By Tom Leech
Just a stone’s throw from Mission Valley — make that just a baseball’s throw — once resided one of San Diego’s legendary figures, a man who was one of my heroes, and I lived just around the corner and didn’t even know it.
Go back a few decades to when I just arrived in San Diego to work at the major aerospace company out at Kearny Mesa. That was the General Dynamics Astronautics facility, employing 40,000 workers to develop and build Atlas and Centaur rockets. I was one of many recent college graduates hired by General Dynamics; half the cars in the company parking lot had out-of-state license plates.
A pressing problem for us mostly engineer types was where to live. On my first day in the company’s new employee check-in area, I ran into a fellow new hire, Paul, with whom I had worked a year before as a summer intern at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. All of us new hires were then sent to an orientation to the company and its products. There I hooked up with two other imports and with Paul, the four of us decided to look for a place to live.
The obvious place for four bachelors to call home would have been the beach communities. Slight problem was rentals raised their prices for summer (and we were all about out of funds having just paid for our four or so years of college). So somehow we found a workable two-bedroom apartment in North Park. The location was Kansas Street, a short distance from the North Park Theater (where they showed reel-to-reel films back then). North Park wasn’t especially exciting, but it worked.
Once the summer ended, the beach rentals went down significantly, so we found a small house right at the beachfront in North Mission Beach. No question that location provided us with a bit more excitement than the North Park abode. We discovered the hot cultural hangouts along the boardwalk, from the Beachcomber to Maynard’s. Someone came up with a surfboard, only about 10 feet long, which took two of us to carry from our house to the shore. We beach bums barely tried it out, but a couple of General Dynamics cronies did come down for some brief surfing shots.
Fast forward a few decades, and both the beach communities and North Park have changed considerably. I have since learned much about San Diego’s history and key figures.
One that was intriguing had personal roots for me from back when I was a kid in a small town in Indiana. My chums and I were big baseball fans, rooting for mostly nearby teams like the Chicago White Sox or Cubs, the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Indians. My pal Bill and I were ardent Boston Red Sox fans, and had the Bosox symbol pasted on our bicycles. Needless to say, our hero was a left-fielder and super hitter named Ted Williams. During my years here in San Diego I had learned about Ted’s baseball start playing for Hoover High School and the early Padres team at Lane Field, Downtown. The Hall of Champions at Balboa Park had ample info about him, and a major road off Interstate 15 north of Poway was named the Ted Williams Parkway.
When Ted died in 2002, I joined a big crowd for a Ted memorial at the Hall of Champions and heard stories from many locals about who had grown up with Ted and stayed close over the years. Following that, I went to the museum’s book store and bought a biography, “Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams.” While intently reading about his career from the early years, I came across the address of the house where his mother lived and where Ted had spent much time. And, wait a minute, what’s that address? On Utah Street? In North Park? Oh lordy, Ted’s family house was just one street over from where I lived on Kansas Street and all of about three blocks away! So for those several months I lived there decades ago, had I known Ted’s actual nearby house, I would have made a practice of checking if the Splendid Splinter was visiting his mother and perhaps actually seen my early hero. But no such thing happened.
Lesson learned: Be a more careful researcher about personal heroes who may be living in my vicinity. Hmmm, did I also miss out on La Jolla High School graduate Raquel Welch?
—Tom Leech is a frequent contributor to Mission Valley News, and author (with Jack Farnan) of “Outdoors San Diego: Hiking, Biking & Camping.” For information about many ways to enjoy our natural areas, visit outdoorssandiego.com.
