HUNTINGTON BEACH : Concessionaire Ends 3-Decade Business

The city has transferred its lease of a beach snack shop to a new operator, ending Cecil Wheat’s tenure as the city’s longest continuing beach concessionaire.

Wheat sold the second of his two snack shops, Zack’s Too, to downtown business owner Mike Ali. Last year, Wheat sold Zack’s, the stand he had operated for three decades, to the owner of the Waterfront Hilton at Huntington Beach, a hotel across the Pacific Coast Highway.

The Newport Beach-based Robert Mayer Corp., owner of the Waterfront Hilton, had long considered the stand as a potential beach amenity to complement its ongoing development, which will include hotels, restaurants, shops and condominiums. The firm is reportedly considering erecting a pedestrian bridge across the highway to link the two sites.

Wheat said, however, that Mayer’s interest in the stand had no influence on his decision to abandon his concession business. At 75, he said, “it was just time to retire.”

“We’ve been out there on the beach for 30 summers now, and we’ve enjoyed every one of them,” he said. “But my wife and I decided we don’t have many summers left, so we decided to get out.”

Having spent seven days a week, six months a year dishing up burgers, hot dogs, fries and other snacks since 1961, Wheat has witnessed changes on the beach and its environs that he never envisioned.

Huntington Beach grew from a beach town of 11,000 people to Orange County’s third-largest city, now home to almost 200,000 residents. Downtown is changing from a tiny seaside village into a hub of activity, and the beaches attract more than a million visitors each year.

Wheat is disillusioned with some of the changes he sees, such as the pollution of the once-pristine surf. “I worry about the contamination out there,” he said. “All you have to do is talk to the surfers; they see it all the time.

All told, however, Wheat says he approves of the direction his city has taken.

“I hate to see it change, but it has to change,” he said. The area “has gotten so run-down, you’ve got to do something to make it pay.”