Belle Lowe. A portait of the woman who named Long Beach. Photo courtesy Gerrie Schipske
Our city hasn’t always been called Long Beach. During the first 50 years of its history it was known by many names. But, Long Beach, which was suggested by Belle Lowe, wife of our town’s first postmaster, was the one that finally stuck.1
Suggesting the name in 1884 to a land syndicate attempting to market the area at the time, Lowe believed it reflected the town’s most popular asset—eight-plus miles of wide-open beach along the town’s southern border.2 Lowe’s suggestion won over Crescent City, a name recommended because of the shape of our coastline.3
More than a decade later, the City of Long Beach was officially incorporated on December 13th, 1897—growing from a sleepy seaside community into a thriving municipality.
But, what else was our city called? Find out what Long Beach was named during its formative years by solving this month’s puzzle using the ROT13 method of encryption. ROT13 is a letter substitution cipher that replaces a letter with the letter 13 letters after it in the alphabet.
References
1-3. Schipske, G., Early Long Beach. Arcadia Publishing, 2011, p. 7.
The answer to last month’s puzzle comes from Greggory Moore’s novel, The Use of Regret:
I’m tormented by the idea that it’s all nothing. I accept that things exist—coffee, Casablanca, you, your favorite songs—and I allow for their valuations, subjective as they may be, that things matter or they don’t, are wholly good or wholly bad or fall somewhere in between. But what is the Holocaust to water or to Saturn’s rings, to the expanse of time and space, within which we may as well never have existed? What is tomorrow’s ecstasy or horror to yesterday? Moments come and go, things happen and stop happening, that’s all. I spend half my time trying to turn this nothing into something, to capture and preserve it, to bring life to lifeless dust. This is nothing, I keep saying, but here it is. Look, it’s nothing, look.
The Use of Regret is available for purchase at {open}, the bookstore and performance space, located at 2226 E. 4th St., Long Beach 90814 – thestoryofopen.com