Newport Beach in the Rearview Mirror

“W.S. Collins: Balboa Island Visionary, Con Man or Both?” takes a deep dive into the life of the most intriguing figure in Newport history: W.S. Collins. 

The farsighted land speculator is best known for buying the entire Newport Beach townsite (almost all of the peninsula) in 1902. And for his next act, he created Balboa Island out of a tiny, mosquito-ridden mudflat.

But Collins also had a darker side that’s been rarely explored, whether it was literally trying to hang a second-grader in his first job as an teacher in Kansas, marrying five times, conducting shady business deals, or going bankrupt and leaving behind a partially (and poorly) developed Balboa Island along with an island full of angry residents. 

Looked at as a whole, Collins packed in an insane amount of living in his 88 years. In addition to his Newport exploits, he also was a citrus farmer, oilman, dealmaker, championship motorcyclist, early car enthusiast, speedboat champion, and serial entrepreneur, among other things. 

For our money, W.S. Collins is the most interesting person in Newport Beach history.

For more than 50 years, the Collins Castle stood sentry over Newport Harbor. The concrete mansion once rivaled the stately Balboa Pavilion—five years its junior— for the attention of boaters on the bay. Located on tiny Collins Island, which is one of three islands that make up Balboa Island, the castle was built by Balboa Island's original developer, W.S. Collins, in the early 1910s and has been a part of Newport Beach lore ever since.

For decades, the beach in West Newport would occasionally disappear when storm waves stripped away the sand. In the 1930s, one storm wiped out the beach and sent several homes to Davy’s Locker. A later storm wiped out all  the oceanfront houses between 50th and 55th streets. 

The sand returned for a few decades, but in the early 1960s, the West Newport beach started to disappear again – and this time, Mother Nature wasn't giving the sand back. So solutions were offered – almost all of them completely bananas.

The favorite idea was to build a 1.5-mile-long breakwater from the Newport Pier to about 60th Street. Other kooky proposals included the construction of an underwater reef two miles long and making the sand radioactive so it could be easily traced. The latter plan actually happened.

With no agreed upon solution, by the late summer of 1968, West Newport was literally without a beach, and oceanfront homes stood on the precipice of a crumbling 10-foot-high sand cliff. So authorities hastily conducted a controversial experiment: place steel jetties at 40th Street and 44th Street to hold the sand in place. After promising results, six more jetties–these made of boulders–were placed from 56th and 28nd Street with the last one completed in 1973. In West Newport, the beach was back.

There’s no chunk of land in Newport Beach that’s more historic and has been more malleable than the Castaways. Its chameleon-like ability, enabled by its prime location overlooking the bay and ocean, has given the Castaways nine distinct lives–some historically critical, others largely forgotten, some lasting millions of years, others gone after less than a decade. The one thing they have in common: they are all fascinating. 

In 1909, W.S. Collins wanted to massively increase the footprint of his Balboa Island development. The land extension would have cut the width of Newport Harbor's main channel by more than half. 

In those days, the federal government had final approval of any plans for the harbor, so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent Captain D.E. Hughes to assess the situation. In just 960 words, he delivered a masterpiece of a report (part love letter, part manifesto) that amazingly predicted the future of Newport Beach and its harbor with great precision and beautifully laid out the argument that the harbor's waterways should be reserved for the people's enjoyment and not a developer's profits.

His observations killed Collins' plans for a super-sized Balboa Island and set the precedent that the harbor should be enjoyed by all. 

In 1984, the first swim test required to join Newport Beach's new junior lifeguard program drew all of three kids. Today, that number has soared to more than 1,500. In an insightful, revealing and occasionally emotional interview, Reenie Boyer–the pioneering female lifeguard and architect of Newport Beach Junior Lifeguards–talks about the origins and evolution of the most successful youth program in city history.

The rock-solid foundation for Newport Beach's prized lifeguard operation goes back more than 100 years, forged in tragedy and a Russian immigrant’s belief in 1923 that a city lifeguard department–a rarity in those days–could prevent the frequent drownings that had been occurring in Newport Beach for a half-century, ever since 1870, the year a “new port” was established. 

In just a few short years, the Russian, Antar "Tony" Deraga would single-handedly remake Newport Beach lifeguards into one of the most elite units in the world–a distinction it still retains today.

J.J. Moon was more Paul Bunyon than Kelly Slater. The surf hero of the 1960s was the alter ego of Ned Eckert, a very average weekend surfer–and still a Newport Beach resident, by the way–who enthusiastically embraced a practical joke played on him in 1964 by some world’s best surfers and ran with it until he became a near mythical figure sitting atop the surf world. 

It’s true that J.J. Moon may have not been the world’s greatest surfer, but he did pull off the biggest hoax in the history of the sport. 

Newport Beach’s rich journalistic history dates to 1870, only a few days after a “new port” was established in Upper Newport Bay and the Los Angeles Star reported the news. Over the years, many local newspapers have come and gone, almost all making some kind of mark on the city. This episode looks at the long line of newspapers that have tried to capture the city's heart (and advertising dollars) and takes a deeper dive into the success of the Daily Pilot, Newport's G.O.A.T publication. Special guests: Former Daily Pilot Publisher Tom Johnson and former Editor Tony Dodero. 

When the 1953 National Boy Scout Jamboree came to town, the event created an insta-city of 50,000 Scouts and their leaders in the rolling hills of what's now Newport Center/Fashion Island, Big Canyon and Eastbluff. Guest interview: Don Webb, former Newport Beach council member and mayor who attended the Jamboree as a 14-year-old Scout.