The swan by the sea

When they first laid eyes on her, she was not a pretty girl. In her younger years, perhaps, but by the time they saw her, age had ravaged whatever physical gifts she may once have possessed. She was old, tired, a bit smelly and slowly fading away. Yet beneath her withered exterior remained a certain grace, a kind of enduring charm that still made people want to be around her. Even in her decrepit state, they could sense she had something special — something worth saving.

So they decided to buy her.

“It was a gem that needed to be shined up,” says Heidi Stok, referring to the Beachcomber Tavern, the small, unassuming 68-year-old bar located in the unincorporated beach community of Silver Strand that she, her husband and two friends purchased earlier this year.

Adam Blantz, another of the four new owners, describes the place before they took it over using a slightly more caustic mineral analogy: “We saw it as a diamond in the rough — but it was very rough.” Indeed. Once the definition of a classic blue-collar neighborhood dive, the Beachcomber had, over the last two decades, gradually descended into disrepair. Its blue carpets were stained with generations of spilled beer and wine, preserving the stench along with the image. The jukebox, the tiny television set in the corner and the bar itself, with its Formica top, were all terribly outdated. Beyond its aesthetic degradation, the evening clientele had gone from working class to no class. “It was a horrible place in some ways,” Blantz confesses. “It went through this whole drug era that was kind of scary. There were a lot of tweakers hanging out there.”

Visiting on a bright Friday afternoon, it’s hard to imagine that this was, just a few months ago, the seedy, uninviting money pit Blantz claims it was. The stinking carpet has been replaced by hardwood floors, the single miniature TV with a plasma screen and the dollar-per-song jukebox with a laptop outfitted with iTunes, allowing patrons to construct their own playlists — for free. There’s a top-shelf sound system now, with a full-band setup for live music on the weekends. The wine selection has expanded and the choice of beer now includes higher-end lagers such as Stella Artois. Not everything has changed, though: the famous 1955 Marilyn Monroe nude pinup — for which local boys used to dare each other to stick their heads inside the door and take a peek — still hangs on the wall, in the same spot; and the façade, featuring a sailboat drifting between a pair of pelicans, remains untouched. Most importantly, the sketchy characters who overran the bar in the waning days of the previous ownership have been forced out, allowing the kind of people who used to frequent the bar — construction workers, servicemen and women, general hard-laboring folks who appreciate having a place they can walk to for a drink after work — to return en mass.

She may have gotten a makeover, but underneath it all she is the same charming woman she always was. It’s just easier to recognize the charm now.

“It’s coming back to life,” Stok says from behind the bar, her blue eyes beaming.

Of course, nothing in a community this compact happens independently of the community itself. The resuscitation of the Beachcomber is a mirror for Silver Strand’s growth as a whole, which is almost an oxymoron: This is a place that literally cannot grow. Hidden way at the end of Victoria Avenue, the mile-long stretch is practically an island on land. According to the Ventura County Coastal Area Plan, “[t]he only areas where the Silver Strand community could expand are owned by the federal government” — referring to the United States Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme — and “attempts to purchase or lease Navy property have proven generally too costly.” In other words, Silver Strand is stuck. But that doesn’t mean the county can’t in-fill. And that they have, stuffing more than 1,200 dwellings into 130 acres. In addition, housing prices have inched skyward and, with increasing high-income development in surrounding areas, the effect has been to draw Silver Strand out of its relative remoteness and make it part of the region at large, even as it remains unincorporated.

Before, the narrow streets, high-density housing and isolation from the rest of Oxnard, the nearest annexed city, bred a rabid sense of nationalism among young residents. For decades, Silver Strand was known exclusively for its fantastic surf and for the fiercely territorial surfers who refused to share it with outsiders. Stories of slashed tires, stolen surfboards and in-the-water beat-downs spread across the state. “We were warned when we bought our house … that the neighborhood had a rough reputation,” says Elaine Blantz, Adam’s wife and a co-owner of the Beachcomber. “It was not just surfer localism,” Adam adds, “but a lot of drugs and other bad things.” He admits they benefited from that reputation when they moved here from Santa Paula in 1998 (none of the owners is a Silver Strand native), buying a home at a much lower cost than they could find in most other coastal communities. Today, however, the Blantzes regularly find themselves serving people at the Beachcomber who just strolled over from their multi-million-dollar beachfront behemoths. And the problems their realtor cautioned them about have largely disappeared. It could be simple maturation, that those who gave Silver Strand its violent image finally grew up, had kids and mellowed out. Or, more deeply, it could be a matter of economics.

