My Master’s degree field experience working for the Los Angeles Board of Education at their School camps at Clear Creek in the Los Angeles mountains and Point Fermin Lighthouse Marine Camp on the coast.

After completing my Masters courses and my Graduation Teaching Responsibilities at Springfield College, I headed west with my new Volkswagen 1967 Camper with my wife Jeri and two year old son Dean Mead. We had 3,000 miles to go to get to Los Angeles in early June 1967. We were to spend two weeks in the mountains at 5,000 feet above sea level at Clear Creek School camp and eight weeks as Assistant Camp Director at the Point Fermin Lighthouse Marine camp.

Each week the Point Fermin lighthouse camp which was in the middle of a public park on the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean would receive 80 students from different school districts in the Los Angeles Board of Education district; Watts, Lincoln, Hollywood Hills, Anaheim and several other districts all came each week. The students all slept in large Army tents set up in the park next to a 20 foot hedge next to the lighthouse.

We took the student on tide pooling trips down the 300 foot steep cliffs, daily trips to the Cabrillo beach, once a week trip to a Harbor tour in a water taxi and camp fires at night on the Cabrillo beach. We ate our meals in the park. The food came from a local elementary school in heater stacks to keep the food warm. On the weekends we were free to explore Mexico and California.

I was selected to do the Harbor Tour which 40 students went in the morning and 40 in the afternoon. The first day I had to wing it, and eventually I got better and better in pointing out tankers vs. freighters, countries of origin, the Harbor Masters house, the Coast Guard station, marine terms, and so on.

The following pictures give an idea of how varied the activities were based on solid ecology of the sea.