Ken Kramer: Welcome to San Diego, but it's a whole different world just offshore, and few of us have ever viewed sea lions and seals the way Sandy Huffaker has.

Sandy Huffaker: You look up, and usually they're right there in your face, and they're kind of just looking at--the babies particularly, just kind of, "What are you?"

Ken: He's been around the world documenting events for Getty Images and major news organizations, so how did he get to be the sea lion guy of San Diego?

You'll see.

announcer: Of all the faithful servants of mankind down through the ages, none has served us better than Old Bossy, the cow.

Ken: Nostalgia, how about the Miller Dairy?

We'll see a few photos at a local history exhibit that are sure to bring back memories for a lot of folks.

Go back more than a century.

If you wanted to go Balboa Park, how did you get there?

The answer might surprise you.

There was something right here where this tree and the lawn is today.

And here's the sea wall at Mission Beach.

It's designed to hold back the surf from the boardwalk and the homes beyond.

Do you know how it came to be?

We'll have the answer.

Plus, a quiz for you and more stories too, all of them true about San Diego.

announcer: Ken Kramer's "About San Diego," the history and people of the area we call home.

Here's Ken Kramer.

Ken: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the show.

How's your week been?

Well, how about settling back with a cold drink or some hot chocolate and let me tell you some stories about San Diego.

A minute ago you heard the man say this is a show about the history and people of the area we call home.

We've got a people story to begin here, and it has to do with a man who is a brilliant photographer, that's part of the story.

The other part, well, that's about San Diego.

Ken: If you take pictures for a living and the pictures you take end up on the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune, New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, then you are a good photographer, and Sandy Huffaker is very good.

Sandy: I've been around the globe, I've been to Peru and Haiti, all around Europe, of course, a lot down in Mexico.

Ken: His dad was a brilliant political cartoonist, and for a while Sandy thought he'd try to follow in his footsteps.

But when he got a camera for Christmas one year, that was it.

Sandy: And I just fell in love with the cultures and photographing and documenting all kind of different peoples.

Ken: He's covered immigration, border issues, civil unrest, wildfires.

His work is just extraordinary.

Sandy: But now I walk around town, and, "Oh, the seal guy, you're the sea lion guy.

Ken: The sea lion guy.

Sure he spent time in Brazil and the Caribbean, covered conflicts in hotspots around the world, but it is in La Jolla Cove, mostly, where Sandy Huffaker found this remarkable specialty.

Sandy: And I just decided on a whim to find this underwater housing right here and kind of go take pictures.

I had a lot of time.

Most of my work had fallen off due to COVID.

Ken: His love of snorkeling and photography quickly led to a love for these sea lions and seals in a protected marine sanctuary like La Jolla Cove where people can swim with them respectfully.

Sandy: You know, I have actually never touched one, and I will not do that.

I just--I'm an observer of these sea lions, and I'm not there to touch or pet or do anything but just observe and photograph them.

Ken: He says it helps that he's always been able to hold his breath for a long time.

He goes underwater, grabs hold of a rock, and he's in their world on their terms.

Sandy: One of the neat things with the sea lions is they have such a really adorable kind of natural curiosity, and you'll dive down, and they'll--you'll-- they'll see you, and as you look up, they're usually right in your face, and they're kind of looking at you like, "What are you doing?"

You know, and they have a really neat natural curiosity.

And then I'll start taking pictures, and they'll swim around you, they'll spit a bubble at you every once in a while.

And I think that for a minute they think you're one of them until they see how slow you are.

Ken: They swirl around him with astonishing agility and a gracefulness that you don't see on land.

Out here in their territory he is a grateful guest.

For Sandy, this place, these experiences have been, in their own way, healing.

Sandy: It was a very tense time for a photojournalist being in the media.

You know, you were getting screamed at a lot, yelled at, there was just a lot of anger and political tension going on.

Ken: He found his visits out here to be calming and, like any good photographer, in time, developed a rapport with his subjects.

