Face it, Orange County: You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
At least not people in Hermosa Beach, where resident/activist Geoff Hirsch yesterday revealed a once top secret Orange County nefarious plot to takeover his city's surfing wares businesses.
And those of us in OC can only blame ourselves. You see, if our Huntington Beach hadn't grabbed the title “Surf City, USA” from the Chicago Tribune, Hermosa Beach citizens–who insist, absurdly, the title is rightly theirs–wouldn't have been on the lookout for our sneak attack.
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Why should we have settled for just a title when we could possess both the title and control surf shops in Hermosa Beach?
Meanwhile, news of our plot has alarmed and angered the surfing community in Hermosa.
I'm not making this up. Here's Hirsch in
his July 22 report in the HermosaBeach.Patch.com:
“Jack's Surfboards, headquartered in Orange County, will be taking over the vacant storefront near the corner of 17th Street and Pacific Coast Highway at the end of this month, prompting a huge backlash in the local surf community that's suspicious of the commercial franchise [my emphasis].”
And why the backlash and suspicions of one of Southern California's proudest businesses launched in Huntington Beach in 1957?
“Surfers are traditionally territorial,” explained Hirsch, who didn't mention that dogs and Latino gangs share the same laudable attribute.
He also noted that folks who wander outside their own turf can be “brutally beaten” and cites an example.
(Note: It's just 20 miles along the Pacific coast between Hermosa and OC.)
Yet, Hermosa resident Adrienne Coco called the arrival of Jack's Surfboards at the location “lame,” apparently content for the space to have remained empty.
Locals have even created a Facebook page: Don't go to Jack's Surfboards.
Sad, but I admit I'm bummed more by our inability to carry out a stealth operation on a piddily city whose greatest contribution to civilization is actor Jack Black.
What will Hermosa folks do when they discover that Irvine-based Taco Bell has also infiltrated their city?
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
