Ed & Teresa Stiglic

The Images in this gallery were mostly captured near Leucadia, California, or various locations related to the Ed and Teresa Stiglic family. Pictures here date from the early Sixties to present day. The Stiglics have been lifetime friends, and Eddie and I grew up across the street from each other in a working-class Anaheim housing tract. My parents moved to California in 1956 when I was 10 and Eddie was only 7 years old. The day my family moved into a pink stucco house, Eddie pulled up to introduce himself on a bicycle apparently made from parts of a dozen bikes. Eddie was the neighborhood mechanical genus, and he kept the local boys’ bikes and cars running smoothly throughout our youth. It was only natural that Ed would one day start a successful machine shop, http://www.stigtec.com/index.html Stigtec, located in San Marcos. The neighborhood where the Stiglics and the Ganns lived a real-life version of “Happy Days” was known The Buck Homes. Our fathers came home to Chevy Chase Drive in the evening dirty from their work in factories and shops. Ed and I were raised by men who had been to war and who spoke to their sons in the hard language of seasoned soldiers. They wore their names on their shirts with pride, and entered the front door like kings carrying their big black lunch pails in callused hands. These photographs then partly chronicle and provide brief glimpses into the lives of two Orange County boys from such a blue-collar upbringing. Ed and I came of age in the California sun, and by the early Seventies we had wives, children, and grown-up lives of our own. In the early Seventies Ed and his wife Teresa moved from Anaheim to a three-acre crane yard on Ponto Lane just South of Carlsbad owned by Teresa’s Father, Harry Cottam . Though rustic, the crane yard was beautifully situated along the ocean in the middle of thousands of acres of blossoming ranunculus. In the spring the North San Diego County area was transformed to a splendid tapestry of blooms from the foothills to the ocean. I was usually there with my camera to document the annual wonder. Eventually the Stiglics bought their own home, a small cottage on La Costa Avenue. They raised their children Jennifer and Brian in an avocado grove on a high hill overlooking Batiquitos Lagoon, the ocean, the painted flower fields. The Stiglic cottage grew with the success of the family business, and is now an area landmark known as “The Leucadia Rock House.” Pictures taken at the family’s desert house in Borrego Springs are also included in this gallery. My first wife Diane, our son Billy and I would often visited the Stiglic paradise in Seventies. Photographs here are from a collection of slides taken long ago and then sequestered in a dark closet. Most of these photographs were never seen by the Stiglics, nor were they printed or projected. So it is I free these good memories here as thanks to the Stiglics for many years of both friendship and free surf-side lodging. In addition, work is now in progress on earlier black and white images that will also be posted here soon.