The closing of the restaurant Red Sails Inn on Sept. 1 was a notable alteration along Byron Street mole, which connected the mainland to the unlovely shoal that would become Shelter Island. Entrepreneur Jack Allen Davis Jr. opened Red Sails Inn on Jan. 27, 1957. But his adventurous influence was felt elsewhere as San Diego’s island playground began to take shape.
The original 1930s Red Sails Inn had been located on the old Fisherman’s Wharf at the foot of Market and G streets. Jack’s parents enjoyed a friendship with its founder, Joe Viery. Thus the sentiment for the $1 Jack paid to the city for rights to the restaurant’s name.
“I got started in 1942 as a teenager with a boat rental business out on ‘Sandy Point’ off Qualtrough Street, kinda boot-leggin’ it on the waterfront,” Jack said in a 2003 interview. “I built a small dock out of driftwood and gave people rides in my speed boat for a fee.” To his advantage, Jack’s mother was a cousin of San Diego’s harbor master, Joe Brennan. It wasn’t but a couple of years, however, when San Diego’s new port director caught up with Jack. “Oh, boy, here he came driving down there in a company car,” Jack said. “Told me his name was John Bate. Asked if I had a lease. I told him, no.”
“Well, you’re going to damn need one! You’re encroaching on the rights of the harbor,” Bate said, “and you’d better get your business over to the other side of the basin!”
In 1949, Jack negotiated a lease from the Harbor Department for a parcel of land 100 by 150 feet (and 200 feet into the water) on the north side of Byron Street mole, at the site of what would become Red Sails Inn. It was conveniently located between Kettenburg boatyard and High Seas tuna cannery. Jack had added a fuel dock and boat-launching ramp in his business venture.
Hungry cannery workers ate hotdogs and chili from Jack’s 24-by 12-foot lunch counter that he called Point Loma Cove. It was affectionately known as “Ulcer Gulch.” Jack’s daughter, Jeanette Davis, says that her mother and grandmother cooked that food. “We wanted to catch workers before they left for Rosecrans Street to eat.” “They’d come over in aprons and smellin’ like fish,” Jack said. “Cannery docks where fish was off-loaded were just next door to my place.”
As Shelter Island was raised to a usable island paradise, Bate confronted Jack about his launching boats from his dock behind Point Loma Cove. “I told John Bate,” Jack said, “well, these guys need someplace to go in and out of the water, so I charge ‘em two bucks a piece to launch a boat and and haul ‘em out.”
“Let’s get in the city car and you pick out a spot where you think a public launch ought to be on this island,” Bate insisted. The two drove along Shelter Island, Jack suggesting that the ramp ought to be half way down the island. “Put it right there,” Jack pointed. The ramp would need to be made of concrete, have a dock, and a jetty to enclose the launching area. Vessels traveling the bay cause wake, which makes it difficult for launching an untied boat. And, so it was done as Jack suggested.
In 1954, Jack Davis and a partner, sail-maker Herb Sinnhoffer, bought the 150-slip boat marina (adjacent to what would become San Diego Yacht Club) and renamed it Point Loma Anchorage. Davis had a broker’s license and sold yachts from here. In the mix was also a small U.S. Coast Guard station where Sinnhoffer sewed his sails.
Three years later, a deal was hammered out with John Bate, whereby San Diego Yacht Club would take over Point Loma Anchorage. Davis would then secure a long-term lease on land for a bigger restaurant, slightly east of ‘Ulcer Gulch.’ Jack built Red Sails Inn in 1957, and added the Oyster Bar not long after. He sold 60/40-interest of Red Sails Inn to his business manager, Carl Reid, in 1959. Jack wanted out of the restaurant business and sold his remaining interest in 1966. The restaurant trade at Red Sails Inn simply fueled Jack’s passion for flying airplanes. Read the book before you fly ‘em!
Davis was also a high-flying speculator who bought, flew, and sold World War II surplus aircraft with daring competence. He had learned to fly at age 12 with Bill Gibbs who later formed Gibbs Flying Service at Montgomery Field.
Jack was fond of old Bill Gibbs and stayed close to him over the years. As a historian, I had looked forward to driving Jack to Gibbs’ home on a July day in 2005. But that very morning, ahead of my arrival, Jack suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, which took his life one year later. Ironically, at the writing of this story, I have learned that Bill Gibbs died Oct. 30 at his home in La Jolla. Gibbs was 106 years old.
