HMB Review of my book: “Princeton-by-the-Sea

As a college student in the 1960s, June Morrall and friends would visit the Coastside and the funky ambience of Princeton.

As an adult, living on the coast and either writing professionally or working to support her passion for writing, she researched, chronicled and shared the history of the area she had come to love.

Her latest undertaking is “Images of America: Princeton-by-the-Sea” (Arcadia Publishing, 127 pages, $19.99) She visits Bay Book Company Friday to discuss her work.

In the style of Arcadia’s Images of America series, which profiles the histories and stories of small communities across the country, it tells Princeton’s story in photographs with detailed captions. Many are historical, but others might be familiar to today’s Coastsiders.

Princeton may be small and quiet, but over seven lively chapters, the book delves into the many worlds that unfolded there.

It presents Ocean Shore Railroad stretching to the beaches. It reveals the rumrunners and roadhouses that gave the area a whiff of scandal during Prohibition. Local icons, and colorful incidents attached to them, include Hazel’s restaurant (and the 1946 tidal wave that struck it) and Ida’s seafood eatery and the small “cannery row” it spawned.

Subsequent chapters follow the drag strip and racers, big waves and surfers, the beatniks that predated Pete Douglas and the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, and today’s Mavericks subculture.

“In this place and at one time there were 300 people” here, Morrall said, but “I knew there were layers of history taking place under the scenic photographs.”

The whalers, railroad, the fishermen and other aspects of Princeton life “just fascinated me. It’s a layering of history,” she said.

But the evolution of her book is a saga of its own. It began in the early 1970s, not long after Morrall settled in El Granada, when she interviewed Bach owner Douglas and became fascinated with stories he told of the beatniks he said had lived here in a building where abalone was processed.

“No one else knew anything about that,” she said.

So, she said, she started delving: She contacted Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who gave her the address of Beat painter Michael Bowen.

She contacted Bowen and they discussed beatnik history. Eventually they lost contact, but not before he helped her contact Marvin Lewis, who gave information about the house where, in the 1940s and ’50s, fishermen processed abalone.

By this time, Morrall had forged her own writing career.

She had written a regular column on local history for the Half Moon Bay Review beginning in the 1970s, which led to her 1978 book “Half Moon Bay Memories: The Coastside’s Colorful Past.” In 1980s she wrote and produced the KCSM-TV documentary “The Mystery of Half Moon Bay,” accessible at www.archive.org/details/half_moon_bay.

And, similarly intrigued with Pescadero history, she penned “The Coburn Mystery,” about a murder that took place there, in 1992.

She had put together three Web sites, dedicated to her writings and to information she’d collected over the years. “I have a lot of files,” she said. “I just research to death, when I get interested in something.”

She put information she’d gleaned from Lewis onto her sites, and Bowen saw it and contacted her in 2006. By then, she was interested in a book on Princeton.

“I continue to be intrigued,” she said. “This area still remains a mystery to me. I don’t think all the things that happened here are dried up yet. It’s steeped in history.”

Doing a book for Arcadia, with its photo-and-caption guidelines, was a different kind of challenge for her. She had to obtain about 200 photos, primarily historical, to fit into the Arcadia template.

She contacted people on the coast and beyond to track down photos – a daunting task, as she had to persuade people to whom she was “a perfect stranger” to lend their cherished old photos. And then, when she had trouble with the scanning process, she had to approach them again.

“It was hard to do,” she said, “but (photo owners) did it.”

Many photograph lenders will be familiar to readers too, such as Michael Wong of Spring Mountain Gallery, Jerry Koontz or Douglas.

Morrall is looking ahead to looking back again, this time close to home. Still living in the same El Granada house in which she settled in 1973, she is working on a history of her own family, in World War II when her parents lived in Shanghai, China, and “every spy from every country was in Shanghai.”
Local historian, author discusses Princeton

As a college student in the 1960s, June Morrall and friends would visit the Coastside and the funky ambience of Princeton.

As an adult, living on the coast and either writing professionally or working to support her passion for writing, she researched, chronicled and shared the history of the area she had come to love.

Her latest undertaking is “Images of America: Princeton-by-the-Sea” (Arcadia Publishing, 127 pages, $19.99) She visits Bay Book Company Friday to discuss her work.

In the style of Arcadia’s Images of America series, which profiles the histories and stories of small communities across the country, it tells Princeton’s story in photographs with detailed captions. Many are historical, but others might be familiar to today’s Coastsiders.

Princeton may be small and quiet, but over seven lively chapters, the book delves into the many worlds that unfolded there.

It presents Ocean Shore Railroad stretching to the beaches. It reveals the rumrunners and roadhouses that gave the area a whiff of scandal during Prohibition. Local icons, and colorful incidents attached to them, include Hazel’s restaurant (and the 1946 tidal wave that struck it) and Ida’s seafood eatery and the small “cannery row” it spawned.

Subsequent chapters follow the drag strip and racers, big waves and surfers, the beatniks that predated Pete Douglas and the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, and today’s Mavericks subculture.

“In this place and at one time there were 300 people” here, Morrall said, but “I knew there were layers of history taking place under the scenic photographs.”

The whalers, railroad, the fishermen and other aspects of Princeton life “just fascinated me. It’s a layering of history,” she said.

But the evolution of her book is a saga of its own. It began in the early 1970s, not long after Morrall settled in El Granada, when she interviewed Bach owner Douglas and became fascinated with stories he told of the beatniks he said had lived here in a building where abalone was processed.

“No one else knew anything about that,” she said.

So, she said, she started delving: She contacted Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who gave her the address of Beat painter Michael Bowen.

She contacted Bowen and they discussed beatnik history. Eventually they lost contact, but not before he helped her contact Marvin Lewis, who gave information about the house where, in the 1940s and ’50s, fishermen processed abalone.

By this time, Morrall had forged her own writing career.

She had written a regular column on local history for the Half Moon Bay Review beginning in the 1970s, which led to her 1978 book “Half Moon Bay Memories: The Coastside’s Colorful Past.” In 1980s she wrote and produced the KCSM-TV documentary “The Mystery of Half Moon Bay,” accessible at www.archive.org/details/half_moon_bay.

And, similarly intrigued with Pescadero history, she penned “The Coburn Mystery,” about a murder that took place there, in 1992.

She had put together three Web sites, dedicated to her writings and to information she’d collected over the years. “I have a lot of files,” she said. “I just research to death, when I get interested in something.”

She put information she’d gleaned from Lewis onto her sites, and Bowen saw it and contacted her in 2006. By then, she was interested in a book on Princeton.

“I continue to be intrigued,” she said. “This area still remains a mystery to me. I don’t think all the things that happened here are dried up yet. It’s steeped in history.”

Doing a book for Arcadia, with its photo-and-caption guidelines, was a different kind of challenge for her. She had to obtain about 200 photos, primarily historical, to fit into the Arcadia template.

She contacted people on the coast and beyond to track down photos – a daunting task, as she had to persuade people to whom she was “a perfect stranger” to lend their cherished old photos. And then, when she had trouble with the scanning process, she had to approach them again.

“It was hard to do,” she said, “but (photo owners) did it.”

Many photograph lenders will be familiar to readers too, such as Michael Wong of Spring Mountain Gallery, Jerry Koontz or Douglas.

Morrall is looking ahead to looking back again, this time close to home. Still living in the same El Granada house in which she settled in 1973, she is working on a history of her own family, in World War II when her parents lived in Shanghai, China, and “every spy from every country was in Shanghai.”

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