Ninety-nine year old recalls bygone Manhattan Beach
Anita Koontz Stichter receives a kiss from her daughter, Patti Asbury, in front of the building at Pacific Elementary that her father built in 1934. Photo
Anita Koontz Stichter vividly remembers the day in 1933 when the big earthquake hit.
She was 15. Her family was living in a little house that her father had built, the first of several he’d build in fledgling Manhattan Beach. The home was on a dirt road rather hopefully named Walnut Avenue, but it didn’t feel much like an avenue. Her mother, Ruth, was constantly complaining to her father, Frank, that she was tired of living in the country, surrounded by little but sand and artichoke plants. She wanted a house in town.
“And father always said, ‘We’ll see,” Anita recalled.
There were no other houses nearby, but there was a railroad, another annoyance for her mother. Hobos rode the rails, and they liked to jump off at the bend by the Koontz house, so as not to attract attention when the train pulled through downtown Manhattan Beach. They’d ask Ruth for food.
“Okay, I’ll give you food,” Ruth told the men. “I’ll put it on the step, but you have to eat it out there on the hill, and leave the dishes back here.”
On that day in March of 1933, the earthquake, which would decimate much of Long Beach, rattled the Manhattan Beach countryside. Anita and her little brother, Bob, were home alone. As instructed, she was practicing piano and ostensibly looking after her brother, who was playing outside.
“My brother was up a tree, of all places,” Anita recalled in an interview earlier this month. “He was younger than me by four years…And I remember my folks were up someplace shopping, and later they said the windows fell out of the door in the shop where they were looking for a pair of shoes. My brother, he came running to me, ‘What happened? The tree was moving!’ He was scared to death. It was just swaying. I said, ‘I don’t know what is happening. My piano was dancing.’ We knew something had happened, but we didn’t know much about earthquakes then.”
On November 12, Anita turned 99. She was born the day after WWI ended. A few days before Anita’s birthday, her daughter, Patti Asbury, took her out to lunch and then stopped by Pacific School, just three blocks from another house Anita’s father built, on Pacific Avenue, where she later raised her own family and where she still lives. Nine decades ago, she attended what was then called Center School as an elementary schoolgirl. To arrive at school every day, she walked on a dirt trail from her home out on Walnut through some Japanese gardens behind the campus. Pacific Avenue was unpaved, as well, and the buildings on the crest of the hill overlooking town were scarce. One of the biggest buildings on the campus was built by her father, Frank Koontz, in 1934.
Anita still giggles when she recalls her schoolgirl days. The school had both a girls and boys glee club, overseen by a teacher named Mrs. Fagan. A few years before the earthquake, Anita was in a musical at the school called “The Florodora” that was a big hit. She played a young maiden being wooed by a young man, who happened to be played by her friend Isabella. The song they sang, exchanging verses, began, “Tell me, pretty lady, are there anymore at home like you?”
“I had to sit on her knee, we were 10 or 11, and we had our cute little dresses on and we’d dance around,” Anita said. “People were clapping like it was the greatest thing in the world.”
“The thing of it was after we grew up, every time I’d see her, I’d sing, ‘Tell me, pretty girl….’ Like when we were in our 60s! We laughed because we thought it was so funny.”
Her favorite teacher was an 8th-grade teacher named Mrs. Frank, who was also a Girl Scout leader and quite a character. She’d take the girls and some of their mothers — particularly the ones who could help drive — on camping trips up to Lake Arrowhead, where they’d pitch tents and sit around a campfire and sing songs.
“As we grew up, she never married,” Anita recalled. “She liked to stay with the young people. And she liked to smoke, but she never wanted anybody to know she smoked in those days. So when we were young…we’d go down to see her. ‘Darn you kids were there, and I had to go hide in my bedroom because I couldn’t let you know I smoked,’ she said. ‘I was so glad when you girls grew up and some of you could have a cigarette or a glass of wine with me.’”
Anita stayed in touch with Mrs. Fagan all through her teacher’s life. Even into Mrs. Fagan’s 90s, she’d drop by and visit her with a bottle of vodka as a gift.
A lot of her childhood friends were lifelong. Her best friends when she was young were a sister and brother, Irene and Bill Young.
