Point Loma High School’s Class of 1950 Gets Together

What makes someone in San Diego a local is sometimes debatable, but it’s hard to dispute the status of the folks who got together for the 60th reunion of Point Loma High School’s class of 1950 on September 24.

The Hawaiian-themed event was held at the Bay View Restaurant at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. During lunch, I asked three attendees if they’d answer questions from a class-of-1995 Pointer. Marshall Milton smiled. “I hope you can understand us,” he joked, “because we speak Old Fogey.”

Milton was sitting with Eric Brelin and William Howard Mayfield. “I still live in the same house I was raised in, on Bermuda,” said Mayfield, who played on Point Loma’s championship football team in 1949. Mayfield remembered a road game when the Pointer footballers realized their belts weren't packed with the rest of their equipment. “I had to tackle with one hand holding my pants up,” he laughed.

Brelin, who grew up in a house near the corner of Rosecrans and Bessemer streets, said he remembered keeping horses tethered in a vacant lot across the street. “We rode horses all the way up and down the beach,” Brelin said. “There had to be flies all over the neighborhood, but nobody said a word.”

Milton said that, as a youth, he swam in the saltwater of the Silver Spray Plunge near the foot of Niagara Avenue. Brelin remembered seeing movies at the Strand Theatre for ten cents per ticket.