Beach bond and back

Deepa Bharath

The Corona del Mar that Charles Masters Jr. and Tom Westgate know and

love still exists.

The place could have gone berserk with development, but in the

hearts of these natives, it’s still a little village.

It was the hamlet by the bright, blue ocean where they ran around

as little kids with reckless abandon. Standing on top of the foot

bridge, they bombed cars with water balloons, eggs and oranges from

the trees that grew on a neighboring hill.

On Friday, both will sit at the same table at the Neptune’s Ball

Black Tie Gala. Masters is taking his friend to their hometown’s

100th birthday bash, all part of this week’s Corona del Mar

Centennial celebration.

The boys were inseparable in their youth. Both went to Corona del

Mar Elementary School, which no longer exists, Harbor View and then

Corona del Mar High School.

“We knew every nook and cranny in this place,” said the now

55-year-old Masters, whose father, the late Charles Masters Sr., a

builder, brought his family to Corona del Mar in 1946.

Masters Sr. built close to 90 homes in Corona del Mar, his son

said.

“They were nothing like the homes you see here now,” he said.

“They were more like bungalows with two or three bedrooms and one

bathroom. A lot of those have been remodeled now.”

When Masters Sr. came to town, the landscape looked completely

different. Developments such as Shorecliff and Cameo Shores were

nonexistent.

The older Masters also acquired a lot of commercial property,

which his son and daughter, Catherine Masters, later inherited.

Masters Jr., who was born and raised in Corona del Mar, went away to

the Bay Area after high school and didn’t return home for good until

1990, when he took on the responsibility of taking care of his

father’s properties.

But he kept visiting home on and off, and every time he returned

home, he saw something different. But every time he came home, he

also became wistful and nostalgic. The days he and Westwood spent in

the old Corona del Mar were engraved in his memory.

“I was like Tom Sawyer running around with these kids,” he said.

“And there were a lot of kids with the baby boom and all.”

It almost seems like he has a memory of every structure and every

person that stood or walked in his hometown when he was a boy,

Masters said.

There were a lot of unforgettable characters, too. One of them was

the person who ran the Old West Museum, a store that was basically an

old adobe building crammed with Native American and cowboy artifacts,

Masters said.

“I mean, this guy wore buckskin clothes, had long hair, a goatee

and a handlebar mustache,” he said.

Then, there was a man only known as “Doc Brady.”

“My dad told me he owned half of Corona del Mar,” Masters said.

“But he only lived in this little shack behind the post office.”

Westgate remembers Doc Brady, too.

“He was quite a character,” he said, with a laugh.

But one of the real characters was a guy everyone called

“Bunhugger Ed.”

“No one has ever seen this guy wear anything other than Speedos,”

Masters said. “We’d go to the beach in baggy shorts. But this guy

always wore Speedos.”

And Ed lived in a Volkswagen bus parked on Big Corona beach.

“He was a night watchman for some of the beach stands,” Masters

said. “But, I’ve never seen him in pants. All he wanted to do was to

live on the beach, I guess.”

And then, there was a man widely known as “the Chief.”

“He used to ride around in this golf cart, which had a steering

pole instead of a wheel,” Masters said. “We called it the Chief’s

Chariot.”

But for all the eccentric people and strange characters, Corona

del Mar was a great place, he said.

“It was just wonderfully different,” Masters said.

Westgate remembers a variety store on Coast Highway that sold

everything from needles to yo-yos.

“But my best memories are at the beach,” he said. “We played our

own games, something kids these days never get to do, because sports

is so structured.”

Westgate recalls playing tackle football and baseball on the

streets and breaking several windows in the process.

He even remembers going to lobster bakes in Big Corona beach in

the 1950s, which were a precursor to the Fish Fry, a huge Costa Mesa

event held by the Lions Club.

Masters and Westgate took different paths in life. Westgate even

lived for a few years in Australia, New Zealand and Maui.

But now, both are back home for good. And they can’t think of a

better place to spend the rest of their lives in.

Masters lives in China Cove -- the same house he grew up in and

where his parents lived.

“I feel so blessed that my children are living in the house their

grandfather built,” he said.

Masters still keeps a black-and-white photograph of the view from

Little Corona beach taken around 1945, above his mantel as a reminder

of how things used to be.

For Westgate, the memories are as good as the real thing.

“We rode around everywhere on our bikes and felt perfectly safe,”

Westgate said. “The only difference between people growing up in

other parts of the country and us was that our back yard was the

Pacific Ocean instead of a cornfield.”

* DEEPA BHARATH is the enterprise and general assignment reporter.

She may be reached at (949) 574-4226 or by e-mail at

deepa.bharath@latimes.com.