking places in the beach lots.

For the homeless, who slept in the sun on Saturday in the grass at Palisades Park overlooking the ocean and on a park bench across the street from the Biltmore downtown, the end of summer meant impending months of cold, damp nights.

Los Angeles County Lifeguard Capt. Steve Saylors, who was patrolling the beach, had a different way of looking at the seasons. “From a lifeguard’s point of view, it doesn’t matter what the calendar says. If the temperature hits 75 degrees downtown, everybody goes to the beach,” said Saylors. “There is no end of summer at the beach.