“As housing prices go up,” Elaine says tentatively, “some of the more troubled elements seem to not be present anymore.”

She chooses her words carefully when she says this; she does not want to be accused of supporting gentrification. The owners of the Beachcomber concede that the natural progression of things around here appears to be leaning toward the rich at the expense of the not-so-rich. For a group trying to operate a commercial enterprise, wealthier residents mean wealthier customers. But for four people who came here mainly because they loved the makeup of the community — the eclectic mix of millionaire homeowners and modest renters, white-collar professionals and dudes who work at gas stations — the threat of a homogenized upper-crust neighborhood replacing the one that’s been here forever is crushing.

After talking to the four of them, it’s clear that the threat is genuinely more significant than the possibility of making more money. They all use the phrase “labor of love” to codify their involvement in the Beachcomber, and while that’s an awful cliché, in this case, it has to be true. After all, none of them actually needed the stress involved in running a business: Adam Blantz is a production sound mixer who already works 60 to 80 hours a week (he recently completed work on Rocky VI and a Rear Window reimagining titled Disturbia); Heidi Stok’s husband, Bill, is the controller at a technical services company; Elaine Blantz is studying chemistry at Cal State Channel Islands; and both women are stay-at-home moms with two children apiece. What’s more, none of them has a true background in business. (Bill comes closest, having helped with his parents’ refrigeration company before he “took off to get a desk job.”) Taking over the Beachcomber was something they just felt compelled to do, and that compulsion stemmed from the fact that the bar played a role in introducing them to the community.

Elaine Blantz, for example, first encountered the bar while she and her husband were house hunting. She stepped in to use the restroom — and walked straight into a biker party. “It was kind of a rough place, definitely not a quiet little wine bar,” she recalls. “I like that kind of thing. I like the energy people bring to a place like that.” It needed some sprucing up, for sure, but the vibe gave her a taste of the area’s down-to-earth nature. “It was a place where you didn’t have to worry about pretense. You didn’t have to worry about what kind of shoes you were wearing. It’s edgy, but comfortable. There are places in L.A. where they do look at your shoes when you walk in. There are these eyes judging you. It’s not like that at Silver Strand.”

The Stoks stopped in at the Beachcomber right after signing escrow papers for their home on Lakeshore Drive. They left Woodland Hills in 2002, driven out by rising real estate prices, a dying family-oriented atmosphere and frustration with the Los Angeles Unified School District. “It was either put the kids in private school or pay more on my mortgage,” Bill says. “I decided to pay more on my mortgage.” The night they officially became residents of Silver Strand, while enjoying a beer on the Formica tabletop, Heidi turned to her husband and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to own this place one day?”

And when the opportunity arose three years later, they leapt at the chance.

Ellie Oliver had actually been looking to sell the bar for a while before then. She and her late husband bought the building in 1968, when it was known as Lucille’s. They already owned one bar on Ventura Road in Oxnard (now Sunrise Cantina) and received both the restaurant and the property in a package deal. “But I didn’t know anything about running a restaurant,” she says, so they converted it into the Beachcomber Tavern. It was an instant hit with the locals, famous for its monthly summer fish fries featuring live bands and a hundred pounds of fish personally dragged out of the ocean by Oliver’s husband. She would be there 16 hours a day, greeting customers and playing pool. It was her life.

Then, in 1990, Oliver had surgery on her foot. It made being up and about all day damn near impossible. That’s when the bar began its slow decline. “If you can’t keep it hands-on and be down there all the time, the bartenders take advantage,” she says. “They steal, or they give stuff away.” Eventually, it got to the point that maintaining the Beachcomber became more of a burden than a joy. She began searching for someone to take the reins in 2001, but finding a person who would treat the place with the respect she felt it deserved proved more difficult than she imagined. “It had to be the right people — someone who really cared about it.”

