A Welcoming Spirit : But Laguna’s Century-Long Greeting Tradition Is Losing Some of Its Appeal

You see him standing each day at the corner of Coast Highway and Forest Avenue shouting greetings to passersby.

An elderly looking man with a golden beard, weather-beaten face, straw hat and gnarled wooden cane, he smiles at the cars whizzing past, waving daintily to their drivers like some flower child’s version of God.

“You’re perfect,” shouts the man, whose Texas birth certificate identifies him officially as No. 1 Unnamed Archer. The name was bestowed 61 years ago by his parents, taken by surprise at the birth of twins. Using their last name of Archer, he explains, “they called me Number One, and my brother Number Two.”

“You’re perfect too, Number One,” a passing motorist yells back through his window to the man standing at the curb.

Meet Laguna Beach’s self-proclaimed greeter, a man who for more than a decade has spent 14 hours a day, seven days a week, standing or sitting at the well-traveled corner waving to passing pedestrians and motorists. He is just the latest in a century-long line of greeters who have embodied the welcoming heart of this seaside resort.

But things are changing in this town of artists, artisans and art lovers. Now, some residents aren’t so enamored of the city’s open-arms tradition or the free spirits who have greeted generations of travelers.

“Enough is enough,” says Michael Phillips, director of a conservation group that, while not opposed to tourism, is fighting to preserve Laguna’s small-town atmosphere.

Back when the city’s first greeter was meeting stagecoaches along the dusty road into town, such sentiments must have been inconceivable.

His name was Old Joe Lucas, a Portuguese fisherman who had survived a shipwreck and ended up in Laguna. From the 1880s until his death in 1908, Lucas--who always carried a trident and was said to resemble the Roman god Neptune--greeted stagecoaches as they passed through town en route to Santa Ana or El Toro.

Next came Eiler Larsen, a Danish immigrant who arrived in Laguna around 1940. A huge hulk of a man with an enormous gray beard and wild penetrating eyes, he spent the next 31 years shouting his booming “hellos” to harried motorists along the coastal highway.

The City Council proclaimed Larsen the Official Greeter of Laguna Beach in 1963. Today, his memory is honored by at least two statues in town, not to mention a restaurant bearing his name. His footprints are embedded for posterity in the cement of the sidewalk at his favorite spot.

“He was part of the spirit of Laguna,” says Karen Ziegler, a longtime resident of the city.

That welcoming spirit had a lot to do with the completion of this segment of Coast Highway in the first place.

As a concept, the highway began in 1919 when Laguna Beach started promoting itself as a mecca for “automobilists.” One enterprising real estate firm, according to early newspaper reports, even offered a road map, predicting that “Laguna is destined to become the greatest automobilist resort.”

Only one problem: would-be motorists had no way of getting there. N.E. West, a local landowner, stepped in with a petition drive to extend Coast Highway from Newport Beach south to Laguna Beach, which at the time was reachable only by a narrow dirt road through the canyon from Santa Ana.

“It occurred to me (that) it would improve the town if we could open it for more tourists,” West, who later became an Orange County supervisor, told The Times in 1973. “I thought it would be a good way to meet more people.”

It took him more than two years to collect enough signatures to make the highway a reality. When it officially opened in 1926, most of the communities along the way chose beauty queens for the inaugural parade, and movie star Mary Pickford was enlisted to cut the ribbon. Automobiles followed en masse, and the traffic has only increased in the years since.

That bumper-to-bumper, horn-honking, no-place-to-park reality has caused some Laguna residents in recent years to question the wisdom of the city’s traditional open-arms stance.

Environmentalist groups, like Phillip’s Laguna Canyon Conservancy, have opposed county efforts to widen Laguna Canyon Road, the only other highway leading to Laguna Beach. They also have lobbied against construction of the San Joaquin Hills tollway, which would increase access to the city. Local polls show that three-fourths of the city’s residents stand behind them.

Anti-development efforts have been supported by the City Council as well. “We are not at all an exclusionary community, but we have a very strong sense of preservation,” says Laguna Beach Mayor Robert F. Gentry.

In some ways that attitude has affected perceptions of the city’s current greeter. While Larsen, the former and best-known greeter, was eventually bestowed that title by the city, Gentry said, there are no plans to make Number One Archer official.

And while Gentry hails Archer as “someone who provides lots of local color, (someone who) is part of the fabric of what Laguna is all about,” he also believes that the greeter’s ministrations often go unnoticed or misunderstood these days along the major arterial highway that Coast Highway has become.

“Larsen was more of a fixture in the community,” Gentry says. “Being the second or third of anything isn’t as impactful as being the first.”

That doesn’t seem to diminish Archer’s passion for what he does, though. Seven days a week he can be found at the end of Forest Avenue locking eyes and smiles with people on foot and in cars. He’s done it for 11 years, he says, ever since the idea struck him while walking across Coast Highway once in 1981.

“I was with a friend and we were talking about being,” the greeter recalls. “I said, ‘Look, you don’t have to have anything in order to be--I’ll be the greeter.’ ” Archer had met the previous greeter twice. But he says he never dreamed he would follow in Larsen’s footsteps.

Archer, a divorced father of six, had owned a beauty shop and worked for a time as a model for a clothing company, appearing in magazine advertisements wearing jeans and T-shirts. Today, he says, he sweeps the sidewalks in front of several local shops whose owners pay him enough to rent the storage garage that serves as his home base.

“It’s my calling,” explains Archer, who arrives at his favorite intersection by bus each morning at 6:04 and leaves 14 hours later at 8:15 p.m. “It’s a way of being that you’re not hired to do; you do it out of love.”

And love, for the most part, is what he gets in return.

“It’s a friendly face,” Debbie Laydon, 33, a visitor from North Carolina, said on a recent summer morning after encountering Archer on the sidewalk. “Just the gesture of saying hello makes you feel good.”

Vinny Trippi, a stockbroker from New Jersey, was favorably impressed during a five-minute encounter in which the greeter urged him to be true to himself.

“He said I was perfect,” Trippi recalled. “I’m still shaking from the inspiration of his words.”