Moving from Chicago, we had lived in our new house in southern California for only a few months and were still the new guys on the block. This was back in 1956, I was only 10 and the whole post-war westward movement was still only in its beginning stages, as if it hadn’t been going on since the mid-1800s.
The block we lived on only had seven houses on it; a few homes built in the late-forties, three new model homes and a lot of undeveloped vacant lots. Behind my house there was still an orange grove.
The neighbors often got together for middle-of-the-street block parties. One Saturday, most of the neighborhood all loaded into our respective family automobiles and drove the relatively short 20 miles to Huntington Beach because, “the grunion were running.”
“What are grunion?” I wanted to know.
Louie Mazari, my next-door neighbor, whom I considered wise to all things natural, and who often took me along with him when he went fishing, attempted to answer the question. We fished off the pier at Huntington Beach and often went surf casting along the wide sand beach were the Santa Ana River joined the Pacific.
“They’re little fish,” he said, “about the size of a sardine. But they’ve got a really strange spawning ritual. On Spring and Summer nights, of the highest tides of the month, they swim ashore, and the females stand on their tails, burrow into the sand, lay their eggs and then swim back out to sea when the next wave comes in.”
“A month goes by,” he continued with his explanation, “and when the next high tide comes along, they hatch when the salt water hits them and the young fish swim back out to sea.”
C’mon, I thought, I had just watched on TV the Mouseketeer’s “Spin & Marty” episode about the snipe hunt. The camp counselors had the new kids out tramping through the woods, banging horseshoes together and using other highly dubious methods to attract the mythical snipe. While the counselors all thought it was a hoot, the new kids were out all night, holding open burlap bags and whispering, “Here snipe, here snipe” into the darkness.
This whole grunion run sounded like the California version of the same thing. Kind of a “Get the Newcomers to California” razzing. It was, however, a chance for an evening beach party.
The neighbors who were long time California residents insisted that this whole grunion run story was indeed legitimate, and they finally convinced us to join in and soon a caravan of neighbors was headed for the beach. When we got to Huntington, we had the choice of the State park or the City park beaches; we chose the State park because it was probably going to be less crowded and thus more attractive to the grunion.
The California Department of Fish and Game has released a publication titled “The Amazing Grunion” in which it says, “Grunion hunting has become one of the famous sports of southern California. The common sight of thousands of people lining the more popular beaches in southern California in anticipation of a grunion run attests to its ever-growing popularity. All that is needed to catch grunion is a valid State fishing license and a willingness to get one’s feet wet.” Well, virtually no one gets a fishing license just because they are going grunion hunting.
The state even offers up cooking instructions: “Grunion should be cleaned and scaled. For best results the should be rolled in a mixture of flour and yellow corn meal to which a little salt has been added and deep fried until golden brown. Although bony, they have a delicate flavor and provide excellent table fare when prepared fresh.”
We selected a couple of cement fire rings midway down the beach, spread our beach blankets out and waited for sunset and the high tide, which wouldn’t arrive until just after 10:30 pm. After it got dark, a spotter was dispatched every little bit to run down to the beach and check to see if the run had started. Every time he checked, he always came back with the same sad news, “Not yet.”
The grunion never did show up at our particular strand of beach but the Fish & Game publication does warn to, “Plan to stay late, many grunioners quit an hour after high tide and miss a good run.” I think that night, the grunion just chose another beach.
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