Favorite Route Leads to Coast : Wave of Summer Beach-Goers Will Board Beach Boulevard’s Buses

LA HABRA —  The bus pulls away from the curb at precisely 8:10 every weekday morning.

Driven by a no-nonsense woman called Sarge, the vehicle eases into the traffic, cutting a swath for itself in the southbound lanes of Beach Boulevard just below the La Habra Boulevard intersection. For the next hour and a half, the crusty bus driver--whose real name is Darlene Stephan--will traverse eight cities, traveling 20 miles to the steamy sands of Huntington Beach.

“It’s pretty much a straight shot,” said Stephan, 59, who’s been driving a bus for 20 years. On Beach Boulevard, “you know you’re getting somewhere; you just put your foot on it and go.”

Most of Sarge’s passengers this day are commuters, people going to work or embarking on shopping sprees. But a few weeks from now, when the weather heats up, the bus will be filled with swimsuit-clad boys and girls lugging surfboards and beach towels. Residents of inland Orange County, they will be part of an annual ritual in these parts: the summer migration of beach lovers down Beach Boulevard.

Welcome to one of Orange County’s favorite roads to summer. Serving as many as 65,000 cars a day, this 20.25-mile stretch is the county’s busiest surface street. It is also the traditional route for folks from the region’s northwest corner to the coast, a fact that gives the street its name.

“It seemed like anywhere you went, it always involved Beach,” said Karen Drum, 37, a public-relations professional who now lives in Long Beach but grew up near Beach Boulevard. “It was always so big and wide; when I was little, it seemed like the road to all places.”

That characterization has its roots in history.

In 1769, when California was still a Spanish territory, Gen. Gaspar de Portola, accompanied by Father Junipero Serra, led an expedition from Baja California to San Francisco to establish a string of Spanish missions and confirm reports of a huge bay near Monterey. Part of the route they followed touched the northern part of what would later become Orange County. From Portola’s and Serra’s route, a long country road evolved, winding southward toward the sea to connect farming communities around old La Habra to what is now Huntington Beach.

Over the years, the road took on many names at its various points, including La Habra Road, Grand Avenue, Hampshire Street and Huntington Beach Boulevard. “It was like a snipe hunt, telling anyone how to get from one end of the county to the other,” said Orange County historian Jim Sleeper. “That’s the reason they gave it one name.”

In 1933, recognizing the increasingly unified character of the road, California officials designated it as State Highway 39. Then in 1960, an Orange County street naming committee charged with eliminating multiple names on county highways decided to call the whole thing Beach Boulevard in honor of where it led.

In its earliest days, the route was a farmer’s dream, dotted at its northern end by avocado, walnut and citrus groves that gradually gave way to bean fields as one traveled south. Oil derricks later sprouted near the coast. At one point, historians say, there was even a pig ranch north of Buena Park that greeted travelers with its heavy stench.

But as Orange County has changed, so has Beach Boulevard. A six-lane highway, it is lined with a densely packed expanse of offices, shopping centers, fast-food outlets and filling stations. Stretching through eight cities as the fourth-longest street in Orange County, it is host to:

* 62 traffic signals.

* 34 gas stations.

* 29 car dealers.

* 9 car washes.

* 14 flower shops.

* 6 theaters (two of them adults-only).

* 5 McDonald hamburger joints.

* 1 major amusement park, Knott’s Berry Farm, plus scads of other tourist attractions.

* 5 mobile home parks or dealers.

* And 3 cemeteries--two of them for humans.

The street has always held a kind of dubious mystique.

In 1979, a group of local punk bands released an album called “Beach Blvd” that, for a time, seemed to symbolize the suburban youth culture of that period for an international audience. “Beach Boulevard connected the punk rock spectrum from inland to the beach,” said Jim Kaa, a guitarist and songwriter for one of the groups. “It was a classic period--the seed of a lot of Los Angeles and Orange County punk.”

Officials of various cities along the route, disparaging what they described as Orange County’s most congested street, later took to publicly calling it “Bleak Boulevard.”

Many who grew up in Orange County have deeply embedded memories of the street closely associated with the visions of their youths. “I like the street,” said one, Vince Conte, 33. “It has just about everything you want on it.”

It was partly the boulevard’s high visibility that prompted county officials in 1985 to designate it as the first of an envisioned network of 21 “smart streets”--major arterial highways connecting various parts of the county. The improvement of Beach Boulevard has already begun--a $36-million project to widen the street, coordinate its signals, restrict parking and add bus turnouts as well as additional right- and left-turn lanes.

The goal, according to John Garcia, project manager at the Orange County Transportation Authority, is to increase traffic flow by about 6.5 miles per hour, thus decreasing the average 35-minute transit time for private automobiles by five to 10 minutes.

The work is expected to be completed in just over four years, he said.

All of which seems rather remote on a quiet morning at the northern end of Beach, where the street begins in a “T” intersection at Whittier Boulevard. There’s a Motel 6 here, frequented, according to its manager, by international travelers on tight budgets. Across the street is a Mark C. Bloom tire store, and at the other side of the intersection, a Bank of California building faces an abandoned-looking carwash.

Interesting things have happened here, according to the locals.

It was nearby on Beach Boulevard that Richard Nixon’s parents lived during the 1950s while their son was vice president. In fact, a La Habra historian said, the former President’s father died here during the reelection campaign of 1956.

This end of the boulevard was home to the county’s first commercial avocado grove in the 1940s. And it was near here that the discovery of oil in 1903 started the Standard Oil Company’s rise from a small marketing firm into the major petroleum developer it eventually became.

One of the more significant things that happens around here these days, however, is the daily departure of Sarge’s bus from the intersection once known as Smith Corners, named after the family whose members lived on all corners.

“Beach is my favorite route,” Sarge said as she pulled out even with the southbound traffic. “It’s a wide street. You never know for sure what’s gonna happen.”

On this particular morning, what was happening was a beautiful Southern California day in the yawning weeks before summer.

“It’s gonna be a good day at the beach,” Sarge mused as she began to pick up speed. Later, as is her custom, the gray-haired woman greeted customers personally while calling out their stops.

“Thank you much and have a good day,” she said with a smile. “Next stop--Stage Road.”