San Pedro Looks Back on Past

It’s a gloriously illustrated picture book--but one that will never grace anyone’s living room coffee table.

It’s a richly detailed history book--but one that will never find a place on any library’s reference shelf.

The fat volume that Kuzma Domancich carries around these days in San Pedro is both. But he says the best words to describe it are “order book.”

Domancich’s book is a loose-leaf binder stuffed with nearly 500 photos that are chronologically organized and numbered. The pictures depict the harbor town’s early days and are the basis for an unusual history project that is raising scholarship money for local high school students.

Enlarged copies of the old pictures are for sale. And more than 1,000 have been purchased by local residents who are curious about the old days--and by local history buffs who are using them to create a “Fisherman’s Hall of Fame” commemorating San Pedro’s early ties to the sea.

The photographs illuminate a time that could be simultaneously harsh and beautiful.

There are images of a funeral service for sailors killed by a 1924 ship explosion and of the business district damaged by the 1933 earthquake. A few pages away are scenes of a 1949 snowstorm that blanketed miles of untouched grazing land on the next-door Palos Verdes Peninsula hills and of a visit 63 years ago by the historic American sailing ship Old Ironsides.

Other photos are striking in the way they show how ordinary San Pedro residents once lived and worked.

There are pictures of the 1920s-era White Point Hotel, whose hot springs were popular with local bathers until the natural steam vents were pinched shut by the 1933 earthquake. There is a view of locals looking over a Pan Am Clipper airliner that landed in the harbor in 1935. A big seller is a 1953 photo of a drunk being tossed out of the long-closed Shanghai Red saloon near the waterfront.

“I’ve learned a lot about this place from these pictures,” said Domancich, a 74-year-old retired gas station owner and San Pedro native whom his friends call “Matty.”

He discovered the legend of Dead Man’s Island (so named because six people were supposedly buried there) when one of his former teachers ordered a copy of its picture.

“My high school civics teacher, Nick Zorotovich, said his first job when he got out of UCLA in 1928 was shoveling rocks from Dead Man’s Island into a barge so they could be used for the extension of Terminal Island,” Domancich said.

“Some great pictures were taken in the old days. And now they’re coming out for people to see.”

They’ve come out of steamer trunks in long-forgotten attics and from dusty cardboard boxes piled in garages. In fact, word of Domancich’s collection has set off treasure hunts in homes all over town.

“Yesterday I was over at a 90-year-old gentleman’s house and he had these in a box in his closet,” Domancich said, cradling a dog-eared and yellowing stack of photographs. Among them: an 1892 view of San Pedro’s first drugstore, a 1911 look at a hotel converted into the town’s hospital and 1910 team photos of San Pedro High School baseball and rugby players.

The collection has grown from the handful of old photos that started it all eight years ago. They had been gathered by Leon Callaway, a Harbor Department construction inspector who is an avid amateur photographer.

Callaway made copies of the old pictures in a darkroom built in a spare bedroom at his home. He offered prints for sale as a community fund-raiser during San Pedro’s 1988-89 centennial celebration.

More old pictures began trickling in, prompting the 62-year-old Callaway to repeat the photo sale for a 1995 Chamber of Commerce event.

“When it was over, Matty said: ‘Let’s give it a try selling them as an ongoing thing,’ ” Callaway said. “Matty likes to get out among them and do that sort of thing.”

Callaway printed up small copies of the photos for the order book, while Domancich arranged to contribute proceeds from sales to a scholarship fund run by the San Pedro Elks Lodge.

The sales--$10 for an 8-by-10-inch copy, $60 for a 20-by-24-inch blowup--net about $300 a month in aid earmarked for college-bound students at San Pedro, Mary Star of the Sea, Banning and Narbonne high schools, Domancich said.

The biggest sale so far has been to the San Pedro branch of Coast Federal Bank. That’s where the Fisherman’s Hall of Fame is taking shape around a wall lined with photos depicting San Pedro’s once-thriving fishing fleet.

So far there are about 130 pictures of boats and crew members. And more are arriving weekly, according to bank officials.

Former fisherman Rubin Acalin--a childhood friend of Domancich--last week donated pictures of three of his family’s old boats.

“They were in a box we hadn’t unpacked,” said Acalin, 71, who moved to Lincoln, Neb., seven years ago after retiring from deep-sea fishing.

“One of them is the Garfield. I fished on it, and I lost a brother who disappeared at sea from the Garfield in 1947,” Acalin said.

Bank branch manager Barbara Mancusi, also a San Pedro native, said the old photos evoke plenty of memories.

“People react very emotionally to them,” she said. “Many times people were killed and boats were lost out there. A lot of times you see people standing here looking at the pictures and crying.

“This is something that should have been done years and years ago, honoring the fishing fleet. If Matty hadn’t walked in that day with his big book of old pictures, we’d never have gotten started.”