Ahoy, Mateys: Everyone Out of the Water

The faded page of the high school yearbook resembles countless others past and present.

It pictures a bunch of kids clowning around on an outdoor stairway. One is wearing a fancy white blazer and tie; another is dressed like Hugh Hefner -- complete with a pipe; a third is encased in a rigid-looking straitjacket. One of the boys is holding a banner that proudly proclaims the group’s identity: “Villa Park High School Yacht Club. The Only Yacht Club Worth a Ship.”

The students posing for Page 117 of the 1982-83 Odyssey, however, are different from the denizens of most high school yearbooks in at least one respect: Though unaware of it at the time, they were giving birth to an odd yet enduring tradition.

“It was kind of tongue-in-cheek,” admits Erik Kuli, now 37, who founded the sporting club with five friends. He’s the one wearing the straitjacket in the picture. He doesn’t wear it anymore, but some might argue that he should: He also helps put on the most public spectacle spawned by the long-dead club -- next month’s Villa Park boat parade, the only pageant of seagoing vessels, residents of this landlocked city believe, that takes place entirely on land.

“If Newport Beach can do it,” Kuli says, “why not Villa Park?”

Why not, indeed? Like its neighbor to the south -- whose harbor and canals host Southern California’s oldest, longest and most famous annual boat parade -- this little city near the junction of the Costa Mesa and Riverside freeways boasts a high per capita income -- in excess of $100,000 per family per year -- and a median home price of $750,000.

In other words, one nonresident recently observed, “if you can afford to live there, you can also afford a boat.”

Unlike Newport Beach, however, the county’s tiniest city -- with only 2.1 square miles of territory and 6,000 residents -- contains no bodies of water and is about 20 miles from the sea. But that didn’t dissuade Kuli and five buddies from planning Villa Park’s first and only yacht club at his 16th birthday party in 1981.

“We were all involved in student government,” he recalls, “and knew that there was lots of money in the budget for school clubs. We thought that yachting was sort of an upper-crust thing -- we were preppy types and felt that it sounded better than bowling or fishing. We would have called it the golf club, but they already had [one]. We thought of calling it the beer-drinking club but figured we couldn’t get away with that.”

When the history of Villa Park is written, it should be noted that none of the original initiators of the city’s yachting tradition were boat owners themselves. They were, however, people with friends in high places. So they wrote a constitution, got a teacher to sponsor them, persuaded the student senate to approve the idea and -- voila! -- they had $400 and a page reserved in the yearbook.

“We were kind of thumbing our noses at Newport Beach,” he says.

Yet thanks to the impressive embossed stationery that the club members had printed, they landed invitations to that city’s Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club, where they had their pictures taken aboard Newport Harbor yachts.

The seeds for Villa Park’s proud tradition of seamanship were planted. One of the club members’ fathers quickly came up with the idea of the parade.

“A bunch of us were at the big Women’s League Christmas dance at the Disneyland Hotel,” recalls Rich Freschi, now a city councilman. “We were all in kind of a celebratory mood.... Chuck came up with the idea and ... by the end of the evening, we had a commitment for 15 to 20 boats.”

In fact, 38 boats turned out for the first Great Villa Park Dry Land Yacht Parade in December 1982.

“It was a Doo Dah-type parade,” Freschi says. “Everyone who had a boat pulled it on a trailer. We had guys pulling Jet Skis, one kid made a yellow submarine and someone was being pulled on a skateboard behind a truck to simulate water skiing.”

The following year’s boat parade attracted even more entries: about 75. “It was huge,” one city official recalls. “It was a hit.” Then the thing just died.

The memory of the event lingered, however, in the hearts and minds of its participants. And 15 years later, after Freschi had been elected to the council by, among other things, promising greater community involvement, he led a drive to bring it back.

The modern parades -- which have taken place each December since 1998 -- bring out about 3,000 spectators to watch more than 50 boats being dragged through city streets on trailers, heralded by baton twirlers, drum majors and marching bands.

In addition to serious yachts as large as 26 feet, organizers say, the pageant has featured kayaks, fishing boats, surfboards and even an amphibious car festooned with holiday lights. Recently the rules were expanded to include such land-based vehicles as a huge yellow cement truck.

And, like their neighbors on Balboa Island, many Villa Park residents have taken to throwing annual boat-watching parties in their homes along the event’s 1.25-mile route.

“It’s the kind of thing you do in a small town,” says Karen Holthe, chairwoman of this year’s extravaganza, scheduled for Dec. 8. “The purpose is to make us closer.”

So far, those neighbors haven’t included members of the Newport Beach City Council who, Freschi swears, have been invited but have never shown up. “We wanted them to come and see if we do ours as well as they do theirs,” he says.

Newport Beach Mayor Tod W. Ridgeway begs to differ. “We’ve never been invited,” he flatly states. In fact, he says, he didn’t even know of the county’s only inland boat parade until a reporter’s recent call. “I wouldn’t snub Villa Park,” Ridgeway says. “They’re nice people there.”

But would he actually attend their parade? Well, the mayor demurred, “that would depend on scheduling.”

Richard Luehrs, president of the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce -- which sponsors that city’s annual five-night boat parade, attracting close to a million viewers -- went a step further. “I don’t see it as a particular threat,” he said of the smaller city’s smaller parade. He even extended a cordial invitation: “If anyone wants to participate in the Villa Park parade and then put their boat in the water, we’d be happy to have them in ours.”

Ah, but there is one tiny stipulation. “Provided it will float,” he added hastily.