THE VERDICT

Robert Gardner

When Charley Plummer taught me to swim, he taught me the Australian crawl

-- now called the freestyle -- and the breast stroke. When he was

teaching me the breast stroke, Plummer said the reason I should learn it

was that when I was swimming in the bay and saw what I thought was a

cigar bobbing in the water ahead of me it wasn’t a cigar, but human

sewage, and if I was swimming the Australian crawl I would bump into it.

The reason for this unpleasant state of affairs was that even though, by

1920, there was a new sewer line, not all houses were hooked up to it. A

few were still discharging their sewage directly into the bay.

There was one “private” sewer emptying into the bay at the Montero Street

beach. It wasn’t so bad at high tide, but at low tide that discharge just

lay there in the sun until high tide, not a pleasant sight.Discharging

into the bay was easy for houses on the bay, but what about houses on the

ocean side of Bay Avenue and Balboa Boulevard? That was more of a

challenge, and so, laboriously, I come to the story of Grandfather

Atwood’s sewer line.

Shortly after coming to Balboa in 1920, I met a kid of my age, Tagg

Atwood, and he became the closest friend of my youth. Every summer the

Atwood family came down from San Bernardino and spent the summer in

Grandfather Atwood’s house on Central Avenue, now Balboa Boulevard, three

houses west of Palm Street. It was a typical beach cottage of the time, a

two-story, single-wall building that had one rather singular difference

from the usual house -- its toilet. The house had four bedrooms, one

downstairs and three upstairs, but only one toilet, which was upstairs

where it was placed in a platform which raised it about three feet from

the floor. For the Atwood children, when they were small, there was a

little ladder built into the platform.

At the time, I thought that was a pretty funny toilet, but I never asked,

nor did I really speculate as to the reason for the existence of that

peculiar toilet. Now I know.

Grandfather Atwood built the house long before there were anything, but

“private” sewer lines in Balboa. Thus, his private sewer line ran from

his house to the bay. Given the location, when the toilet was flushed,

the contents of that toilet had to flow quite a distance before they

emptied into the bay.

First they had to go under Central Avenue. Then they had to go under the

service station across the street from the Atwood house. They then had to

flow under the rest of that block, then under Bay Avenue and finally

under another block of businesses until at last discharging into the bay.

That’s how Grandfather Atwood and all the other people who built houses

in Balboa before 1920 took care of their sewage.

And that’s why Grandfather Atwood’s toilet sat on such a high throne. His

sewer line needed some extra help in addition to natural gravity to

deliver its contents to the bay.