Only here, there's no setup shots.

You can't pose a sea lion.

Sandy: So, slowly I've learned how to kind of give them the space they need, and then to where they just kind of ignore you and they play on their own.

Ken: The beauty is in simply letting them be.

Sandy: And it's a really amazing thing.

I mean, most of the time we're--we see them in a zoo, we see them, you know, with glass in between.

The fact that you can go out and swim with these wild, native sea lions is a beautiful thing.

It's really interesting.

Ken: And for Sandy Huffaker, page one, internationally renowned photographer, it's something else too.

A career turn born of a COVID downturn.

Who could've seen that coming a few years ago?

Now there's a calendar, perhaps one day a book.

Whatever else around the world he has documented in photographs, he is now also San Diego's sea lion guy, and to him, that's just fine.

Sandy: You know, if that's on my gravestone, that's okay.

You know, we all have to be known as something.

♪♪♪ Ken: One more thing: Sandy says that underwater photography in San Diego presents some real challenges.

The water isn't perfectly clear like you find in other parts of the world, so, interestingly, he says the best time to shoot sea lions is right at noon when the sun is directly overhead.

And if you're a photographer, you know normally that's not a great time because of the shadows and everything.

But he says, for sea lions, it works.

They're in their perfect light.

Spoken like a true director.

Ken: Time for a quiz about San Diego.

See if you know which famous director had a home in Fallbrook.

announcer: The producer/director who shocked the world with "Psycho."

Ken: Was it Alfred Hitchcock?

Was it Frank Capra, best known for films like "Meet John Doe" and, of course... ♪♪♪ Ken: Or was it this man?

Orson Welles: How do you do, ladies and gentlemen?

This is Orson Welles.

Ken: So there you go, which famous film director had a home in Fallbrook?

It was... ♪♪♪ Ken: Frank Capra, director of some of the most iconic films of the '30s and '40s, like this one.

speaker: The chair recognizes Senator Smith.

Ken: "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," among so many others directed by Frank Capra, who had a ranch in Fallbrook from the '40s through the early 1970s.

And if you knew that, congratulations for knowing a lot about San Diego.

♪♪♪ Ken: All right, time for a favorite story we wanna share with you now.

It has to do with nostalgia that some longtime beach residents feel for their community, and it's quite a different perspective from those of us who just go there for a day on the sand or to jump waves.

This place has quite a lot of history, and we've got two things.

First, some old film, most of it a century old in fact, that'll take us back, so we've got that, and we've got a couple of really expert guides.

Terry Curren: The old bowling alley, hamburger stands.

Phil Prather: Lifeguard station.

Terry: The lifeguard station was right here.

Phil: They had two hamburger stands here.

Ken: Stay hello to Terry Curren and Phil Prather, a couple of guys who wrote the book on Mission Beach.

I mean, they go back to the days when this was a little community that had its own identity, just a big neighborhood, really, is what it was.

Terry: This is where we grew up.

This is where all the kids in San Diego came when they came to the beach.

Ken: These are photographs from longtime Mission Beach residents and from the San Diego History Center's archives.

Take a look, it was San Diego, sure, but it was Mission Beach to be specific, and Terry says as a kid he just loved living here.

Terry: Well, life was so simple.

In the summertime, I'd leave home at 8 o'clock in the morning, and I wouldn't come home until dark.

Ken: Go way back, from the very beginning it seemed like there was a particular quality to this place, something special, something unique.

By the late '30s and '40s here, Phil and Terry were calling it home, and part of what they do is recall and document how it was.

Terry: You remember the Safeway was right here, and they'd stack watermelons in the summer, and somehow or another the kids would walk by and kick a watermelon that'd roll out onto the sidewalk, and somebody else'd be right there to scoop it up.

Phil: And out here, buried under the asphalt is the old trolley cart tracks.

Ken: Now, you get to talking with these guys about Mission Beach, and you quickly learn how at times and in spots this place has flooded, of course.

