The Tinhorn Commodore

By Scott Martelle / Photograph by Ralph Palumbo

It was, Jim Thobe admits, a martini-induced idea.

In the summer of 1970, Thobe, who recently had moved into Cottage 35 at Crystal Cove, was getting ready to help neighbor Paul Ramsey host a Saturday beach party for the fraternity brothers of Ramsey’s college-aged son. It was about 1 p.m., happy hour somewhere in the world, and after a few martinis Thobe and his pal decided that the frat boys ought to be entertained at a yacht club.

The problem was, Crystal Cove didn’t have a yacht club. In fact it didn’t—and still doesn’t—have a dock, let alone a yacht. But what it did have was an appetite for the absurd, a communal drive for a good laugh, and an awful lot of driftwood.

So Thobe and Ramsey, martinis in hand, wandered the cove collecting whatever could be recycled into something vaguely architectural. A shelter emerged, a basic A-frame of tree branches, poles, pieces of boats, busted lobster traps, ship hatch covers, and God-knows-what-else that had washed up on Crystal Cove’s beautiful beach.

Thus the Crystal Cove Yacht Club rose from the sand. Of course, a yacht club needs a commodore and Thobe stepped into the void, instituting two rules of membership: Thobe had to like you—he tended to like a lot of people—and you had to bring “a fifth of Cutty Sark to be drunk with the commodore.”

For a yacht club, Crystal Cove’s was a pretty egalitarian affair. Over the years, Thobe handed out hundreds of Crystal Cove Yacht Club ID cards, each listing the holder as a “life commodore,” and each numbered “009,” giving a fantastic sense of exclusivity to what, essentially, was a gaggle of half-toasted beach partiers.

“A yacht club has always been kind of snooty, and that’s why we did it tongue in cheek,” says Thobe, an 82-year-old retired insurance executive who lives near Irvine’s Shady Canyon. Adds Pam Gardner, Thobe’s longtime companion: “We prided ourselves on being an anti-yacht club.”

Club events were “just spontaneous,” says Thobe. A neighbor would see another neighbor, bottles would be retrieved from cottages, and, the next thing you knew, a potluck party had erupted for no other reason than the sun was setting.

The Crystal Cove Yacht Club effectively died along with the old Crystal Cove. The Irvine Company sold the land to the state as future parkland in 1979, and, after years of political and legal wrangling, longtime residents were forced out of their vintage—and tiny—leased cottages. By then, the cluster of shacks had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the last surviving examples of California’s legendary beach communities.

Bitter about the lengthy political and legal battle, many of the evicted have never returned. But some, such as Thobe and Laura Davick, founder and president emeritus of the Crystal Cove Alliance, couldn’t leave the past behind.

Initially they hoped to use the Yacht Club as a tongue-in-cheek way to entice big donors and foundations to donate $50,000 for a lifetime “commodore” membership, but staid foundations and martini-infused beach parties didn’t seem to click. The recession didn’t help, either. So, in March, Davick and the association shelved plans to use a replica of Thobe’s rickety old A-frame of driftwood as part of a fundraising effort for planned education programs. But the Alliance, which contracts with the state to manage the historic cottage district within the park, plans to push ahead with the programs.

The Yacht Club will rise again, Davick insists, and the Alliance eventually will re-create the club’s shack, which over the years sat on several different spots. Occasionally a resident would tire of the noise and ask Thobe and the others to lug the clubhouse farther down the beach.

If “Gilligan’s Island” had a social club, this would have been it. The Crystal Cove Alliance plans to build a version of Jim Thobe’s original clubhouse in the historic district.

 

 

Sometimes winter storms would carry chunks of it away. “Neighbors, if they were walking the beach and saw pieces of it, would bring it back and then we’d have another cocktail party and rebuild it, making changes all the time,” Thobe says.

Exactly when the new clubhouse might get built is as fluid as the contents of a martini shaker. And the future yacht club by necessity will be different. Davick hopes it will be just as spartan and open-sided, but it likely will have a permanent spot at the southern end of the historic district.

More significantly, happy hour can’t be quite so happy, or long. Drinking on the beach in state parks is banned, and the park closes at sunset for all except cottage renters and patrons of The Beachcomber at Crystal Cove, which now occupies Cottage 15. So the intimacy will be gone. Parties in the old days were impromptu affairs among longtime neighbors; the current neighbors change as often as reservations expire.

With all those differences, could a new Crystal Cove Yacht Club be similar enough to the original to work? Times change, and the “Rat Pack” approach to partying is long gone. In the end, the dream may fall to the memory. But what a memory it was.

Thobe sits in the living room of his Irvine home,  separated by coastal hills from the ocean on whose edge he lived for so many years. He has a scrapbook with mementoes on the shelf in the large family room off the kitchen, and old photos are tucked away in a box. Some of the characters who made Crystal Cove such an irreverent place have died, or moved away in the diaspora that came with their exile from Eden. Thobe hopes that a revived Yacht Club—even with the legal limitations—can help Crystal Cove cling to some of the best of its past, particularly the irreverence.

Thobe likes to tell the tale of visiting a son in Hawaii and stopping by the Lahaina Yacht Club for dinner—a place that only admits members of yacht clubs with reciprocal agreements. Emboldened with his “life commodore” card, Thobe feigned surprise that the Crystal Cove Yacht Club’s insignia wasn’t up on the ceiling with those of legitimate affiliates, then bluffed his way through signing the club’s leather-bound guest book. “It worked—we got in there all the time,” Thobe says.

Though not always easily. “One night we come in and I flash the card, and a guy at the bar—just socko blotto—hears me say, ‘Yeah, we’re members of the Crystal Cove Yacht Club,’ ” Thobe says. “He turns around on the bar stool and says, ‘Oh for God’s sake, kick his ass out of here. That Crystal Cove Yacht Club is a piece of driftwood and it goes in and out with the tide!’ ”

Thobe boasts that he got in anyway.


Scott Martelle is an Orange Coast contributing writer.