The Fox and the Weasel sipped beer on the patio of the Pennant bar last week and talked about the old days at the Beachcomber next door. They were reaching way back – to 1961, the year Al Leonard sold his Pacific Highway taco stand and used the proceeds to buy the Beachcomber, a bar which would become south Mission Beach’s premier landmark and Mission Boulevard’s rowdiest address. The Fox and the Weasel, ageless and sun-tanned archivists of Mission Beach history, laughed about how they used to buy hamburgers, an order of French fries, and a slice of strawberry pie at the hamburger stand next to the Beachcomber. The nickel or dime they got back in change from their dollar bill wasn’t enough for the 15-cent beer at the Beachcomber, but they didn’t fret. “If we timed it right, we didn’t need any change,” reminisced the Fox. “There was always free beer at the Beachcomber at six.”

Free beer every night at 6:00 p.m., pinball machines, a sidewalk full of bicycles and “hard young bodies,” OMBAC members planning next summer’s Over-the-line tourney, junior Navy officers from Coronado complaining about the Vietnam War, and nicknames — “Lowlife,” “Grumpy,” “Chisel Chin,” “Pig Pen,” – everybody had a nickname. That was the Beachcomber.

But last month the bar on Mission Boulevard near San Gabriel Place was closed. It will reopen sometime this summer under new ownership, with the same name but minus much of the atmosphere that made its earlier reputation. The interior already looks neater as workers tear out the mishmash of lighting fixtures and electrical sockets that protruded from the ceiling. The outside looks forlorn, though, for a bar one long-time customer romantically referred to as “a classic, British-style neighborhood pub.” Two “Iranians Go Home” bumper stickers are plastered to the front door, and the hand-painted signs boldly advising that “The Beachcomber Features Lady Bartenders Wednesday Nights…” and “You Must be 21 to Enter… No Rollerskates…This is Not a Public restroom,” are buckled and weather-beaten.

In the late Sixties and through the Seventies, the Beachcomber was sometimes so crowded that customers spilled out onto the sidewalk, blocking foot traffic. “The firemen used to come by and order no one else to go inside,” recalls one regular. “They’d nail up a sign that said ‘Maximum Occupancy 200.’ After they left, some guy would always add another zero to the 200 and make it 2000.”

“It was a wonderful beer bar, frequented by young professionals, scantily clad women, and bicycles,” says another Beachcomber alumnus, who, like several of his friends, met his wife at the bar. “Ask anyone what they remember, and they’ll say bicycles… they were parked all over the place. You didn’t necessarily take home your own bike, because when you finished there you couldn’t always remember which was yours, but nobody seemed to care much.”

Often the customers couldn’t even recognize the Beachcomber’s interior since “remodeling” was a daily activity. “That place was always being renovated,” one former patron recalled. “You never knew where the tables or walls would be or how the ceiling would look. They even used to move the bar around.”

South Mission Beach residents had little warning that the Beachcomber was closing, although the bar’s popularity began sliding in 1979. Some former patrons say they began to feel unwelcome as relations between management and guests were sometimes less than cordial, and rumors of financial problems surfaced. There was always cross traffic between the Beachcomber and the neighboring Pennant, as they were the only two bars south of Belmont Park, but this movement back and forth became one-sided with the opening of the “new” Pennant in July, 1980. With its refurbished downstairs bar and a wood-decked, open-air upstairs patio, the Pennant shed its dowdy image and became the favored drinking spot on a sunny day. So the Beachcomber’s owners, Al “Zeus” Dwyer and Bobby “Boomer” Blasch, who started there as bartenders in the late Sixties, split up and closed shop on Tuesday. (Dwyer now sells beer for Mesa Distributing; Blasch has temporarily left San Diego.)

Dick Kovalcheck, an ex-tuna fisherman who purchased and renovated the Pennant, figures that even without the eccentricities that made the Beachcomber a landmark, the “new” Beachcomber will still attract an instant clientele when it reopens. And Kovalcheck doesn’t mind, because he’s never seen the Beachcomber as competition for his bar. “On a good summer Sunday, we’ll get 800, maybe a thousand people through here,” he says of the Pennant. “I just can’t handle that many people, and we have to turn some of them away at the door. There’s nowhere else they can drink here in south Mission now that the Beachcomber’s closed, so they get mad and leave. Who needs that?”