Rains, high tides, and one particularly bad storm in the 1920s when there was just a wooden boardwalk.

The surf tore up houses along the beach, it was a mess, and out of that came this, the sea wall that everybody knows today.

Well, in trying to learn more about the sea wall, Phil and Terry came across a piece of home movie film shot by Dr. and Mrs. Raymond Penwarden in 1927 and '28, and what this is, is the Mission Beach sea wall being built.

Terry: They built the piles for the retaining wall, they mixed the concrete, cut all the steel.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ken: It was all designed by a man named Burl Phelps back in 1927 and took months, but finally it started looking like the wall and oceanfront walk we know today.

But there are some things you might not know.

Terry: This wall goes all the way down to bedrock, and on the ocean side he built a lip on here so the surf would come in, hit the wall, and bounce back toward the ocean.

Ken: Only thing is, it's a public beach, and the sand is generally higher than that lip, so you don't see it.

What you do see every once in a while is some pretty amazing pictures of surf splashing against that wall.

Terry: Sometimes the surf will bounce up 20, 30 feet and then come crashing down onto the walkway and taking care of fences and sometimes houses on the shore.

Ken: Then there was this, one of the strangest things beach residents had ever seen.

It's foam, just foam.

Terry: I do recall, it was probably in 1939 after the big storm where the wind blew the foam off of the ocean and covered the entire beach, where we could go down the steps into this foam, and it was over our head, and we would walk through this.

And it was one of those things kids loved to do.

Ken: So much more.

There was the dredging of what would become the Mission Bay we know today, a mammoth project that fascinated kids like them who grew up here, lived here off and on their whole lives, still love it, still remember so many of the little things.

Terry: Right there on the next corner was a drug store, it was a soda fountain.

Whatever you needed, it was here.

Ken: And remember I said they wrote the book?

They really did.

"The Book on Mission Beach" from Terry Curren and Phil Prather, who certainly do know and recall a lot about San Diego.

Ken: Between the ocean and the bay, if you look at the walkways and streets that intersect Mission Boulevard, you'll find they're alphabetical from south to north.

If you see one that is named a Place, like San Fernando Place or Santa Clara Place, those are named for missions.

And if you see something that ends with a Court, like Pismo Court or Coronado, they are named for beaches from all around the world, beaches.

So, you have the missions and the beaches intersecting Mission in Mission Beach.

♪♪♪ Ken: Okay, just before we go to our next couple of stories, I wanna show you something.

These are some pictures, they were sent in by Brett Michael.

You know what this is?

These are old tracks in North Park from the original streetcar system that stopped running in 1948.

Well, this is January of 2022, and road crews were resurfacing University Avenue in North Park, and they uncovered the old tracks.

So, Brett ran out with his camera and captured a little history about San Diego.

Which brings us to this story.

If you go back in time, that streetcar system was really important to the way people got around San Diego.

And one place they wanted to go more than a century ago was the Exposition in Balboa Park.

Ken: So many people came to Balboa Park for the Exposition, saw the various attractions and distractions, but here's the question, how'd they all get there?

Did they motor up in their 1915 cars and drive to the park?

Michael Redding: Some did.

Ken: Did they hitch up the horse and go?

Michael: A lot of them did, yes.

Ken: Yes, but do you know how about one in every four visitors got to and from the park in comfort and style?

[trolley bell ringing] ♪♪♪ ♪ Clang, clang, clang went the trolley.

♪ ♪ Ding, ding, ding went the bell.

♪ Ken: They took the trolley.

It was quick, convenient, and cost about five or ten cents to get you there, Michael Redding says.

Michael: Very good possibility that up to a million people rode the trolley over the two years of the Exposition.

Ken: But what trolley, where?

There's no trolley to Balboa Park, no station here, not anymore.

But a century ago, let's say you were from the East Coast or just coming down from LA to see the exposition.

Michael: Came in by train on the Santa Fe to the brand new depot downtown, and waiting right out front was the trolleys of the San Diego electric railway.

