Outdoors : Discovering a New World : Over Last 60 Years, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium Has Developed Into Place Where Children Gaze in Wonderment at Creatures From the Sea

John Olguin spent part of his day, as he often does, watching the children go by, wide-eyed and full of wonder.

They hardly noticed the bearded, gray-haired man as they walked past him by the hundreds. They were busy discovering a new world--one displaying its brilliance before their very eyes.

Being first- and second-graders, mostly from inland schools, some had never seen the ocean before, much less the critters that live in it.

Through the glass walls at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, they marveled at the sand sharks and small rays scurrying about in the sand, just as they had marveled at the life-size model of a great white shark looming menacingly over their heads as they entered the building.

They stood face to face with moray eels, which were sticking their rubbery necks out from the rocks and showing off their razor-sharp teeth. The children reacted in kind, showing off their teeth.

At the tide pool, they touched things as foreign to them as aliens from outer space. And the animals they touched--the colorful sea stars, spiny urchins and flowing anemones--definitely had that alien look.

Cara Heneline, a second-grader from St. John Fisher elementary school in Rancho Palos Verdes, touched a purple urchin and let out an ear-piercing shriek as she quickly drew her hand back. But soon she was walking the length of the shallow pool, happily touching everything in sight.

Olguin, a fixture at the facility for more than 50 years, took particular delight in all this because without him, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium might never have evolved from a card-table display at Venice Beach into the hottest ticket in town for school-age children.

So popular is the aquarium that there is a waiting list of more than a year for field trips there. More than 150 kids an hour and considerably more than 100,000 a year pass through the building’s narrow halls, which are lined with displays featuring the same marine life that thrives in the real ocean just off Cabrillo Beach.

“We have kids who come all the way from Bakersfield --Bakersfield, “ said Olguin, 74, director emeritus of the facility in the back of a parking lot at Cabrillo Beach. “They get up at 5 a.m. and sleep on the bus on the way here. I said to one of the teachers, ‘Why do you come all the way from Bakersfield?’ and she said, ‘Yours is the only museum we can go to that speaks on their level. You folks are all down on their level and speak their language.’ ”

That began with Olguin, who before his recent retirement tried to run the facility through the eyes of a child, involving them in the exhibits and programs.

And as part of the celebration this year of the aquarium’s 60th birthday, which includes plans for expansion into a full-blown aquarium, complete with a kelp forest exhibit and live sea otters, Olguin on Feb. 25 will conduct a slide show and discussion, taking a look back at its evolution.

It was begun, sort of, by Bob Foster, a lifeguard working at Venice Beach in the early 1930s. Foster collected shells, crabs, fish, birds and plants--all put in glass jars or boxes. Eventually, the collection was moved to the Sunset Beach Bathhouse. And in 1935, it was moved into the vacant Cabrillo Beach Bathhouse, which like other bathhouses was becoming obsolete.

“That’s largely because of the car,” Olguin said recently, while sitting in the aquarium’s library. “The Model A came in and people no longer used bathhouses. They changed their clothes at home. People used to come by rail, there was the Sunset Beach Bathhouse, the Redondo Beach Plunge, the Long Beach Plunge and then the Cabrillo Bathhouse.

“At the end of a streetcar line they always built a bathhouse. The Big Red Car brought people from Cucamonga, Monrovia, Glendora, L.A., and during summer people would pile into the Red Car, check in their clothes at the bathhouse, put on a suit, take a swim, come back and have a fish dinner on the seashore. Then they’d jump in the Red Car and go back to all the outlying cities.”

Foster’s display became the Cabrillo Beach Museum and William Lloyd, a retired dentist, became its director until retiring in 1949.

Olguin, a Cabrillo Beach lifeguard captain at the time, took over as director and began developing programs that would make the facility more attractive.

“I enrolled in various biology and oceanography classes at universities and junior colleges and soaked up as much knowledge as I could,” he said. “I told them, ‘I don’t care about the credit, all I want to do is learn.’ ”

He did, and the expanding display grew slowly but consistently, both in size and popularity.

