Sunny Cove, Alameda, CA

Sunny Cove, Alameda, CA

Thank you so much, Sally Dietz, for sharing these wonderful great personal memories of yours, with us.

Memories of Sunny Cove, Alameda, California
by Sally Dietz, May 2008

My name is Sally Ann Dietz. I lived at Sunny Cove in Alameda, California with my Grandparents, George Henry Masters and Bertha Catherine Dietz Masters from 1938 until it was sold in 1950. It was my home and family life with George and Bertha Dietz Masters, my beloved Grandparents and the only real parents I ever knew. My parents were divorced and then Grandpa George and Grandma Bertha passed on in the early 1950's after the beach was sold. I miss that life at the beach with my Grandparents everyday. I hope that God will renew our best years in heaven with the place and people we were the most happy with.

I can still smell the Eucalyptus trees which you can barely see standing at the entrance to Sunny Cove Baths in the photo named: Entrance to Sunny Cove Baths Alameda CA. The trees lined the whole length of the east side of the large entrance and parking lot to the beach. There are a group of people standing on the sidewalk visiting at the entrance to the parking lot where the trees start.

We had a restaurant maintained by my Grandmother Bertha. She boiled the hot dogs and made the potato salad and clam chowder fresh everyday. We had an ice cream and candy counter. Who can pass up ice cream, not my family. Sodas, of course, were sold in glass bottles with caps. We had sit down booths in the lunch room with wooden benches and tables. It was spartan, no table clothes or cloth napkins. It was closer to a picnic style lunch room at the beach for dining in your wet bathing suits and sandy bare feet. There was no sign on the door requiring shirts and shoes. You came in for a hot lunch and a cold ice cream as you had just walked out of the salty surf and sandy beach. There were no rugs on the floors anywhere, just wooden plank floors like a deck floor everywhere, inside the lunch room and outside on the spacious decks above the beach. There were wooden benches on all sides of the out door decks.

"Grandpa was getting older in the 1940's. He would lounge on the benches and just watch the people enjoying their leisure days at the beach. It was so relaxed and easy to live there during the warm summer months. Nature was King, we all just live by the seasons. In the winter when the weather got stormy, Grandpa George would go out in the worst of the storms which sent huge waves lashing against the platform built around the large salt water swimming pool. We were always afraid for him, because he would walk around the pool to investigate any damages that may have happened, because of the stormy seas. The beach was closed to the public during the winter, of course. That is when we played a lot of checkers and dominoes sitting together close to the old gas stove with Grandpa's cat, Timothy. We ate a lot of molasses and raisin cookies, which we warmed on top of the stove."

The photos below are taken before the salt water swimming pool was added to the beach area. What a great experience to have lived my early childhood at Sunny Cove Beach with my wonderful Grandparents. Nothing has ever come close to those happy days since then.