Beach Ramp Opens New Horizons : Handicapped: For the first time on a county beach, people who use wheelchairs, canes, walkers or crutches can easily get to sun, sand and surf.

Laura Zaragoza doesn’t have much of a Southern California tan. In fact, the skin of the Spring Valley woman has the pallor of someone who wouldn’t go near the beach.

Or couldn’t.

For most of her 29 years, Zaragoza would be the one left behind when her family of 12 trooped off to the beach for a day of suntan lotion and fun.

Laura, who suffers from polio, is paralyzed from the hips down and has been using a wheelchair ever since she can remember.

The little rubber wheels of her chair didn’t do well plowing through the shifting sands. “And she was just too heavy to carry with that chair,” recalls brother, Carlos. “We tried but we just couldn’t do it. And so most times the family went to the beach, Laura stayed home. She cried a lot. But what could we do?”

All that changed Saturday, when city and state officials officially unveiled a new accessible beach walk at La Jolla Shores Beach--one built with a hard surface for people who usually have trouble with thick sand. People who use wheelchairs, walkers, canes or crutches. People like Laura Zaragoza.

On Saturday morning, Laura and a dozen other wheelchair-users rolled easily from the parking lot at Kellogg Park and across the sands that once gave them such headaches, and heartaches.

Two of them were so elated at their new freedom they even went in for a swim afterward, Laura said.

“It was real neat going down that ramp,” said Laura, who is taking secretarial courses at Southwestern College.

“The ramp is made of the same treaded material as a car tire. And my chair made a clunka-clunka noise as it went down. It was great.”

As Laura’s brother Carlos, mother and father watched, officials from the city of San Diego, State Coastal Conservancy and San Diego Unified School District made speeches about the new walk, which they said was the first in the county to provide access to the open ocean surf.

The family nodded in unison when one official said that the ramp should have been opened a long time ago. If the present one is a success, others will be installed at Ocean Beach and Mission Beach.

“Everybody always says that California was a state that believed that everyone had an equal right to the beach,” said Carlos Zaragoza.

“But if you looked at my family, you could see that wasn’t true. Laura just couldn’t go.

“But now every time family comes to visit and somebody says ‘Let’s go to the beach,’ I know one person who’s not going to be left behind.”

Added mother Isabel: “It’s true. It’ll be like being able to do things as a family again.”

La Jolla Shores life guard Paul Caton says the beach walk has actually been in use for several weeks now. “But maybe now that it’s officially open, more wheelchair-bound people will come and use it.

“I’ve seen just so many people in the past have to carry people to the beach and set them down. It doesn’t look easy.”

Jack Robertson, a 41-year-old teacher of the disabled who is himself a paraplegic and marathon swimmer, took a cool dip in the sea Saturday after wheeling his chair to the ocean’s brink. “Before, if I wanted to get here, I would have to be lugged by my friends or drag my butt in the sand,” he said.

More than 13% of San Diego’s population is disabled and the new walk means good news to them and their families, he said. “For me, it’s just the cat’s meow,” said Robertson, who lost the use of his legs after an automobile accident in 1969.

“For so long, people like me have been bystanders at the beach, looking on from the boardwalk. But now all that’ll change. And it’s not just for the disabled. Just watch for a few minutes at all the people who use it--people with bikes, moms with strollers, even people who don’t want to get sand in their shoes.

“It’s like the city rolled out the red carpet. Only it’s black.”

On Saturday afternoon, Cornelia Mackey, a white-haired La Jolla woman who has been coming to Kellogg Park for 37 years, walked slowly along the rubber carpet that stretched from sidewalk to shoreline.

“It’s really a wonderful idea,” she said. “Like a walk in the park for older people like me. Why didn’t they do it sooner?”

But Laura Zaragoza isn’t complaining. Later in the afternoon, she sat in the grass in a La Jolla park, munching on a sandwich, her red and black wheelchair by her side, and said she looked forward to becoming a regular old Southern California beach bum.

Heck, she said, her brother might even teach her how to snorkel.

Said Carlos: “We’re going to have to work on that tan of yours in the meantime.”