Capturing the golden history of Balboa

Everyone on the island has a story about why they came here.

And Tina Wayt wants to document them all.

“We’re trying to capture the magic,” she said on a recent afternoon, as a whirring fan pushed air around the Balboa Island Museum and Historical Society’s small main room. Framed black and white photos of sailboats and coy women clad in old-fashioned bathing suits covered the walls. “What is it? What is it that makes this place so lovely?”

There’s Marcia Working, now 81, who slept in the rumble seat of her uncle’s Ford convertible during the summer of 1936 while her great-grandmother’s summer beach house was built around her — she said about a third of the lots were developed at the time. Later, she returned with her own family.

There’s Michael Romo, who was fascinated by a mysterious woman who appeared to sit in one house’s scalloped, copper-roofed tower as a child. Now, he lives in the house, and has kept the manikin, “Matilda,” in her perch, as he renovates using the structure’s original blueprints.

Then there’s Wayt herself, who remembers stumbling across her first “perfect” house on the Island in 1987.

A 34-year flight attendant, she’d visited exotic locales around the globe. But, pregnant and “ready to pop,” she decided Balboa Island was the place she wanted to call home.

“I’ve been around the world — I really have,” she said. “And I come over that bridge, and you know what I say? ‘Ahhh.’”

But Balboa Island — self-contained both in geography and small-town identity — is changing.

Manmade from a sandbar in the first few years of the 20th century, Balboa and Little Balboa islands have about 1,400 houses.

Though many of the island’s original bungalows built in the ‘20s and ‘30s have been preserved, more and more old summer homes are being torn down in favor of the kinds of mansions fit to be the full-time residences of modern Newport families.

So, with help from the museum’s former president Sharon Lambert, Wayt decided to make it her mission to document every house on the island — as quickly as possible.

“I would hit a block, and honest to goodness, two weeks later, a house would be gone,” Wayt said. “We’re racing against the clock.”

Wayt, slim and dressed with the stylish practicality of an art curator on the weekend, described setting up a ladder, then scrabbling up with her camera in front of each house.

Along the way, she said, residents would come out to ask what she was doing. She’d tell them about her project, and they’d tell her their stories.

Wayt said trends started to emerge.

In the ‘40s, houses started to be built with insulation.

In the postwar period, starting in about the mid-’50s, the island took on a party atmosphere, as California experienced a boom.

“They were building schools and they didn’t have enough teachers, so they actually recruited teachers from the Midwest,” Wayt said. “There were all these young women who came to California, and many of them found themselves on Balboa Island.”

Another growing population at that time, of course, happened to be servicemen.

“It was like a party going on, with all these single school teachers and military men,” she said. “A lot of people fell in love and got married.”

Some of those couples, she said, have stayed around.

Each address has its own timeline, Wayt found, and those histories were often the best entrees into the lives of the people who have lived there over the years. She started a drive to find “block captains” to go door-to-door asking residents to share their memories — a kind of analog crowd-sourcing.

And that’s the goal of the museum, which was founded in 2000 and moved to its current spot tucked off the main tourist thoroughfare, Marine Avenue, in 2011. The museum is run entirely by volunteers and survives off donations, and grants that average about $16,000 per year from the city of Newport Beach.

Lambert said the move has been good for business.

“Twenty, 40, 50 people come through in a day now,” she said, adding that’s pretty good for a museum of their size.

“People are hungry for this stuff,” Wayt added. “They’re hungry for the history of their special paradise.”

Ultimately, Wayt said, she and Lambert hope to have a kiosk set up with an iPad, where visitors can browse the museum’s full archive, which will also be online.

Click on an address, she said, and ideally, photos showing the house there as it’s looked over time will pop up, alongside oral histories from its residents. Then, Wayt said, she hopes visitors will be moved to add memories of their own, whether they stayed for a few days, or decades.

And the museum’s docents have a voracious appetite for memorabilia of all kinds, eagerly storing yellowed newspaper clippings and prints in an office next door to the museum.

But, despite the island’s tiny size, creating an archive of more than a century’s worth of history nearly from scratch is no small task. Just getting photos of every house took a couple of years, Wayt said, and recruiting more volunteers is an ongoing process.

The Internet, too, has given past residents or visitors another avenue to contribute to the museum’s collection.

Eventually, everything that comes in will be scanned and cataloged by Bob Dennerline. So far, he’s added about 2,500 items to the online archive.

Dennerline, who’s lived on the island for around 13 years, said he got involved with the museum a couple of years ago, after being recruited by neighbors.

The 60-year-old insurance broker doesn’t have any background in archiving or research, and some of the work is tedious, to be sure.

Still, he felt compelled to help the cause.

“This is an important time,” he said. “If we don’t get a lot of this stuff now, it’ll be gone forever.”

For more information, or to see the museum’s online archive go to balboaislandmuseum.org.