Lake Mudge Chronicle - Desert Wind Graphics

February 2011
Lake Mudge Chronicle
A publication of the Southern California Regional
Organization of Tough Individuals
Inside
Editor’s Page
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Going for Shipshape
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3 Who Made It Happen!
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Salton Sea Museum
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Sick Salton Snaps
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Volume 3
Number 1
Greetings, One and All! This is your Master Editor Sam Hallmark and I’d like to welcome
you to issue Number 1, Volume 3 of the Lake Mudge Chronicle. Published sporadically, but we
are shooting for somewhere between 6-12 times a year! This newsletter is a publication of the
Southern California Regional Organization of Tough Individuals (S.C.R.O.T.I.),
a loosely organized group of like minded adventurers, outdoorsmen, bon vivants and lunatics with
a deep and abiding interest in the deserts of Southern California and the strange and lonely places
found therein. E-mail all submissions to the Master Editor at [email protected].
Lake Mudge is a real place. It may not be a real name, but it does really exist.
It’s a place of fragile beauty and historic significance. As such, we have no desire to promote
nor advertise it’s true identity or location. You figure it out!
~ Master Editor
Enough said. Happy Trails!
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February 2011
~ Going for Shipshape ~
Riverside County plans to restore the long-abandoned North Shore Yacht Club
BY ANN JAPENG
North Shore Yacht Club on the Salton Sea. View of the original building from the marina.
COURTESY HOLT ARCHITECTS
At the old North Shore Yacht Club on the Salton Sea, broken aluminum siding bangs ominously in the wind
while pigeons fly in and out through the holes in the building. Apocalyptic graffiti — “Many lose the search for
home” — ornaments the abandoned pool. Yet, despite the appearance of hopelessness, this classic symbol
of The Wasteland might again become an emblem of hope and prosperity — as was originally intended by its
creator, modernist architect Albert Frey.
It’s not just a wrecked building we’re talking about. The entire North Shore community has been battered by the
economy. To make things worse, the Salton Sea itself has been dismissed and maligned by national media.
Given these odds, is redemption possible for Frey’s yacht club? It may seem unlikely, yet Riverside County
has committed nearly $4 million to restore the building. Architect Tim Holt of Rancho Mirage has completed the
plans; and the county is taking bids for construction. Once a bid is accepted, it should be about 18 months to a
new yacht club, says county spokesman Tom Freeman.
The revamped club will serve as a senior center, community center, and museum — the latter under the
direction of North Shore preservationist Jennie Kelly, who has already helped bring the long-extinct boat races
back to the sea. The new museum is where the tale of Albert Frey’s shimmering yacht club — with its fantastic
ups and downs — will finally be told.
North Shore has always been the premier site on the sea because of its topographical charms. Highway 111
and the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks make a graceful arc through town. The Salton Sea State Recreation
Area winds for 14 miles along shore, luring campers with its secret nooks. Above and behind town rise the
comely Orocopia and Chocolate mountains, favorites of early landscape painters. Looking across from the Vshaped yacht club jetty (hand-built with rocks from the Chocolates), expansive views take in the Santa Rosas,
San Gorgonio, and San Jacinto peaks and much of Anza Borrego Desert State Park.
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Innkeeper Gus Eilers got North Shore rolling with boat and bathtub races as far back as 1927; but it was Palm Springs
cowboy Trav Rogers and oilman Ray Ryan who brought Las Vegas-style glamour to the sea in the shape of the yacht
club. Rogers ran the Old Ranch Club in Palm Springs. Ryan, a flamboyant gambler who later died in a ganglandstyle slaying, owned the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs and developed the Bermuda Dunes Racquet Club. The pair
enlisted then-little-known architect Albert Frey to design their dream resort on the landlocked sea.
Frey was obviously delighted by the irony of building a yacht club in a desert. His playful design looked like a futuristic
aluminum ship nosing through the surf, complete with catwalks, a flying bridge, masts, and lanyards. A small upper
floor with porthole windows served as the crow’s nest.
When the club opened in 1962, Indian Wells resident Dan Callahan remembers towing along 23 guests. His family
owned the Desert Air Hotel in Palm Desert. He used to fly down from the family airstrip, taxi right up to the yacht club
clubhouse, eat lunch, and fly home. Callahan was so taken by the club’s promise that he even sold $90 memberships
to Coachella Valley boaters. “I knew this thing was going to be big,” he says, noting that his sales technique was to
look for a boat in the driveway, then ring the doorbell.
