The Bird Rock train station was tiny and architecturally fitting, built from rocks from the area shores. It was the only structure in sight standing next to a dirt road and a field of scrub near what is now La Jolla Hermosa. Train tracks had once run along the dirt road but the city had pulled them in 1918 to lay down trolley tracks nearby instead. The black-and-white photo hung at the hamburger joint, Boll Weevil, and it had captivated Philomène Offen, who has lived on La Jolla Hermosa for the past 37 years. The photo disappeared when Boll Weevil went bankrupt last year. Offen frantically searched for the photo fearing it would be destroyed. Her search quickly progressed into a 250-hour-long project to piece together parts of Bird Rock’s history, which ultimately led to the creation of the Bird Rock History Museum that opened in November. The museum is essentially a small exhibit that hangs on a wall at the coffee shop, Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, at 5627 La Jolla Blvd. “I discovered that Bird Rock had more history than I could ever imagine,” Offen said. Offen spent hours tracking down La Jolla High School alumni, researching the San Diego Historical Society and flipping through archives of the La Jolla Light newspaper. She began to make friends with octogenarians who possess valuable memories and archives. Offen found dozens of photos at the San Diego Historical Society for $40 a pop. “It was heartbreaking,” Offen said. “I was drooling all over these photos. If I had $1,600, I would have bought all 40 of them.” Offen said she had never undertaken a history project before. She is now retired after working as an administrative assistant at the University of California, San Diego for 21 years. Chronologically, the exhibit starts with photos of Japanese farmers at the turn of the 20th century who grew vegetables on vast, flat farms spreading across Bird Rock and Pacific Beach before the government rounded them up and sent them to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. Like many small communities, world history touched Bird Rock in significant ways but left no visible traces or memorials when the times changed. During World War II, the U.S. Navy stationed a gunnery school at the foot of the Calumet cliffs. The location of the school was not publicized in newspapers to avoid attack, but it became a great source of entertainment for neighborhood kids who kept a close ear to the radio to wait for parachuting “targets” to land on streets nearby if the sailors failed to shoot them down. The adolescents often got to the parachutes first and striped them bare of their engines and radios before the Navy could arrive to retrieve them. The exhibit shows a photo of a young boy poking his head out from within a silk parachute. A grave tragedy struck off the shores of Bird Rock in 1917 when two submarines collided during a foggy storm. Nineteen sailors died and a submarine sank, which remains at the bottom of the ocean adjacent to Bird Rock to this day. Charles Lindbergh apparently ate his last meal at the Bird Rock Inn before departing for his transatlantic flight. The restaurant had been built from smooth stones brought up from the Shores, and is now a private residence on Dolphin Place. The exhibit also shows there are elements of history that continue to recycle themselves as part and parcel of community and democratic life. Twenty-nine residents gathered to protest an unwanted neighborhood development in 1946 when Standard Oil proposed building two more gasoline storage tanks on a resident’s property. The neighbors ultimately prevailed. “It was the first example of community activism in Bird Rock,” Offen said. Since the advent of the car, calming traffic has continued to dominate community planning as newspaper articles show from the 1950s. Bird Rock Elementary School has bounced between having too few students and facing the threat of closure in 1981 and presently as the school district contemplates closing the school to save money – to a time when the school couldn’t accept all its students in 2003. The exhibit ends with a question to the community: “Should the community resurrect the rock sign that once spelled out ‘Bird Rock’ atop the scrub bluffs?” Responses so far have been varied. Offen never did discover who had placed the white washed rocks there in the first place or who had cut the brush around them to keep the rock sign visible, but she did track down a La Jolla alum living in Hawaii who admitted mischievously to rearranging the rocks to spell out “Turd Rock.” A photo of the prank hangs in the exhibit. During her investigation, Offen learned that Bird Rock was largely disregarded by the La Jolla village as a place where its working class employees lived. Offen said she had difficulty unearthing history about the community. “Bird Rock was never where the mover and shakers lived,” Offen said. “It was where the help for the village lived, and a place to drive through…Even to this day, a lot of people don’t consider Bird Rock to be a part of La Jolla.” Offen welcomes photos and stories to contribute to the history museum. E-mail her at [email protected]. The museum is located at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters at 5627 La Jolla Blvd., which is open Mondays through Fridays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.