“We were going to be ever and ever and ever…You know how young people talk, and think,” Anita said. “We just thought this is the way it is. It was sixth grade, ‘Oh, we are never going to get married…’ We have too much fun playing baseball or dressing up, or whatever we’d do. We don’t have to worry about anything. We’d go to shows together. He’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll probably get married sometime.’ I said, ‘Probably we will.’ And so it just went on….we stayed best friends forever.”
“I remember we were sitting having a drink one time, and she said, ‘You know, how come you never married my brother?” And I said, ‘Well, you know, this was a long time for you to start asking that! We have grandkids now! That was a long time ago.’ We giggled it up.”
By high school, her mother got her wish and the family had moved closer to downtown, to 1208 Manhattan Ave. There were a few scattered shops and sand hills.
“Oh, change, whew — yes, I should say,” she said. “Downtown is nothing like it was. Gosh, there wasn’t much downtown…it was just the downtown section of Manhattan Beach Boulevard [then Center Street] and Manhattan Beach Avenue. There wasn’t much from there up…that was just a sand hill there.”
A little building that originally housed City Hall downtown was turned into a restaurant called The Green Shack.
“I worked in there a little bit as a waitress when one of the high school kids parents bought it, Leonard Olson’s parents,” Anita said. “And he hired us all us girls. I said, ‘I don’t think I like this job,’ but anyway, to get to it was all sand. I was at 1208 Manhattan Avenue living there during high school and I crossed through the sandlots over to the Green Shack. Now Mama D’s is in there, and Wahoos…”
She and her girlfriends used to run down the pier and jump off the end.
“Well, you know, we were not smart,” Anita said, laughing. “We weren’t supposed to. But we had a couple guys who were Water Rats and they were lifeguards and they were pretty nice to us.”
The Water Rats were a South Bay surf club.
“They thought they owned Manhattan Beach,” Anita said. “They started out as teenagers, and they grew up here, and then as they grew up they became postmaster, one became a police officer, one became head of the yacht club…quite a few stayed here.”
After high school, Anita was set up on a date with a handsome young teacher from UCLA, Bob Stichter. He’d been a track star at UCLA and was a ranked tennis player in the state. She’d learned to surf a little bit with the Water Rats, so for a wedding present her husband made her a surfboard.
“I said, ‘Thanks a lot, I can’t even lift the darned thing.’ I couldn’t even drag it in the water,” she said. “He had our name printed on it. I said, ‘Oh, it looks beautiful.’ But anyway, when we needed money we sold it to a lake up in Tahoe for $150. It was beautiful.”
When Bob was still working at UCLA, he hatched the idea of opening up a little tennis shack just above the Manhattan Pier, near where the Strand House is now. He’d work at school all day and then go to the shack and string rackets every night. Anita, who’d just had their first child, Patti, wasn’t pleased.
“That was the worst investment we ever had,” she said. “He was teaching at UCLA and giving tennis lessons. What did he expect me to do, with this baby, put her in a buggy and take her down [to the shop] all day long? ‘You didn’t hire anybody?’ He’d be stringing racquets after he got home…I said, ‘What are you going to do, leave this place open all night? That was the worst part of our whole marriage, that damned thing.”
It was nevertheless a happy marriage, and tennis was a big part of it. The couple started the city’s first tennis club at what is now Live Oak Park.
“So we played a lot, and after that closed down, they got that big private club where you pay lots of money,” Anita said. “With the city, we paid 50 cents a month to join. And my husband always said, ‘Gosh, I had more darned trouble collecting 50 cents from everybody.’ And now they have this [club] over there and it costs a thousand dollars to join.”
They were married nearly a half century. Bob passed relatively young, at 70, and Anita says tennis is part of what kept her living locally. She and another lifelong friend — Sako, a Japanese-American whose parents were put in internment camps during WWII and later ran a flower shop in Redondo — formed a women’s tennis club and all played into their 80s. Anita’s last tennis match was at 88.
“We had a great bunch,” Anita said. “That’s what kept me here.”
She sometimes sees all the busyness up and down Manhattan Beach Boulevard and wonders where the sleepy little town she grew up in has gone.
“We take a walk on the pier, looking up that hill, and then drift back to the house…and traffic is all the way up to Pacific Avenue,” Anita said. “And I think, ‘It’s already packed downtown. Where do you think you are going when you get there?’ It’s just crazy down there, no place to park, no place to walk. It’s just people.”
Anita says sometimes it feels like time went by in a blink, sometimes not.
“You know, it depends,” she said. “Sometimes it seems like another dream. And sometimes it seems so real.”