Living on Balboa Island, Newport Beach, California - 1959 to 1964
This is where I lived from 1959 until June of 1964, with my two sisters and my mother, Marion. Balboa Island, California.
That’s not entirely true as even back then the rents on Balboa Island would double in the summer time. So every summer we headed over to live in Corona del Mar. And every school year it was back to Balboa Island. Our family lived in five different houses on Balboa Island — all rentals. Four of them were still standing the last time I was there in the late 1990s. Now, why a single Mom raising three kids on her own would choose to do this every year, you’d have to ask her? If she were still alive. I can only guess why. But I can appreciate that she did it 50 years later. In fairness, my Dad, a career Deputy Juvenile Probation Officer with L.A. County, gave $65 per month for each child as part of the divorce agreement. So Mom got an extra $195.00 on top of her salary of maybe $300 a month as an executive secretary to various Newport Beach big wigs back then.
As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.’ Often the values of the influences imposed on us by our mothers and fathers, our teachers and certain friends, are not realized until years later, when we, as a sailor does, look back at our wakes to determine the course we have steered that got us to where we are. — Buddy Ebsen, April 2, 1908 —…