By the late ’60s, the yacht club harbor was thick with boats, and the Salton Sea claimed more visitors annually than
Yosemite National Park. The collapse began in the 1970s with floods that broke apart the jetty. A load of agricultural
runoff, caused by flooding, polluted the water. The increasing salinity of the sea clogged boats’ cooling systems. The
boaters started migrating east to the Colorado River.
Kelly, who moved to North Shore in 1984, remembers the gleaming hulk as a forgotten building, used for occasional
AA meetings. By the early ’90s it was shuttered, the old Commodore Room ceded to skateboarders and runaways.
The county purchased the decayed building from the nonprofit Desert Alliance for Community Empowerment. For
Holt, the job of drawing up plans has been like channeling Frey: “We felt his touch all the way through the project.”
His team (including architect John Anthony Rivera, who worked on the restoration of Frey’s Tramway Gas Station in
Palm Springs, now a Palm Springs Visitors Center) had access to Frey’s original working drawings for the yacht club
from the architecture and design archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Records reveal that Frey was
involved with every phase of construction.
Despite the whimsy and flair Frey put into the building, Holt came to see the architect ultimately as a down-to-earth
craftsman. “He was very practical,” he says. “His plans were straight-forward.”
Holt and his crew found seven or eight layers of old paint obscuring the original salmon-tinted masonry. Because
Frey intended for the siding to be exposed, all the layers will be scraped away. The corrugated aluminum and
Fiberglas siding was beyond repair, a discovery that sent Holt on a lengthy national search before he was able to find
replacements.
As the restoration project proceeds, Kelly, founder of the East Valley Historical Society, has been reassembling the
club’s past, collecting old yacht club deck chairs and matchbooks. She recently received a stash of memorabilia from
Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer, documentary filmmakers who produced Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea.
Kelly believes in the sea, no matter how many times glossy magazines call it freakish or forbidding. While others may
doubt the county can pull off this transformation, she says, “It’s a for-sure, real thing to me.”
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North Shore Yacht Club on the recent decline.
Amazing restoration completed in July, 2010.
February 2011
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THE ARCHITECT: ALBERT FREY
North Shore Yacht Club builders Ray Ryan and
Trav Rogers enlisted a then little-known architect, Albert
Frey, to design their resort. Frey, remembered today as
one of the most famous modernists, went with a nautical
theme and added heavy doses of fantasy. He designed the
club to look like a great aluminum ship nosing through the
surf, complete with catwalks, a flying bridge, masts and
lanyards. The ground floor was made of concrete block; the
small upper floor, designed like a crow’s nest with porthole
windows, housed the lounge called the Compass Room.
For Frey the design was an expression of his sense
of play and joy in architecture, according to his biographer
Joseph Rosa. Frey also designed a house as a prototype for
a planned community at North Shore, as well as plans for
the North Shore Beach Estates project. (The plans are in the
archives of the UC Santa Barbara Architecture and Design
Collection).
THE VISIONARY: TRAV ROGERS
Trav Rogers was an affable businessman who ran the Old Ranch Club in Palm Springs, along with a bar
called the Mink and Manure Riding Club (women in mink coats danced with Palm Springs dudes). He greeted
people with three hellos: “Hello, Hello, Hello!” A member of the elite cowboy society of Palm Springs, Rogers
rode in the Desert Circus and was a member of the Vaqueros del Desierto and Rancheros Visitadores.
He took a liking to the North Shore area, according to Dan Callahan of Indian Wells, and broached the
subject of a club to money-man Ray Ryan: Trav says: ‘We could build a yacht club and also do a lot of riding’.
Ray Ryan says: ‘That’s fine let’s do it.’
North Shore resident Dick Schall adds: “Trav Rogers was the go-getter; Ray Ryan was the money.”
Rogers’ daughter, Jimmie Emmons, now 82 and living in Rancho Santa Fe, says her father picked the Yacht Club
location for its unrivaled scenery. “Daddy took his horse out there and he’d ride the Chocolate Mountains and
the aqueduct. He’d go out on the Sea in the little Yahtzee (the family’s pet name for their little aluminum boat).
