Township Park.
I really loved this place. I almost died her once but I still loved it.
I enjoyed walking up and down the shoreline picking up small bits of beach glass and smoothed stones. I liked the ones that had rippley green lines in them. I found them listed in a book as being California Jade. They reminded me more of malachite.
Once I saw a beautiful odd shade of green in the water. I reached for it only to find it was some kid's wad of chewing gum.
I found an odd piece of something that looked like aluminum and didn't weigh much but it also look like it had bubbles made into it. I took it home and Tom said it probably came from a boat that had burned on the water, maybe exploding with so much heat that the metal had melted and boiled but the water had cooled it to what I was then holding in my hand.
Sometimes I found coins but nothing old, no gold doubloons for sure. I did find a mans gold ring with a diamond in the center. I didn't know it was a diamond at first. I thought it was cut glass or zircon. The gold did look real but it was only gold plate which still wasn't bad.
We had an old mirror at home and Tom scratched the surface with the stone. He declared it a diamond and it went into the basement never to be seen by me again.
This is on the edge looking out at the lighthouse. I don't think its there anymore. I looked it up on the internet and there were three lighthouses at different times. I think this was the last one but I'm not sure.
The last one was sold at auction. The man who bought it had to put up a security bond to live in it. I looked at some google images and I don't see it there today. I didn't save that one but I did take some screen shots of others.
This one shows the park side closest to the harbor. Where that red star is would have been a lot smaller of an area back then. It didn't go out to the right side either but just made it way out to the lake straight out.
Sometimes Diane and I, and once Sue and I would take Tommy and what ever other kid we had around us that day over in here to play in the really shallow water. Sometimes it was six or seven inches and sometimes a foot and a half. It depended on the tide. We liked to play in it because it was safe and not many other people came there. The bonus was that we didn't have to burn our bare feet in the blistering sand.
This day it was Sue and me and Tommy. We walked over from the beach side. I didn't want to lose my keys so I hung them on a chain around my neck and tucked them into my bra. Well, you know how cold water makes "things" shrink? I lost my keys out of my bra. The chain broke and the keys were somewhere in the muck.
I said, "OK, don't anybody move till I find them." I stretched out in the water and floated. Using my hands to not only anchor me but to feel every inch of the dirty bottom. It took me maybe a half hour but I found them. I could just hear the yelling if I didn't find them. I let them play a bit more but I sat on the bank with the keys clutched tight in my hands.
Those little side streets didn't exist back then. There was a big hill there and you could park at the top and walk down a metal stair way to the beach area. It cut down on the burned feet. A lot of that beach area itself is new.
You see these waves at this end but up near the beach they don't look so bad.
Here they just ripple in. Just enough to please a kid. None of those big paved parking lots were there then either.
I have no idea what those things are on the beach that look like holes.
I'm not sure I ever saw the beach this clean. There was usually piles of debris that washed in as well as driftwood piled up in places. In the spring a crew would come down and pile it all up in one huge pile, set it ablaze and wait for the tide to clear away the ashes.
I used to jokingly call this "vagina" beach because of all the plastic douche bottles and tampon applicators that washed up on shore. People said that the ones on boats just tossed their trash overboard.
A few times a year a health person would come out and check various places to be sure the water was safe enough for humans to play in.
That "cut" you see there was closed a few times. It would happen if there wasn't enough water washing it out to see and the bacteria count was climbing.