She was about to just let it go in December 2005, when Bill and Heidi Stok approached her. Aside from their personal attachment to the bar and their desire to preserve its history, they knew that with the regulations set by the California Coastal Commission, if the Beachcomber closed, there’d be little chance of another bar coming in to take its place. By those guidelines, any commercial development in a coastal region that has not been grandfathered in must include a certain number of parking spots, and in an area as strapped for open space as Silver Strand, that makes starting a retail establishment there practically unfeasible. It’s one of the reasons why the neighborhood’s commercial core — Big Daddy O’s, the Corner Store, Quincy Street, Pepe’s Mexican Food, etc. — hasn’t welcomed anybody new in years. “If the bar disappeared,” Bill says, “it would never happen again.”

With Bill’s financial knowledge and Heidi’s enthusiasm, the Stoks appeared to be the perfect candidates to succeed Oliver as the owners of the Beachcomber. But she initially refused to sell to them, for two reasons: their young daughters. She knew from experience that running a bar turns mothers and fathers into absentee parents and wanted to save them the grief. “My kids hated the bar,” Oliver says, “because I was always down there.” So the Stoks went to their best friends, the Blantzes — whom they met after they all enrolled their children at Hollywood Beach Elementary School — and asked them to become partners in the project, to split the responsibility four ways. Elaine accepted the invitation immediately; Adam, however, was hesitant. “I was the one who was more realistic about it. They had a somewhat romantic concept. I knew doing it would mean giving away every free moment we had,” he says. “I brought it up with them; they still wanted to go through with it, so I thought, ‘What the hell?’ ” Besides, “I didn’t want [the Beachcomber] to go away. It would’ve been a tragedy for the whole community if it just died. It needed a big dose of life.”

Comfortable with the four of them in charge, Oliver finally agreed to hand the bar over. The quartet spent the first half of 2006 injecting it with that “big dose of life.” Although none of them had much specific experience in the bar business (Bill worked as a bartender in college), they had enough individual skills between them to do much of the renovation themselves. They stayed up until 4 a.m. most nights laying the new floors. They swapped the old bar for one made of oak and maple, with peninsulas held up by refurbished wood masts from a sailboat. They replaced the tiling and installed a top-of-the-line mixing board for the bands. They reupholstered the pool table. And the coup de grace: They brought in a 25-year-old shuffleboard, placing it, they later discovered, in the exact same spot where one once stood in the 1930s, when the building was the home of Ziegler’s Café. They made it, Bill says, into their “dream bar.”

As the couples officially assumed managerial duties in May, word about the Beachcomber’s revival began to spread through Silver Strand. Little by little, business started to pick up. People who hadn’t stepped foot in the bar in 20 years came by to check it out. Two women who had been “banned for life” for undisclosed reasons decades earlier sheepishly asked if they could re-enter. Military men stopped in before being shipped overseas; one group scrawled a tribute to a fallen hometown soldier on the mirror behind the bar, another sent pictures from somewhere in the Middle East of themselves wearing Beachcomber Tavern T-shirts and holding a sign reading, “Rather Be Playing Shuffleboard.” One night, the grandson of the original owner gave them pictures of the building, circa World War II, which are now inlaid into the bar top. By summer, the bar had, once again, become the classic neighborhood watering hole, a gathering point for the entire community.

Which, naturally, also had its drawbacks. Although the owners went to great lengths to contain it, the increased noise upset the neighbors directly surrounding the bar, who had become accustomed to living next door to a place that hardly seemed to attract anybody at all. “It’s kind of a win-lose situation there,” Bill says. “The more popular we get, the better we do. The other side of the coin is the neighbors, because there’s more noise. It’s a balancing act.” And as the crowds grew bigger, so did the interest of local authorities. The health department told them they could no longer throw fish fries, a 40-year tradition they hoped to continue. In response, the community brought in their own food, everything from 50 pounds of sea bass and barracuda to balogna sandwiches and cereal.

Unfortunately, the owners were told that even potlucks are against the rules. But the statement, Heidi says, was clear: “Everyone feels they own part of the bar.” The Beachcomber, they believe, belongs to all the residents of Silver Strand — regardless of their income level.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a punk-ass or a millionaire,” Heidi says. “Everyone supports each other.”

As for their long-term plans, well, it’s hard for them to have any. They can’t expand and, at this point, they’re not considering getting a license to serve hard alcohol. All they can really aim for is to keep it going for as long as possible. And they’re totally fine with that.