Could the first American version of the margarita truly have been served on the current site of La Jolla United Methodist Church? That’s the story recounted on the wall of the newly inaugurated Bird Rock History Museum (located within the Bird Rock Coffee Roasters facility at 5627 La Jolla Boulevard).
The brief account cites a 2006 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as one source for the claim, but a little online sleuthing reveals that the Post-Gazette account appeared just days after a lengthy obituary for 91-year-old “margarita pioneer” Albert Hernandez Sr. was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune. As obit writer Jack Williams told the story, Hernandez in 1947 had been working as a bartender at the La Plaza restaurant, which occupied a mission-style building on La Jolla Boulevard. (Originally used as a station on the trolley line connecting downtown San Diego with La Jolla, the building later housed the restaurant and an arts and crafts school, then in 1953 became the home of the church that occupies the much-expanded complex today.)
According to the obituary, Hernandez’s boss in 1947 spent a lot of time in Mexico and told his bartender about a drink being served in Rancho La Gloria, “midway on the old road that connected Tijuana with Rosarito Beach.” Supposedly the bartender there, one Carlos “Danny” Herrera, had concocted a drink for an actress named Marjorie King, who claimed to be allergic to all hard liquor except for tequila. In her honor, he named it the margarita.
Hernandez then began trying to reproduce the drink, as his boss recalled it, and eventually settled on a formula of 1 ounce of Jose Cuervo Gold tequila, a half-ounce of Cointreau, and an ounce of fresh lime juice. Originally mixed with crushed ice, he later began processing the ingredients in a blender. In a 1986 interview, Hernandez credited the restaurant owner with coming up with the idea of dipping the glass rim in salt, adding that by the mid-1950s, every bar in San Diego was serving some variation on this theme.
Alternative claims for the margarita’s origins do exist, but enough of them include a connection to Herrera or at least Baja that I find it at least possible that the drink’s US incarnation did first take shape at the La Jolla location.
Although it’s a bit of a stretch to call the new historical repository a “museum” (it consists of a number of large posters that have been mounted on the southern interior wall of the coffeehouse), it includes many other interesting tidbits, particularly for Bird Rock residents. Particularly charming is the chronicle of the white-washed stones that once announced the name of the community on one of the local hillsides. The only problem is that it can be impossible to read the posters, if patrons are sitting at the tables next to them. But that’s also an incentive to come back.
Why isn’t this blog called Travels in San Miguel? That’s what Juan Cabrillo named the big bay and the place around it when he landed here in 1542. But 60 years later, when explorer Sebastian Vizcaino arrived, he renamed everything San Diego, after the fellow pictured to the right. Although he’d been dead for almost 140 years, St. Diego de Alcala had recently captured European imaginations. Indeed, one of Vizcaino’s ships was named after him. Here’s why.
One of the more prominent landmarks along I-5 as you pass Old Town heading south toward downtown San Diego is the jagged-roofed complex that now houses the Navy’s SpaWar (Space and Naval Warfare) center. Today the Navy works on tactical and non-tactical information technology within these buildings, but during World War II this was where the Consolidated Aircraft Company (Convair) assembled some of America’s most powerful war machines. At a San Diego Professional Tour Guide Association meeting the other night, Mike Ryan (a former SDPTGA president and local writer who served in the Navy during the Vietnam War), talked about San Diego’s military history and included a tidbit about the plant’s wartime operation I’ll probably think of every time I drive past.
One of the most grisly historic sites in downtown San Diego is also one of the least known. Even worse, the inconspicuous plaque that marks the location of Punta de los Muertos (Dead Man’s Point) is almost certainly wrong. That’s too bad; the true story is much more interesting.
elled the unfortunate sailors. Their illness, referred to as escorbuto or loanda in the ships’ logs, likely was due to dietary deficiencies beyond just Vitamin C, he believes. Bacterial or fungal contamination of their food supply is also conceivable. The crews had only flour, beans, and dried meat to sustain them — for 59 days in the case of one of the ships and 110 days for the other. And their ordeal wasn’t the worst experienced by the sailors who set off from the tip of Baja California on the mission to create a settlement in San Diego. A third vessel disappeared at sea without a trace.
to Depression, South and his young wife Tanya packed their few possessions into their Model T Ford, drove to the desert east of San Diego, found a mountaintop that appealed to them, and decided to live on it, as simply and naturally as the native Americans who once preceded them. They called the place Ghost Mountain and within five years they’d constructed a compact adobe home that they christened Yaquitepec (after the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, Mexico.)
e plunged into several years of serious sleuthing that culminated in her 2005 book, Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment in Primitive Living.
