A Pier Into the Past : Reliving a childhood vacation spot, where happy haunts have hardly changed a bit

This was a destination that I hadn’t thought about in years, not since my family spent golden summer weeks there when I was a child. But when my sister, Linda, asked me if I could think of some place out of the ordinary for a quick getaway for just us two, it was the Seal Beach Inn & Gardens that first came to mind. I had picked up a brochure and squirreled it away, thinking: “Gee, this looks nice. Maybe I’ll go there someday.”

Wedged between the upscale, million-dollar world of Newport Beach and Balboa Island to the south, and the bustling harbor of Long Beach to the north, this small enclave is a nearly perfect piece of California beach town, past tense.

The inn is the oldest continuous business in town, operating since 1922. It has been owned for the last 10 years by an enterprising and enthusiastic antiques collector and gardener named Marjorie Schmaehl. From the bare bones of the original classic Pacific Coast Highway auto court, Schmaehl has created a French Mediterranean-style oasis surrounded by gardens.

All of the bedroom suites are named for different flowers, and our room, the Camellia ($185 for two), had the comfortable luxury of a guest room in a friend’s home. The inn offers package rates, includes breakfast and is within walking distance of just about every place in town. There is a secluded swimming pool in a garden courtyard.

Linda and I left our car parked at the inn and walked the three short blocks to the commercial center of Seal Beach. It was like walking into a piece of the past. Where other California coastal towns have been developed to within an inch of their lives, Seal Beach was still recognizably the town of my childhood. Made up of one main street (called Main Street) and lined with buildings that number their age in decades rather than years, it’s a town of homemade ice cream, fish freshly caught off the pier and barbecues at sunset.

It didn’t take very long to look in the shops, particularly an antiques barn set squarely in the middle of Main Street. Then we followed the extension of the street west to where it ran into Seal Beach Pier, the longest pier in Southern California.

The Seal Beach Pier isn’t an amusement park like the one in Santa Monica. It doesn’t have an assortment of bars and restaurants like Santa Barbara. What it does have is Ruby’s Diner at the very end, a compact block of a building stuck down like an afterthought among the fishermen and their improvised rods and bait buckets.

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For Linda and me, Ruby’s continued the thread of warped time, because its theme is the 1950s and, sitting in the window watching the fishermen throw their lines into the surging sea below, it was easy to imagine that we had become our parents and the clock had turned back 40 years. Ruby’s Diner specializes in hamburgers and French fries and milkshakes and root beer floats, all the food that we have tried for years to stay strictly away from. But I ordered a cheeseburger for $4.39 and an “itsy-bitsy sundae” (hot fudge, of course!) for $1.59. Linda had a quesadilla with salsa for $3.65, and a root beer float for $1.75, and we sighed over the food as over childhood come again.

When we had first driven into Seal Beach off the 405 Freeway that morning, the fog was wrapped around the town in thick gray clouds. But as we ate, the sun came out. Walking back down the pier, we watched bodysurfers ride the gentle swells that broke beyond the barnacle-encrusted pilings and the breakwater.

We had a choice of afternoon things to do. There was Rancho Los Alamitos on Bixby Road in Long Beach. There was the old Glide’er Inn at 1400 Pacific Coast Highway in Seal Beach, where Charles Lindbergh once hung out when he was flying from the airfield across the road. There were harbor cruises in nearby Long Beach.

“Let’s just take a drive,” my sister suggested. So we drove north to Belmont Shore, the popular shopping and eating area along Long Beach’s 2nd Street, and looked for the summer house that our parents had once rented. We never found it, but as Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “ ‘Tis better to journey hopefully than to arrive.”

At sunset, we decided to take a swim. The Seal Beach Inn was only half a block from a beach so unspoiled that the number of people on it could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The bodysurfers and the sunbathers had all gone home. We swam in the blue-brown swells while lazy bronze strands of kelp and brilliant-green seaweed floated gently by.

For dinner, Linda and I took the advice of the Seal Beach Inn’s concierge, Virginia, and decided to check out a Seal Beach restaurant tradition on 5th and Main, Walt’s Wharf, owned by a retired dentist named Walt Babcock. Walt’s has several claims to fame, among them the fact that he owns the vineyards that grow the grapes for many of his table wines.

While Linda munched on oak-grilled filet mignon, served over onions with Cabernet Sauvignon enhanced demi glace ($17.95), I tried the Boston clam chowder ($2.25) and an appetizer of beef carpaccio with capers, parsley, shallots and shaved pecorino cheese ($6.95). The bread was hot, fresh, sourdough and delicious. Sated and satisfied, we walked back to the inn beneath a full moon.

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The next morning Linda and I took full advantage of the buffet breakfast included in the price of our room. An elaborate choice of fresh orange juice and fruit, homemade Belgian waffles, quiche and coffee cake made choosing difficult. We ate out by the pool and listened to the busy twittering of birds (the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach holds a national wildlife sanctuary) and to the placid splash of the French cast-iron fountain imported from Paris, which displays a graceful nymph hovering over a pool.

Before we checked out and headed back to L.A., there was one more place that we were curious about. The Gondola Getaway was started 14 years ago as an experimental business venture by two students at USC and has done very well. Students work as gondoliers, singing Italian love songs as they guide visitors through the canals of Naples, another small enclave nearby.

Small wooden tables in the replica gondolas hold baskets of bread and cheese and salami, and ice buckets and glasses are provided if you bring your own wine. As the multimillion-dollar waterfront dwellings of Naples float by, with a yacht in every slip, it doesn’t look much like Venice, but as a California interpretation of the Grand Canal, it’s a lot of fun.

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Budget for Two

Gasoline: $8.00

Seal Beach Inn: $185.00

Lunch, Ruby’s Diner: $14.00

Dinner, Walt’s Wharf: $35.00

The Gondola Getaway: $55.00

FINAL TAB: $297.00

Seal Beach Inn, 212 5th St., tel. (310) 493-2416. Rancho Los Alamitos, 6400 Bixby Hill Road, tel. (310) 431-3541. Walt’s Wharf, 201 Main St., tel. (310) 598-4433. Gondola Getaway, 5437 E. Ocean Blvd., tel. (310) 433-9595.

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