 |
|||||
|
Community recalls fond memories of HB pioneer Richard Greenwald
by Kevin Cody
|
Richard and Robert Greenwald, along with half of Hermosa Beach, celebrated their 80th birthday four years ago on the beach in front of Richard’s Sea Sprite Mote. Richard died last Wednesday. |
The Hermosa Beach Civic Center was filled to overflowing Wednesday morning with friends of Richard Greenwald. The pioneer Hermosa Beach businessman died Wednesday, November 29 at the age of 83.
Thelma, his wife of nearly 50 years, selected the following quote by Leonardo Da Vinci to be included in notes about her husband’s life: "As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings a happy death."
In December, 1986 Thelma threw a party attended by half of Hermosa to celebrate the 80th birthday of her husband and his twin brother Robert. Following the party Thelma and Richard recalled their "life well used" for Easy Reader editor Kevin Cody.
Thelma Greenwald was telling her husband Richard that she couldn’t possibly show the rooms at their newly purchased Sea Sprite Hotel on the Hermosa Strand to guests because the carpets were so worn and the counters so badly scarred by cigarette burns that she wouldn’t stay at the hotel herself.
"Honey," said Richard, a born car salesman, "as you’re leading the guests up the stairs, just point to the ocean and say, ‘Isn’t that beautiful.’ They’ll never notice the carpets."
The time was 1964 and Richard and his twin brother Robert were in the process of selling Del Amo Dodge.
Thelma and Richard had purchased the 17-room Sea Sprite motel as an investment. When the manager quit Thelma offered to step in until a new manager could be hired.
"After a few weeks I told Richard to hurry up and sell that car dealership. I think with the two of us working at the hotel we could stop it from losing money," Thelma recalled.
Richard and Robert were born into a Chevrolet dealership in Akron Ohio at the end of World War I. They reached draft age just in time for World War II, which pulled them out of a graduate business program at the University of New York.
"The school had a scholarship for one. But since there were two of us, they took us both," Richard recalled.
Richard stayed stateside during the war. Robert went to Paris where he was assigned to help write the history of World War II. One of his co-historians was a female English officer, whom he brought home as his wife.
After the war Richard met Thelma in Los Angeles, where he had moved to escape the East Coast winters. Having been raised on a Chevrolet lot, he quickly found work at Central Chevrolet. When Robert and their father joined him the family purchased a Nash dealership on Crenshaw Blvd. in Beverly Hills. After a few years, they traded that for a dealership at 5th St. and Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach. They named it Twin Pontiac. Across the street they opened New Castle Foreign Cars.
As a publicity stunt, the twins offered to pay for the college education of anyone who could sit atop the flagpole on their lot for six months.
A young man took them up on the offer and was within days of winning a college education when he spied his wife entering the bar across the street on the arms of another man. Richard adamantly denies responsibility for the woman choosing the bar across from his dealership for her assignation.
By the early ‘60s the Pontiac dealership had become a Dodge dealership and Dodge wanted the twins to move to the new auto row on Hawthorne Blvd.
"We were heart broken at having to leave Hermosa, but we still had the hotel, which we had bought as an investment," Thelma recalled.
Shortly after opening Del Amo Dodge, the twins sold it. Robert opened Allstate Tax Service and Richard joined Thelma at the Sea Sprite.
"I used to stand on the holes in the carpet and use picture frames to cover the burns on the counters," Thelma said in recalling her early days as a hotel manager.
Once the Sea Sprite became profitable the couple bought the old, 14-room, Breakers hotel on The Strand to the north of them. Then they bought the 28 room Del Mar Hotel to the south of them.
When the Biltmore hotel was demolished the Greenwalds gave the displaced elderly tenants rooms in the Breakers at monthly rates that were below the regular guests’ daily rates.
The gesture was not always appreciated. Thelma remembers some of the elderly complaining that the short term guests were getting color televisions and they were only getting black and whites.
"We never pushed anyone out. We waited until they died or had to move to a home. And God has certainly repaid us," said Thelma.
Richard and Thelma’s investment plan called for purchasing at least one piece of property a year. And one piece they particularly wanted was the house at the corner of 9th and The Stand between the Sea Sprite and the old Del Mar. If for no other reason they wanted to buy the house so they could get rid of the coiled barbed wire that the owners had strung along the wall surrounding the house. The
A for sale sign went up on the house in 1987, and soon became the couple’s home, as well as a favorite party house for community groups and the couple’s own extensive family. Their children Darrell, Cathy Hier, Liz Powell and Roberta Perkins-Greenwald gave the couple 19 grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Shortly after purchasing the Strand home the couple’s Torrance house burned to the ground, destroying four decades of family momentos.
"We were standing outside of the house we had lived in for 40 years, thinking of all the things we had lost when a worker from the Red Cross asked us if we had a place to stay for the night. That’s when I broke down and cried because I saw how truly blessed we were," recalled Thelma. ER