But Olguin couldn’t seem to get to the children.

“I realized I was dull,” he said.

Then he developed a teaching technique that earned him the nickname, “Do it! Do it! Man.”

Olguin had the children use their hands to mimic the movements of the animals they studied, from jellyfish to sharks. He developed exhibits that featured a hands-on approach that became so popular that children, brought by their teachers, flocked to the facility.

Many credit Olguin, but he credits grunion and whales.

Little was known about either back then.

“I remember we had a heat wave,” he said. “I had to go back out and do lifeguard duties and this little girl comes up and said to me, ‘Mister, what kind of fishies do I have in my cup?’ I said, ‘They look like polliwogs. Where’d you get ‘em honey?’ and she said, ‘In the ocean.’

“Turns out she had reached down in the sand; they were coming up from the sand. I read up on them, but back then there wasn’t much. I found two books and determined they were grunion.”

Olguin developed a variety of grunion programs--complete with nighttime grunion hunts on the beach--and they quickly became popular attractions at the facility.

As for the whales, Olguin realized that because of their predictable migration routes through the Catalina Channel, they would be a natural for the children. He started a program from the beach, using his fellow lifeguards as sentinels.

“My lifeguards were on duty and I told them to call me whenever they saw one passing by,” Olguin said.

They blew horns instead, signaling the arrival of whales off the coast. The children didn’t know what the sound was.

“I would just say, ‘Well, boys and girls, we could talk about shells, but how would you like to see a real live whale?’ I would lead them out the back door and then I’d look over and the lifeguard would point to the last place the whale came up. I’d look over there, this way or that way, and say, ‘OK, everybody point where I’m pointing, and they’d all point and then the whale would pop up and they all would go, ‘How did you know?’

“Well, one time a little girl came back with her mother and father on a Saturday and asked me what time the whales were going to come by . . . and I couldn’t tell her.”

Olguin was the first to organize regularly scheduled, narrated trips aboard L.A. Harbor boats and became known as the father of modern whale watching. (The first whale-watching trip was run at Belmont Shore in 1929, but the “hunts,” as they were called because the participants played the role of whalers, were not run with any regularity.)

Overseeing the museum, and running its various programs, eventually became too much for Olguin. The aquarium was and is part of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, but the city wouldn’t pay for additional employees and Olguin refused to charge an entry fee to the museum, where admission is still free.

He decided he needed volunteers.

“I advertised in the (local paper): ‘Volunteers Needed, Cabrillo Museum. Anyone who wants to be a volunteer and learn how to talk to children please show up at 9 o’clock Monday morning at the museum.’ ”

The only one there was his mother.

“I came down on my bicycle and I said, ‘Mother, what are you doing here?’ She said, ‘I read in the paper you needed help, Son. I came down to volunteer.’ I said, ‘OK, Mother, you can answer my telephones.’ ”

That was in 1960. The Sierra Club soon chipped in with volunteers, the local school district’s PTA then helped out and by the early ‘70s, there were hundreds of volunteers doing everything from directing tours to mailing notices to members. As is the case today, funds came largely from membership dues and donations.

Bruce Monroe, 64, is in his third year as a volunteer. His wife, Corinne, has volunteered her services for four years. Both had extensive training.

“We don’t get paid and we wouldn’t come back week after week if it wasn’t a good experience,” Bruce Monroe said. “It’s a real good experience because the kids are full of energy and curious and they have a sense of humor. . . . It keeps me feeling young.”

Volunteer Ann Mueller, a three-year volunteer who helps out every Friday, said her reward is watching children’s eyes light up with each new discovery.

“Many have never seen sea animals or any sea life before,” she said, taking a break from an exhibit that features a race between a sea star, brittle star and sea urchin. “Many of them, even though they live in California, have never seen the ocean.”

Thanks to the volunteers, and to people like Olguin, that seems to be changing every day.