CALIFORNIA ALBUM : The No. 1 Man at Saying Hi : Being a greeter is a tough job. The hours are long, the pay is nil. But in Laguna, it seems someone has to do it.

He stands each day at his corner on Pacific Coast Highway, shouting greetings to passersby.

The elderly looking man with a white beard, weather-beaten face, straw hat and gnarled wooden cane smiles at the cars whizzing past, waving daintily to the 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.

“You’re perfect too, No. 1,” a passing motorist yells to the man standing at the curb.

Meet Laguna Beach’s self-proclaimed “greeter,” 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 pedestrians and motorists.

He is the latest in a century-long line of greeters who have welcomed travelers in Laguna. But as Orange County’s growth and the passage of time bring new throngs of people and cars to this seaside resort, some residents have become less enamored with the open-arms tradition that the greeters embody.

“It’s a different time and a different city,” said Karen Ziegler, a longtime resident who, while not opposed to tourism, is concerned about the potential loss of Laguna’s small-town atmosphere.

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

His name was Old Joe Lucas, a Portuguese fisherman who had survived a shipwreck. 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 about 1940. A hulk of a man with an enormous gray beard and wild penetrating eyes, he spent the next 31 years shouting his booming “hellos” to 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 and a restaurant bearing his name. His footprints are embedded for posterity in the sidewalk at his favorite spot.

“He was part of the spirit of Laguna,” Ziegler said.

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

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 campaign to extend the highway from Newport Beach south to Laguna Beach, which at that time could only be reached by a narrow dirt road through the canyon from Santa Ana.

When the coast highway 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 flow has only risen since then.

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

Environmentalist groups, such as the 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 also oppose the tollway.

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,” said 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 official act of the city, Gentry said there are no plans to make No. 1 Archer official.

Gentry hails Archer as “someone who provides lots of local color, (someone who) is part of the fabric of what Laguna is all about,” but also believes that the greeter’s ministrations often go unnoticed or misunderstood these days.

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

Lack of official recognition doesn’t seem to diminish Archer’s passion. He can be found seven days a week where the highway meets Forest Avenue, locking eyes and smiles with people on foot and in cars. He’s done it, he says, ever since the idea struck him while walking across the coast highway in 1981.

Archer had owned a beauty shop, is a divorced father of six 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,” said 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.”