Have you ever had anyone sympathize with you or a friend and feel sorry that you’re moving to or living in our city? Well I have and I don’t like it. When I first came to Long Beach in 1954 at the ripe old age of 10 from Chicago, you would have thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Those cold winters and the icy wind blowing over Lake Michigan would freeze your body right to the bone. Coming to California was a dream come true for my whole family. I spent my youth delivering newspapers, working at the Pike, and going to St. Anthony’s and Long Beach State. Fond memories, I might add.
So how did our Long Beach come by this reputation of a city to avoid? My guess is that its notoriety came from earning the label as a grimy oil and rowdy navy town. There were negative stereotypes of the oil derricks, tattoo parlors and the Pike. Well I happened to love the navy, the oil issue we’ll leave for the historians. As for the Pike, most of us still wished it were downtown, probably a modernized version with the world’s fastest roller coaster. I’d bet we would have more visitors than what Santa Monica’s pier gets these days.
What I don’t understand is that most people who espouse the Long Beach avoidance issue have no idea about how our city looks today. At our eastern border, we have the best, most modernized Veterans Hospital in the system. Long Beach State University, aka Cal State Long Beach, is the largest, most beautiful, and the best campus in our State’s system. Our Long Beach Community College with its wonderful campus feeds to our University system like no other in student quality and academic standing.
El Dorado Park, one of the largest in the country, has some of the best local fishing (just ask my daughter Megan) and the adjacent Nature Center serves our kids from our award winning school system. We’re still making the C-17 for the defense of our country, and our classy downtown and fantastic convention center turn heads once people take a drive along Ocean Boulevard.
Once you’ve taken a drive through the Naples area with its beautiful canals, our miles of shoreline, world class port facilities, and country’s largest municipally owned marinas you’ll begin to see why we’re the envy of any California city.
The above is just a shortlist of what our city can boast about. So, for the ones that don’t know what our shining city by the sea is all about, I say, “Who cares.” I love it here and for me that’s what’s important isn’t it?