After college, I ended up sharing an apartment in Ocean Beach with a college buddy. It was a pretty good situation: We were both interested in the ongoing Computer Revolution, and shared an affinity for the blues.
Ray had a Kaypro luggable computer running the CP/M operating system; I had an Atari 800. More to the point; we both had dial-up modems, and would take turns going online and visiting various local dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. (Only having a single phone line, we had to coordinate our online sessions.)
At the time, San Diego was home to a weekly computer magazine, The Byte Buyer. When the national computer magazine Byte sued for trademark infringement, Byte Buyer became the intentionally misspelled ComputorEdge.
The magazine published a directory of local BBSs each week, giving us a nice guide to the nascent online world.
For those who weren’t around then, BBSs were how one went online in the 1980s if one did not have access to a university or military ARPAnet account. (It was the ARPAnet that, when it was opened to the public, was renamed the Internet.)
You’d buy a telecom program for your computer, and then use it to connect to your modem and dial in to the BBS of your choice. It was a text-only environment at first (although primitive ASCII graphics came toward the end of the 1980s, and then ANSI graphics shortly after). You could read forums, play online text-based games (“Barren Realms Elite” was a personal favorite), and if you had an account on a BBS on the FidoNet, even send email to anyone else with a FidoNet account.
Both Ray and I ended up gravitating to the People’s Message System, hosted by Bill Blue and Morgan Davis. A lot of programmers hung out on PMS, as well as some of the early ComiCon organizers, and some of the San Diego Computer Society officers — even though SDCS had its own dial-up BBS. It had an active “sub” (forums) area, with some pretty feisty exchanges.
But as with all communities, it was the members that made it special.
Before Ray and I found it, some of the PMS members had organized a sky-diving trip — calling themselves the PMS Commandoes. Later, after the BBS changed its name to PdBMS (and I honestly no longer remember what that stood for), the guys organized a team to go compete at the local paint-ball arena. That was grand fun.
Somehow, Ray parlayed friendships made on PMS into writing for ComputorEdge. When Ron Dippold left the magazine, Ray put in a good word for me and I ended up taking over the BBS column (and updating the directory).
Now I was getting paid to visit local BBSs, and so spent more time visiting other boards to review. Still, I always considered PdBMS to be my “home” board.
One of the reasons I stayed on PdBMS over the years was because of the hilarious posts of Lyle D., who at the time held the contract to run the concessions — snack bar, bait shop, boat rental — at Dixon Lake in Escondido.
I was living down in Ocean Beach at the time, and Interstate 15 north of Naval Air Station Miramar was still a two-lane highway — so Escondido seemed much further away from San Diego than it does today when I-15 is 5 lanes in both directions.
So Lyle’s fanciful tales of the Lake Dixon Party Barge — with the topless Scandinavian beauties cavorting in the warm sunshine while partaking of the sumptuous buffets and well-stocked bar — seemed to us to be mirages from over the horizon.
After a year or so of reading Lyle’s posts on PdBMS about the Lake Dixon Party Barge, Ray and I decided to drive up and check this out. We were a couple of single guys, and it seemed the perfect way to spend a Saturday.
I don’t remember if we drove up in Ray’s vintage VW bus or my ’67 Mustang fastback, but we used our Thomas Brothers map book to find our way to Lake Dixon — the last mile or so a tightly winding two-lane road up a pretty steep incline.
We stopped at the guard shack, paid our entry fee, and then drove the half-mile or so to the concession on the lakefront.
After parking, we walked over to the snack bar and asked for Lyle. He was off that day we found out. No problem, we told the young woman working the snack bar, but could we see the Lake Dixon Party Barge and possibly rent it out?
She just stared at us like we’d started speaking in Swahili.
“You mean the fishing barge?” she finally asked, nodding over to the dock.
As we looked over to the sad, grey, beat-up little pontoon boat, our faces must have betrayed our disappointment.
We ended up hiking a bit around the lake that day. Lake Dixon is a small, manmade reservoir that collects rainwater in the winter and then is used to supply the city with water the rest of the year.
I have returned to Lake Dixon many times over the years after I married and moved north. Both my sons’ Scout units went on camping trips there, and this last Saturday I was there to see a Cub Scout pack that my Kiwanis club sponsors bridge their Webelos over to a couple Boy Scout troops.
As I was leaving under a cold overcast, I did slow as I drove by the dock. I didn’t see a pontoon boat still there, 35 years later.
But to be honest, Lake Dixon is not the sort of place where a loud party barge would fit in — Lake Havasu it isn’t. It’s mostly families and Scout units getting in some back to nature time — hiking, fishing, catching up on some reading, enjoying an evening campfire.
Hordes of scantily-clad supermodels cavorting in an alcohol-fueled haze to the sound of loud music from a dee-jay probably would have made the evening news in San Diego at some point. But Lyle’s tales were so well drawn that I think Ray and I just wanted them to be true, no matter how unlikely we knew them to be.
Still, last Saturday, looking over the sleepy little suburban lake in the foothills above town, I once again tipped my cap to Lyle’s fertile imagination — and pictured him sitting in the office at the bait shop writing these crazy stories before hitting “Send.”
-30-
I had access to ARPANET back in the 1970s on an IBM 360/370-165. Punched card decks, baby!