They would go up Broadway to 12th Avenue, Park Boulevard today, and the depot was right behind us.

They would come and get off the trolleys there and come right into the Exposition.

Ken: Look down The Prado and see those arches down there, that was the eastern entrance to the park, and just beyond that was this.

A wonderful station where the streetcars pulled right up filled with passengers going to the Exposition.

You'd walk down some stairs, there was an underpass that went below the tracks, and then you were just steps from the gates, welcome to Balboa Park.

But today there's nothing left of it.

The gates were right about where the lawn is here, the station and the tracks were where Park Boulevard is today.

No tracks, no trolley.

Michael: Unfortunately, not anymore.

Those were all either buried or torn up by 1949 when the system shut down.

Ken: In fact, back in the late '40s on the day the last of the old streetcars were retired, there was a celebration of sorts.

A parade of new, modern buses that would take their place.

You wonder how much of our traffic problem around the park today would be solved if we'd just kept what we once had.

Imagine, you took it right to the door of the Exposition for a day of fun.

Michael: And then get back on the streetcar and take it home.

♪ To the end of the line!

♪ ♪ Clang, clang, clang went the trolley ♪ ♪ Went my heart ♪♪ Ken: Times were you used to be able to take a streetcar from downtown San Diego directly to Mission Beach, and from there right on up to downtown La Jolla, and it took 25 minutes.

Of course, now we do have a system that gets us to UCSD and surroundings, but it's a different route.

None of where that trolley goes now even existed back then.

All right, one more story about our old streetcar system, which we're gonna get to, I promise.

But along the way, to set the scene, we're going to consider some buildings, the way they look, and ultimately one very unusual one.

Ken: First of all, here's a building in New York, very famous because it's strange looking, made to fit on a triangular lot between streets that come together at an angle.

Considered a wonder of the 20th century when it was built in 1902, even today they sometimes call it the Flatiron Building in Manhattan because it's shaped a little bit like an iron you'd use to press clothes.

So, that's in New York, here's another one in San Francisco, one on Peach Tree street in Atlanta, flatiron buildings.

And then, did you know San Diego has a flatiron on a little island of land at 26th and National in Barrio Logan?

Upstairs are apartments in this building that's had several owners dating back to 1911.

Downstairs has been a market, a liquor store, a tavern, and a beauty parlor.

It's a striking site on a little triangular lot where Sicard Street intersects with 26th and National.

Okay, a few blocks up where 26th makes a turn and becomes Logan Avenue, go back in time to the 1940s and earlier.

Here's a great old photo, you can see it's a streetcar making that turn.

Well, that picture is in a frame here at a historic restaurant in Barrio Logan for a very good reason, because more than 70 years ago, this place was a streetcar.

Carolina Santana: Yeah, it's actually an old streetcar that was built in 1912.

Ken: Carolina Santana says when the Logan Avenue streetcar line shut down in the '40s, there was a property owner here, a man named Al Johnston.

Really interesting guy.

Carolina: He was an artist, he was a musician, he supported community members, he hosted community meetings in his space.

Ken: And he noticed one of the old streetcars was abandoned right out on Logan Avenue, left there for junk.

Carolina: Him and a bunch of guys literally lifted the streetcar and had it landed on his property.

Ken: He cleared out the passenger seats inside, added a stucco wall to the front and a kitchen, and named it Carrito, meaning little car.

More than 70 years later now here it still is, uniquely positioned right where he left it as maybe the most unlikely business building in San Diego.

If you look at the walls and the ceiling, and, I mean, you can really tell what this was.

Carolina and her dad own it now.

Her mom created the recipes.

They like to celebrate its history, little reminders here and there, and she says, "Well, sometimes it is a tight fit."

Carolina: So small, it's like a closet, it's literally, like, you could probably expand your arms from end to end and you could go like this and touch both sides, both walls.

Ken: And as for Al Johnston, could he have ever imagined his streetcar would still be here 70 years later?

