Capitola in the 1950s

By Margaret Kinstler

When I was a kid growing up in Sacramento, our family of five always took a two-week vacation in the summer. We were looking for water and an escape from the excruciating heat of the Sacramento Valley. We usually went to Lake Tahoe and stayed in cabins right on the beach at King City. One time, my dad, thinking it was getting too crowded for his liking in Lake Tahoe, asked the owner of the cabins if he knew of any other place to vacation. The guy recommended Capitola and so the next summer we went there.

We fell in love with Capitola with its shallow lagoon and mild surf safe for small children. We’d rent houses usually. Several times we stayed in one of the houses right by the wharf. We also stayed in a second floor apartment on Monterey Ave. that is now a sushi restaurant. We’d spend the whole day on the beach and at night spend our nickels at one of the skee ball places on the Esplanade.

There were at least two, maybe three of them, but our favorite was Andy’s (who was the mayor of Capitola at the time). Andy always had a change belt around his waist for changing our dollars into nickels and was friendly to us kids. We’d hoard our tickets and spend a lot of time examining the prizes locked away in the glass cabinet near the front door, evaluating which prize to choose. The decision was always whether to spend our tickets on some of the cheaper prizes or hold off for something better. The prizes were cheap toys, a Chinese finger puzzle, a plastic whistle, plastic/rubber (?) cowboys and Indian figures, a Kewpie doll, a glass ashtray you could present to your parents; but it could take all summer to save enough tickets for the better prizes (which were really still junk).

There was the merry-go-round to ride on and Babe’s bandstand was right next door at the end of the Esplanade. Babe sold cotton candy, beach balls, beach shovels and pails through an outside window. Babe in his white apron and white hair was bent over the grill that was in the middle of a ring of red stools where we sat, waiting for the best French fries ever, terrific hamburgers and hot dogs.

At that time, 1952 to 1960, Capitola was like any regular little town. It didn’t have any gift shops. Instead, it had Robinson’s Pharmacy, a five and dime, a bakery where my dad and I would pick up donuts to take back to the house for breakfast, a bowling alley (where the Mercantile is) and a movie theater where the Jacobsen mother and daughter team reigned. Mom Jacobsen sat behind the glass window selling the tickets and the daughter with her dark hair pulled back in a bun would take your ticket and pronounce “Thank You” in the very same tone and manner over and over. The daughter would also man the snack bar where you could get popcorn and juju beans to last the whole movie. Smoking was allowed on the left side of the theater and of course would permeate the entire theater but no one thought anything about it in those days.

There was also Nusbaum’s tiny grocery store with a meat counter in the middle of the block of Stockton Avenue, the Post Office, and two restaurants: Mac’s Patio where Britannia Arms is now and Lino’s. Mac’s Patio was divided in two: the dark bar where you could barely make out who was sitting at the bar and the restaurant in the other half of the building serving grilled meat, steak, chops, etc. The other restaurant, Lino’s, was on the corner of the Esplanade and Stockton where Café Violette is now. Lino’s had stools in a semi-circle with the kitchen in the back. A lot of seniors ate there because they had a blue plate special every night with family style cooking like pork chops, mashed potatoes, a vegetable. Everybody knew everybody, and they’d be talking back and forth across the room. But the best were the pies. Lino’s would bake fresh pies everyday. They’d be set by the open window on the Esplanade side to cool off and every day you could walk by and look and smell the pies that had been baked that day: rhubarb, strawberry, peach, apricot, chocolate, lemon meringue. Umm yum!

There were only two bars in town then: the Edgewater and Mac’s Patio, plus a liquor store on Capitola Avenue. In the liquor store, there was a buzzer on the floor to alert the old man who would emerge from the back room when someone arrived. We took great delight in jumping over the buzzer just to annoy him, but he would say nothing and glumly walk to the front of his store to sell us candy and gum.

Capitola village was filled with young families in the summer, staying in the small beach cottages that lined the narrow streets of the old part of Capitola – the “flats” as the locals called it. In the winter, the town was almost empty; most of the permanent residents lived in the more substantial houses up from the “flats.”

In 1960, our parents bought a small beach cabin on the Soquel Creek between the Stockton Avenue Bridge and the trestle and we would come more often and stay longer. Many times my mother and us kids would spend the whole summer with my dad coming down on the weekends. My baby brother was born in 1959 and we three older kids were moving into our teens. We met a group of locals and became our own gang, but that’s another story – the Sixties in Capitola.

P.S. Carolyn Swift, Capitola’s historian, verified that my memories were accurate and filled in some additional facts, like the liquor store was the Black and White Liquor Store and the owner was Carl Anderson.

Babe was Babe Yabobovich and the secret to his good tasting French fries was cooking them in lamb lard. He was Croatian from Watsonville and lamb lard was often used in their cooking. He just didn’t tell anyone.

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This story is from the Capitola CVRA Newsletter. Past newsletters are available online at www.CapitolaCVRA.org.