THE GOOD OLD DAYS:Ship to shore: Sea Scouts still friends after 70 years

Allan Fainbarg is 88, and he shares more than just a closeness in age with the Galapagos Island tortoise he visited at the San Diego Zoo a few years ago.

As a teenager in 1937, Fainbarg was a Sea Scout who spent six months traveling around South America — and later Alaska — collecting exotic animals for the zoo.

The tortoise, along with iguanas, penguins and other birds, was one of several Fainbarg’s group of 25 scouts delivered to the zoo when they returned from their voyage.

Christina Simmons, associate director of public relations for the San Diego Zoo, said, “The zoo received a group of Galapagos tortoises from a Sea Scout expedition headed up by private citizen Fred Lewis in the late 1930s.”

Lewis, a member of the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, was the owner and captain of “Stranger,” a 230-foot diesel yacht he brought into the harbor at Balboa in 1935.

“People wouldn’t believe that that big boat could come into the harbor here,” said Fainbarg, a 35-year Lido Isle resident.

His 70-year-old memories of the time are vivid.Each scout was hand-picked to be part of an expedition, and was required to work and study on board the ship. The boys werepaid $10 a month. Fainbarg’s responsibilities included working as a cook and painting the boat. In Alaska, which Fainbarg said was wild country back then, the scouts went looking for baby walruses.

With Eskimos hired to help, the group traveled from the ship to the shore of the Diomede Islands in umiaks, a boat made of whalebone and seal skins — not the most secure vessel.

Fainbarg said in order to get the babies they had to harpoon the mother, and when that happened, the male came up to their boat — where the scouts were taking pictures — and punched a hole in it.

Leaving the Eskimos to finish the job, the group high-tailed it out of there before their own boat sank.

Over the years, the men on each of the two trips Fainbarg made have held reunions to reminisce and catch up on each other’s lives.

For Fainbarg, the 50th reunion in 1987 was especially poignant, because he hosted it at his home. At least 25 former Sea Scouts and their wives gathered there, and what was intended as a one-day event stretched into two.

Sandy Fainbarg and her husband have been married for 54 years, and she said it was amazing to her that “the guys had such a camaraderie.”

The reunions continued at their home over the years, although it wasn’t an annual event.

The Fainbargs are hoping to hold the 70th reunion at their home before the end of the summer, but the group will be smaller and include more widows than former scouts.

Allan Fainbarg has a banker box full of pictures and papers, as well as the ivory walrus tusks he brought back from Alaska to remind him of the journey he made as a young man.

And as he stands on the balcony of his Lido Isle home and looks across the water, he can still see the green Sea Scout base on the other shore.