Looking back

Young Chang

We all know about Alvin Pinkley’s drugstore in Costa Mesa. The soda

fountain there was the place to be for the city’s kids, adults and even

politicians.

Newport Beach had it’s own soda fountain. It was on Balboa Peninsula,

close to Newport Harbor High School and even closer to the Balboa Bay

Club.

The Avenue Fountain attracted kids who got off the bus at the adjacent

bus stop after school, celebrities including Humphrey Bogart who needed a

quick something while hanging out at the Bay Club, employees from the

next door Balboa library and workers at a nearby telephone company.

Gay Wassall-Kelly’s father, Jack Wassall, used to hang out there when

he brought his family to vacation in the city in the mid-’40s. He would

talk about fishing with the other men who were there.

“It was just kind of a hangout,” said Wassall-Kelly, a longtime

Newport Beach resident. “It was light and fun to go to and everybody

would walk by.”

Janet Steele, a Costa Mesa resident whose father John Groch took over

The Avenue Fountain in the early 1940s, compares it to a mini Circle K of

yesteryear.

Except one important difference: The humble little store offered a

counter with all kind of ice cream sodas and Cokes.

Steele, whose first job was working behind the counter during her high

school days at Newport Harbor, remembers making ice cream sodas with

scoops of ice cream, squirts of chocolate soda and soda water. Actually,

one soda would require one scoop and one squirt.

She even made the Cokes. Back then, Coca-Cola manufactured Coke syrup

rather than pre-mixed soda. Steele would squirt some very concentrated

Coke syrup into a glass and then fill it up with soda water.

The menu included milkshakes made with old-fashioned milkshake

machines and sandwiches like ham and cheese and tuna salad.

“I was a soda jerk,” Steele said, explaining that’s what fountain

employees were called at the time. “I made a dollar an hour. I think he

overpaid me. He was my father.”

The small store also sold minimal cosmetics including lipstick and

hand cream, toothpaste, liquor, magazines, over-the-counter medicines

like aspirin and pretty much everything you’d find in a drugstore except

prescription drugs.

Groch was a pharmacist, but he had a separate job working for a

pharmaceutical company and so the soda fountain retained it’s name of The

Avenue Fountain. Legally you needed a pharmacy with a pharmacist to be

called a drugstore.

Steele’s mother, 102-year-old Marjorie Groch, ran the store much of

the time and also made sandwiches to sell at the fountain.

Groch sold the store in the late 40s and then bought a drugstore in

Santa Ana, Steele said.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at young.chang@latimes.com; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.