Whale barbecue circa 1917. Banner image: Brockton Villa

Myths & Legends Of La Jolla
Every city and town fills archives with official histories that record the births, deaths, and groundbreakings that all places have in common. But the unique flavor of a place is only to be found in the secret history the locals share among themselves, when the tourists have taken over the beach. La Jolla has amassed a treasure trove of local history; its natural beauty, elegant ease of life, and celebrated centers of learning and research have drawn so many ingenious artists, actors, scientists, and colorful characters to its secluded shores that the result could never be ordinary. And yet, much of La Jolla’s unique charm is hidden from all but the diligent historical detective and the gregarious native with an ear for a tall tale — or a very short one.

Like many coastal communities, La Jolla’s sedate and sophisticated image hides a wild and wooly youth, when curious galas and colorful daredevils first distinguished the fledgling settlement. "We do have our eccentricities," Carol Olten of the La Jolla Historical Society modestly admits, but the banquet of oddities she proceeds to set out would rival any served in the Emerald City of Oz.

Public spectacles such as the 1917 "Whale Barbecues" in Scripps Park brought new residents together over the carcasses of hapless leviathans harpooned by local fishermen, while elaborate publicity stunts were staged to draw visitors to newborn La Jolla. An 1894 San Diego Union column details a typical event: "The managers of this favorite resort have prepared another performance for Sunday afternoon...in the shape of a balloon ascension. Miss Hazel Keyes, with her trained monkey Yan Yan, accompanied by Professor Romeo, the accomplished aeronaut, will make the ascension and each will drop in different parachutes, making the perilous descent separately."

But no daredevil put La Jolla on the map with greater panache than the death-defying Professor Horace Poole. Beginning in 1897, Poole made a 4th of July tradition of leaping into the sea from the cliffs above the cave, and outdid himself in 1898 by bathing in oil and setting himself ablaze just before the dive. Poole survived to repeat his feat for several years, until a rival, Burt Reed, the son of former San Diego mayor D.C. Reed, died of injuries from duplicating the leap. This tragedy put paid to further cliff diving, but the redoubtable Poole forged on until 1920, when he dove into the sea off Ocean Beach from an aeroplane. Poole emerged unharmed, but the plane crashed and sank. An unlikely quiet death in bed claimed Poole in San Diego in 1943.

As La Jolla matured and secured its reputation as a secluded retreat, it became home to celebrated creative titans from Raymond Chandler to Dr. Seuss, but long before the La Jolla Playhouse first showcased the town’s world-class local talent in 1947, there was the Green Dragon Colony.

The colorfully-christened group was founded by Miss Anna Held, a nanny to the children of President Ulysses S. Grant, who fell in love with La Jolla while squiring her charges along on the general’s visit to San Diego for the grand opening of the downtown hotel named for him. Held bought adjoining lots around Goldfish Point and built 12 fanciful cottages with names like the Outlook, the Wigwam and Noah’s Ark (which incorporated a boat into its structure "in anticipation of the prophesied flood or of an inrush of tourists," according to the Union).

The Green Dragon Colony opened in 1894 as a hothouse for artists, novelists, composers, and other creative lights to spark off each other and the invigorating seaside solitude; and though the last traces of the colony were knocked down by 1949, some artifacts remain in odd places — a fireplace from one cottage found its way into the now-defunct Chart House restaurant — and the Green Dragon’s tradition of nurturing the fine arts continues to infuse the La Jollan character.

Others among La Jolla’s storied residents refuse to lie quietly and let history speak for them, but if their aim is to terrorize the living, they’ve shot wide of the mark. The Grande Colonial Hotel La Jolla seems quite proud of the fact that some of its guests refuse to check out, ever.