Carolina: You know what, I don't think he ever imagined.

Probably not even in his wildest dreams, but I'm sure he'd be very, very proud.

Ken: So there to this day is his El Carrito, and the flatiron building of Barrio Logan, each in its own way something quite remarkable about San Diego.

♪♪♪ Ken: Shall we see what's come in from you?

It's that part of the show where we take your suggestions and grab some video you think everybody ought to see, or you send it in.

Pictures and stories and sometimes video, old film.

Got some of that this time.

Things about San Diego from bygone days, so with no further delay, let's be on our way.

Ken: There's an old saying that back 60 years ago, if you wanted to find the Miller Dairy, you just followed your nose to Skyline Drive and Mount Vernon Street, and there you were, and so were the cows.

There's a real nostalgic tug for San Diegans who remember this local dairy, and so it was fun to discover at the history exhibit in Lemon Grove's Parsonage Museum on Olive Street a display that took you right back to those days.

Miller Dairy was pretty much beloved in the area it served for nearly six decades with home delivery and later a drive through serving Lemon Grove and East County.

Like the sun and the moon, the exhibit proclaims, Miller Dairy was just always there.

Wanna see something that really didn't work?

This was, believe it or not, for a very brief period of time in 1992 the Padre Mascot.

It was called Bluepper, get it?

"Blooper."

And Andy Strasberg, who came up with the idea, still has a sense of humor about it.

Bluepper turned out to be an error.

He says, "A lot of fans just started calling it, 'Down in front.'

They wanted the chicken."

Ray Hiseki took this, it's where the pod race played for 21 years at the west end of Broadway between Harbor and Pacific Highway.

Thank you to Bill Swank for this photo from 1954 and another when they were dismantling Lane Field four years later.

Guess what year this is?

Mission Bay, Shawna Aiken's grandfather Brownie took it, and another one, same year, of the interchange of Highway 163 and Interstate 8, can you believe it?

Back in 1962.

Driving between Yuma and San Diego a century ago, about 6 miles of the highway was planks of wood tied together.

And that plank road, they called it, would rise and fall depending on the shifting desert sand underneath it.

Linda Jones sent us this old color postcard of what was left in the 1950s of the long-abandoned old plank road.

And finally, Randy Divel sent us this, movies his grandfather made around San Diego from 1928 to 1938, his mom and her sister when they were just little kids on up to his great-grandparents are in these movies.

Back when there were about 150,000 people in the city, and San Diego Bay here looked so different.

♪♪♪ Ken: Here they are smiling, waving into an unseen future they couldn't begin to even dream of.

All these sweet little moments captured on film from back when San Diego was still a pretty small town.

At Mission Beach in the late 1920s, and here's La Jolla.

Little snow in the mountains, so friends getting together and heading to Julian.

Part of the family's business was photography, and Randy's grandfather had an 8 millimeter camera.

Now we see them looking at us from the San Diego of most of a century ago.

Big thing in Balboa Park in 1935 was the International Exposition.

Here's their camera view of the event.

♪♪♪ Ken: And something that you don't usually see film of, from the exposition, this is the Midway, The Monster, Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibit, and a fun ride.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ken: Really unique film.

Thank you, Randy, for this, and to all for sending in the memories about San Diego.

Ken: And that's it for this time and this episode of "About San Diego."

A mix of some new stories and some favorites this time.

A front porch edition, one of several we've done now out here because so many things indoors are shut down.

My colleague, co-producer Suzanne Bartole and I are keeping safe and hoping you are too.

To learn more about these stories, see this episode or previous ones, get a souvenir T-shirt or just say hello, go to kenkramertv.com, and we'll see you next time.

Until then, I am Ken Kramer, thank you for watching and for caring about San Diego.

Bye-bye.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ CC by Aberdeen Captioning www.aberdeen.io 1-800-688-6621 announcer: Support for this program comes from the KBPS Explore Local Content Fund, supporting new ideas and programs for San Diego.