The Naming of Kelly’s Cove

We had some warm weather recently in San Francisco—unusual for July—which brought the people to Ocean Beach. I prefer it when the sky is gray and cold as marble and everything is as desaturated as a crime lab scene in a CSI episode. Maybe that makes me a native.

The climate changes, the people change, but the rolling surf and the view from Ocean Beach where it hooks up against the northern point, a satisfying curve that forces you to stop and look back at the eternity of the Pacific, mostly stays the same.

When men wore bowlers and women dragged their skirts across the sand, they called this termination of sand against rock and rip-rap, “Cliff House Beach.”

But my whole life, and for at least 25 years before me, locals call it Kelly’s Cove, or just Kelly’s. Lore, legend, and some long memories identify this patch of rock, sand, and eddying swells as the birthplace of San Francisco surfing.

Inner-tube paddlers gave way to longboarders on wooden planks, who passed a metaphorical torch to today’s neoprene-clad riders of fish-tails and quad-finned carbon-fiber boards.

But who was Kelly, and why is this area named after him?

If there was a “him,” that is. One story credits a nearby billboard advertising Kelly Tires, the oldest American tire brand in the United States and now a Goodyear product, as the origin of the name.

Not a bad theory when you see this photo:

It is a good origin story because tire bonfires were a regular part of the Kelly’s scene. Sliced-off chunks of rubber helped get a driftwood fire going and then the entire tire would be tossed on. The fire and the oily smoke made a beacon for those in the water while keeping the beach crowd warm on foggy days.

But I believe the Kelly billboard was just a prophetic coincidence, an unintended herald for the flesh-and-blood man who inspired the name.

Old Man Kelly

In the early 20th century, long before our nation’s obsession with monitoring heart rates, 10,000 steps, and “wellness,” a visit to the beach was considered medicinal. Salt water, ocean breezes, and even “sand-baths” were prescribed to improved physical well-being. Considering the often-toxic air in city streets at the time, a walk at the beach certainly didn’t hurt. 

Real exercise by comparison—running, swimming, performing calisthenics—was seen as somewhat odd, even juvenile. Physical exertion meant blue collar work, not recreation. Competitive sports or a ritual group activity like the New Year’s Day run by the Olympic Club, were accepted, but the general advice and societal expectation for adults was not to sweat.

From this context came an outsider stereotype that still kicks around California beaches: an older man exercising by himself at the beach, perhaps in strange garb, a bit of a hermit and curmudgeon, perhaps a spouter of wild philosophies.

Today down at Venice Beach he may be a former hippie on roller skates wearing big headphones and a gray ponytail. At Ocean Beach in the first half of the 20th century he was Old Man Kelly, an ocean swimmer and a jogger before jogging had a name.

The late Patrick Cunneen remembered being a sixth-grader in the mid-1940s, making his first trips to what everyone called Kelly’s Cove:

“We used to save all the dough we could during the week—bottles, cans turned in for recycling—and nip the 7 streetcar to Playland at the Beach. We’d spend all our dough there on rides and candy, and then we went over to Kelly’s to build a huge fire. Nothing a kid likes better than making a big fire out of driftwood. The guy we thought was Kelly had a platform with a windbreak up on the rocks, no roof. It was made of driftwood and he had his own little fire pit. It was like he lived there.

“Other guys, older guys like firemen, cops and bartenders, hung out there too, and would often chase us kids off. The old guy would swim and run. We assumed that was Kelly.”

Legendary and mysterious Kelly took a daily swim out around Seal Rocks. One day he disappeared on that swim (goes the story) and was never seen again. Another version is that Old Man Kelly died on the beach while exercising on an unusually hot day. In both stories, the end of Kelly was the beginning of Kelly’s Cove, named to honor him.

In 1938, before Cunneen’s time, a man named Samuel Kelly, "well-known to beach habitues," did die on Ocean Beach after his daily swim.

Not more than a couple of years after Samuel’s death do we see the earliest documentation of the name Kelly’s in some truly wonderful 1940s photographs that have been bopping around the Kelly’s Cove Facebook group.

On a driftwood shelter up against the rocks north of the sea wall, just like Pat remembered, a sign reads “Fort Kelly’s Cove.” Here is a shot looking south that shows you where this little clubhouse stood:

Like at Coney Island and Muscle Beach, young people started to loosen up the beach scene in San Francisco. This was the jitterbug era of wild dancing and couples doing things like this:

Did this crowd keep Sam Kelly’s old shelter together and properly christen it in his honor? I’d like to think so. Surf culture fermented in the years after World War II and Ocean Beach even had some Gidget-like ukulele days.

Despite the wholesome young faces above, San Francisco never really had the stereotypical California beach-party scene that Hollywood sold to the world.

Kelly’s had its own unique subculture and vibe, a stew of Aloha spirit from swimmers Eddie Ukini and Cliff Kamaka, outsiders looking for a family, gearheads and tinkerers, firemen like Pat Cunneen and Jim Gallagher, truth seekers, city kids who just couldn’t stay out of the water like Arne Wong and Gary Silberstein, free-spirits like Carol Schuldt, and so many more. They are remembered around a virtual bonfire well tended on Facebook by Armando Stileto and Paul Judge.

At cold, foggy Ocean Beach you needed to be hardy, adventurous, willing to shiver, an individual looking to commune with the limitless void, alone with the waves and the wind, before returning wet and cold to rejoin humanity at the fire.

That’s the spirit of Kelly’s Cove. Remember that it was an atypical hot afternoon that did Samuel Kelly in and embrace those icy mists and these gray days.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund 

Thanks to Ted B. (F.O.W.) for keeping my beverage fund solvent. My email in-box is now down to 237 messages, so I have high hopes of getting out and making a toast with one of you soon. (“To San Francisco!”)

Sources

“Record ’38 Heat Kills Man at Ocean Beach,” San Francisco Examiner, June 1, 1938, pg. 1.

Kelly’s Cove & Ocean Beach Memories Facebook group

Tales from Kelly’s Cove (oral histories recorded in 2013-2014 by Western Neighborhoods Project)