He’d been eyeing the area for quite some time.”
THE MONEY MAN: RAY RYAN
While Trav Rogers had the vision of a tony club rising in the desert, millionaire oilman Ray Ryan was
crucial to the plan’s realization. Owner of the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs and the Bermuda Dunes Racquet
Club, he was a flamboyant gambler and desert booster. Ryan would later come to a spectacularly bad end, blown
up in a parked Lincoln Continental in Evansville, Indiana. Ryan had IRS troubles and had testified against
mobsters. His murder was a suspected gangland slaying.
The developers bought the land in 1958, and then had trouble getting water to the site. Gus Eilers, the
resort owner who came before, had to ship water in by tank truck. The developers ended up bringing a pipeline
all the way from Mecca to serve the planned subdivision of North Shore Estates.
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Continued on page 6
February 2011
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SELLING THE CLUB
The buzz was felt all the way to LA: A big shiny yacht club, the fanciest place in the desert, was about
to open at North Shore. Dan Callahan supplemented his income from his real estate business by selling $90
memberships (membership perks included access to the boat ramp and clubhouse), pocketing $12 on each sale.
His sales strategy was to drive through Coachella Valley neighborhoods looking for boats parked in driveways.
When he located a boat, he’d knock on the front door of the house. “I sold memberships by the ton,” he says.
Marketers made Callahan’s job easier with their North Shore slogans: “The Glamour Capital of the Salton Sea”,
“The Salton Riviera”.
North Shore resident Gladys Fei put together a promotional show along with Merlyn Bogue, a comedian
and cornet player who went by the name Ish Kabibble. Later, the Beach Boys would entertain at the club; Jerry
Lewis and other entertainers came to hang out at the desert sea. With two miles of shoreline, pennants flapping
from the mast and yardarms, and the giant “V” of the Jetty jutting west into the water--it was a heady setting.
You could stand on the jetty and look across a beautiful warm ocean to the Santa Rosas in the distance. The
Mediterranean came to mind.
In the 1950’s you could stand in 15-feet of water and “see the bottom as clear as could be,” says part-time
North Shore resident Jerry Horn. Jerry courted his wife, Diane, at the Sea, skiing across from the West Shore to
her family’s place at North Shore, and then skiing home at twilight. The commute took 30-35 minutes. “You’d ski
till it was almost dark and you’d hate to come in,” says Horn.
Original architectual concept for North Shore Beach Estates from the late 1950’s.
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The Mission of the Salton Sea History Museum (SSHM) is two-fold. The museum will spotlight the
physical, cultural and natural history of the Salton Sea and surrounding areas. In addition we will promote
available options for restoration of the historic Salton Sea that ultimately maintains both the lake and salinity
levels.
The SSHM will collect, preserve, record and provide access to its historical collections. Through
educational opportunities for both adults and our youth, we hope to instill a sense of pride in regional history
with the ultimate goal of support for preservation. We believe this can be attained through exhibits, publications,
media, programs and events.
In order to accomplish these goals volunteer support and collaboration with other private and public
organizations and agencies is critical. We invite you to contact us at http://saltonseamuseum.org if you would like
to help make the museum a success. We are looking for oral history, old newspapers from the area including the
Salton Seafarer, North Shore News, Desert Barnacle and others, old photographs, memorabilia, artifacts and of
course volunteers who would like to help out at the museum. And don’t worry about your skill level, we can find
a job that suits you.
Above is architect Albert Frey’s original 1958 rendering of the North Shore Beach & Yacht Club.
February 2011
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Back at the beginning in 1958! Note the newly constructed North Shore Motel middle right.
The magnificent North Shore Yacht Club and Salton Sea Museum. Restoration completed July, 2010.
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February 2011
February 2011
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Time Dated Material
14614 Bowdoin Rd.
Poway, California 92064
phone: (858)722-0795
email: [email protected]
www.desertwindgraphics.com
Lake Mudge Chronicle
Please affix
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Jan Ault, Master Storyteller
Dr. Jerry Ault, Exalted Grand Poobah
Sam Hallmark, Master Editor
Rev. Glen Larsen, Local Representative
John McNabb, Master of Reality
Scooter Robertson, Master Viking
Scott Sandham, Master Thrasher
Tom Walsh, Master Timekeeper
Chuck Zumwalt, Master Tracker
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