An apartment hotel when it opened in 1913, the Grande Colonial once hosted two men and two women who enjoyed loud nightly drinking parties in a pair of ground-floor rooms. Though the rooms later became the hotel’s bakery, the departed revelers have been heard partying on through the decades, and have made their displeasure plain whenever renovations interrupted their merrymaking. During the construction of the hotel restaurant, Nine-Ten, chefs who left sauces simmering overnight found the pilot lights extinguished or turned to full blast, and employees have reported seeing pans and other utensils move on their own, as the rowdy foursome pause to prepare a snack.

A special hotel room with semi-private entrance was a favorite hideaway for such Hollywood luminaries as Gregory Peck and Mel Ferrer, and desk clerks chronically receive calls from the room — when it’s vacant. Other ghostly guests — such as a dapper tuxedoed gent and a lovely lady in a créme-colored evening gown — have been described by employees and guests from as far back as 1928, but the Grande Colonial graciously entertains its phantom freeloaders, and even promotes their hauntings as subtle testimonials to the hotel’s charm.

La Jolla has its share of melancholy ghosts, as well; witness the tragic tale of Brockton Villa, built in 1894 by Dr. Joseph Rodes for himself and his wife. Rodes was fishing off the point in 1896 when his boat went down in a fatal accident in full view of his horrified wife from her porch. Rodes’ widow sold the house and left La Jolla, but the spirit of the luckless mariner still haunts his broken home, now the Brockton Villa Restaurant.

But no La Jollan myth is more persistent or more intriguing than the "tall" tales told of Munchkinland. I’ve never met a native San Diegan who did not hear this fantastical but oddly compelling story, and waste at least one high school Saturday night searching for it. A wonderful case of mythmaking in action, the Munchkinland story persists because those who never found it often built up the mystery with wild exaggeration, while those who discovered the truth sagely keep the secret.

For the transplants among you, the legend goes that a coalition of actors who portrayed the Munchkins in The Wizard Of Oz in 1939 bought and built a secluded community somewhere on Mount Soledad, where they could live normal lives away from prying giants, in a neighborhood custom-built to fit their modest stature: tiny houses huddled around a little lane with short curbs and pygmy trees and streetlights you could touch with your hand. Embellished yarns told of the intensely private munchkins and their regular-sized offspring violently ejecting curiosity-seekers, of secret entrances disguised as hedgerows, and even a series of four enchanted bridges.

The truth behind this legend turns out to be so much more mundane, that one could hardly be blamed for siding with the lie. Indeed, there were once a handful of odd little cottages on Mount Soledad, and according to Olten, a bunch of Hollywood Munchkins did indeed stay in them for a time during the filming of The Wizard Of Oz. While they came and went without incident, like so many other famous and fascinating visitors to La Jolla, the ripples of their passage still have tongues wagging.

Designed by western architect Clifford May, the four fanciful cottages were set on a recessed lot on steep and winding Hillside Drive, so they seemed much smaller than they really were. Their low doors and drooping roofs, quaint cobblestone tile interiors, and Hobbit-sized round fireplaces proved fertile fodder for fairytale speculation, but the mythmaking could not spare them from the bulldozers of progress. Of the four, only one survived at 7477 Hillside Drive as of 2005, but has since been absorbed into another lot as a backyard playhouse. Another of the cottages was relocated in toto onto the grounds of UCSD, where a plaque proclaims its dubious historical value, and keeps the legend of La Jolla’s Munchkinland alive.

The story of a zealously secretive midget colony must strike at some fundamental hook in the human imagination, for it recurs throughout America, from North Carolina and Pennsylvania to rural New Jersey, on the former estate of circus mogul P.T. Barnum. But in the end, such indestructible myths seem far less strange, and not so far afield from the common thread that binds together all of La Jolla’s unusual legends. A truly haunting locale, La Jolla captivated the dreams of America’s most accomplished dreamers, and wove a spell no visitor could escape. Having found a home as magical as anywhere over the rainbow, who could be persuaded, whether by the forces of life or death itself, to leave? — Cody Goodfellow, photography by Vincent Knakal, and courtesy of the La Jolla Historical Society