Ventura Pier Becomes Memorial of Tears, Joy : Tribute: Grieving mother finds a way to keep her son’s memory alive. She joins others in adding loved ones’ names to the historic structure.

In the months after 23-year-old Richard Adams drowned in an accident near the Ventura Pier, his mother, Carolyn, would scour the beach night after night in a desperate search for her lost son.

Richard’s body was discovered near Pierpont Beach two weeks after his disappearance, but his distraught mother continued to look for her son.

“I never saw his body. That made it harder,” she said.

Richard’s body was later taken for a closed-casket burial in Stockton, where he was born. That left Adams with another sense of emptiness because she and others in her Ventura community had no local grave site where they could mourn her son.

“When you have someone--and you love them and you lose them--the worst fear you have is that people will forget about him,” she said.

But last August, Adams found a way to honor Richard’s memory.

She joined hundreds of other Ventura County residents who have donated $105 to $125 each for a plank on the pier and an inscription on a plaque honoring the dead. The money goes toward a $1-million fund for future restoration of the 122-year-old structure, which at 1,958 feet is the longest wooden pier in California.

Since it was launched last June, the “Pier Into the Future” campaign has raised about $330,000, organizers say. And contributions are still coming at the rate of about 10 a week.

“It kind of dribbles in,” said Marita Clark, a campaign volunteer who processes donations. “And then we may have a surge.”

The 700 memorial inscriptions join another 2,000 names of living donors etched on charcoal-colored granite plaques displayed at the pier’s mouth. Fifty-five larger donations--one as much as $15,000 from a business--have been received since last summer, said campaign chairman Monty Clark, Marita’s husband.

Campaign organizers had hoped to collect 75% of the $1-million goal by the end of last year, Monty Clark said. But the flagging economy and a lack of hoped-for commitments from area business slowed progress, he said.

Still, “we’re going to keep plugging away at it,” he said. The pier, shut down for 13 months for repairs from a series of damaging winter storms, reopened last October after a $3.5-million renovation.

So far, about $300,000 of the money stockpiled by the fund has been invested in mainly low-risk stocks and bonds by the Ventura County Community Foundation, said Kate McLean, the foundation’s president. The remaining $30,000 in savings is kept in a checking account for easier access for administrative costs.

McLean, whose nonprofit group oversees investments for community-oriented organizations, said the goal for the pier fund is to eventually earn more money than the community has contributed and provide a source of money for pier upkeep.

Individual donors give for a variety of reasons, Marita Clark said. Some feel an emotional tie to the historic structure and want to commemorate a marriage proposal made there or some other special event in their lives. Some have even bought a plank as a wedding gift, she said.

“There was a couple that came up to us at the Fourth of July street fair (booth this year) who recently got engaged on the pier,” she said, reflecting some of the happier contributors. “They were going to buy a plank so their names would be on the granite marker there.”

The “In Memoriam” plaque, which includes Richard Adams’ name, has helped her move forward in her healing, Carolyn Adams said.

“It helps you realize that he’s gone, which is probably what a grave does,” Adams said. For her and her 27-year-old daughter, Tammy, Richard’s plank and inscription are prized possessions.

Richard worked for several years within a block of the pier as a parking garage attendant. Often, Adams said, he would take his dog to the beach at the pier and throw sticks in the water, playing fetch.

But it was on one of those days that Richard mysteriously disappeared, and his dog walked into a nearby hotel lobby a short time after his master was last seen alive. Adams said she believes Richard was out on a jetty near the pier and must have slipped off and hit his head on a jagged rock as a tide swept in.

“He loved Ventura,” she said, “and he loved being near the pier, so to me the memorial is kind of symbolic that he liked this area.”

One of the first names on the memorial plaque is that of a Ventura man in his late 20s who is dying of AIDS, Marita Clark said. He approached Clark and asked to have his own name placed on the “In Memoriam” plaque.

“That one was really hard,” she said. “He is facing his own mortality, and it forced everyone else around (in the office) to do that too.”

Clark said she believes the man’s name represents the only living person found on the memorial plaque.

For 59-year-old Stephen Flores, a fifth-generation Ventura resident, it was the wish to do something for his grandfather that drew him to make a memorial donation.

Flores bought a plank in memory of his grandfather, a Teamster from 1917 to about 1925 who loaded and hauled lumber on a horse-drawn wagon from ships that pulled up to the pier, which at that time served as a wharf.

“He died before I was born,” Flores said. But the pier served as a place to remember the grandfather Flores never knew.

“As we were growing up, the pier was a place for us to go and fish,” Flores said. “I knew that my grandfather worked on it. Naturally, I feel a strong belonging to the pier. It’s part of Ventura.”

Renee Evans of Fillmore also has a nostalgic attachment to the pier.

On a recent afternoon, Evans cast lines off the end of the Ventura Pier, her first fishing excursion with her 14-year-old son, Scott.

She said she has considered donating to the pier, and may still, because she treasures fond memories from her youth when she fished at the pier with her father. “We used to fish through the cracks in the pier,” she said. “My dad wouldn’t allow us to fish near the edge. He was afraid we’d fall off.

“It’s nice to have it back--it’s like an old friend came back,” she said. “It’s going to be a lot of memories for a lot of young kids, just like I’ve got.”

FYI (East Ventura County Edition, B4)

The cost of purchasing a plank on the pier and having a name inscribed on a granite plaque is $120, plus a $5 processing fee. For more information on the “Pier Into the Future Campaign,” call Ventura City Hall at 658-4726.