1978 | San Diego Rowing Club
Even after growing rapidly beyond its military core since World War II, San Diego seemed to act like a small city. It’s a diffused place; when I arrived at UCSD in 1965, there were 500 undergraduates. After grad school in L.A. and alternate service in South Dakota, I returned in 1973, finding scant signs of life – street photography had to be worked up, as gatherings were smallish and infrequent. The grand Balboa Park had been established in 1868, but over a century later it seemed to draw a small attendance except on fair-weather Sundays.
So I sought out parades, competitions, lifeguard trials, sandcastle contests, any occasion where two or more people would likely gather. This day, the first of January, the old-timers at the San Diego Rowing Club met at this location for their seventy-ninth annual Penguin Plunge, just about the coldest thing you could do in the city.
I arrived early but was disappointed to see barricades and yellow crowd-control tape holding back a number of onlookers. I was an uncredentialed onlooker myself, but I swung my camera out in front of me and approached the gate monitors to shake hands, “Hi, I’m Davi…” and was interrupted with an enthusiastic “Oh, you’ve come to take pictures!” I was ushered in, directed to the beer and chili buffet, and encouraged to go right down onto the float to get good pictures.
That’s when I began to learn that for every ‘no’ that I may encounter, there is a possibility for an unexpected ‘yes.’ My medium is special, since it allows me to gather precious evidence of these opportunities.
Soon after this picture was made, the aging clubhhouse building was condemned by the City of San Diego; the Club’s lease had not been renewed for some time. The Club relocated to a suitable recreational shoreline on Mission Bay, and the old clubhouse was refitted as a nautical-themed restaurant. Later, the restaurant changed hands and themes, but a lot of personal and civic influence was required to retrieve the historic trophies loaned to the Chart House and then held hostage by the new proprietor, Joe’s Crab Shack.