“I was crazy about airplanes,” Jack said. Born in 1922 at the infancy of American aviation, imagine Jack’s infatuation when this country began producing engines to power its own aircraft. Just three years earlier, by the end of World War I, Americans had flown into combat using European-designed airplanes.
“There were darn few airplanes toolin’ around in those days,” Jack said, “but my dad knew a Western Auto clerk who owned an old parasol-wing Fairchild 22. Another friend had a 1928 Inland Sport. They kept them in a hangar side-by-each out in Camp Kearny, where Miramar Air Station is now. They used to take me up in their airplanes and let me fly ‘em a little bit.”
When World War II broke out, the airspace over San Diego was restricted to military aircraft. Personal airplanes were dismantled and hidden away for safe-keeping. “Flying came to a screaming halt for me again,” Jack said, “so I joined the Civil Air Patrol.” (Jack had had a painful bone disease as a child that prevented him from military service.) Flying Piper Cubs and Taylor Crafts, the air patrol pilots would go out on airport inspections to make sure emergency fields were safe after bad weather, or look for lost military aircraft. “We had uniforms, but no guns!”
Next venture: A 20-year lease on the county’s Palomar Airport in 1959. “We built and served as the fix base operator for the field,” Jack said. They ran an FAA-approved repair station for airplanes, a radio repair shop, the bus service to and from the Del Mar Race Track, Shell Oil’s airplane fuel facilities, and flight instructions ground school for pilots. Interestingly, Jack’s Palomar flight instructor, Jim McFaren, later flew for Pacific Southwest Airlines. It was his jet that crashed over North Park in 1978 on approach to Lindbergh Field, killing all 144 people on board.
“It wasn’t Jim’s fault,” Jack said. “A small aircraft clipped the jet’s starboard wing. Jim was a hell of a pilot!” Over the years Jack owned 49 aircraft. The first World War II surplus airplanes he bought were four Ryan PT-22s. “Flew them home from Arizona; I had never flown one before. I just read the book and took off.”
Eight Consolidated-build BT-13s were bigger and faster. Next, Jack bought “four, hot-son-of-a-gun AT-6s with 600 HP. “I was never checked out in any of these planes, “Jack said. “You had to be a pretty good pilot when you bought war surplus. You’d go to the war-assets base with your bill-of-sale as the high bidder. If you couldn’t fly the plane, you had to get somebody who could.”
Then Jack purchased eight Fairchild PT-26s with his partner, ‘Sailor Main’ for $775 each. Main operated a car dealership on Pacific Highway. “We had an AT-6 sitting on the car lot and 100 cars parked in the way. Sailor had a notion we’d go look at some PT-26s in Fargo, N.D. Late one night I rolled that plane off the curb, and taxied down Pacific Highway and into the back gate at Lindbergh Field. It was amusing to bar patrons.” Two of Jack’s AT-6s were sold as instrument trainers for the new Pacific Southwest Airlines. There were heavier aircraft, the B-25s, the first twin-engine surplus planes Jack had flown. And there were dangerous aircraft: Two Douglas A-26s, with 2000 HP on each wing. A flight inspector once told Jack, “You be sure to keep your approach speed up to 145 miles an hour on that A-26 before you ever throttle back. Those things can let go and drop right out from under you.”
Jack bought amphibians: A Sea Bee, and the giant PBY-5A with a wingspan of 104 feet. “Thank heavens I read the book before I flew this one!” Jack said. “On the flight from the assets base to Palomar we found we had no hydraulic fluid for brakes, and we had a landing gear problem so we dropped ‘em manually.” Clever Jack managed to land the plane short on the runway to give it room to coast to nearly a stop.
A war assets base was Jack’s toy store. He bought a five-passenger Howard in South Carolina. “I’d never flown one of these and they were miserable to land. I looked down at the end of the runway as I took off and saw a pile of ‘em from inexperienced pilots.”
Jack found an English-made DeHaviland Dove that had been used for sight seeing over the Grand Canyon. Two hot-rod Beech Craft Bonanzas were all in Jack’s flight path.
A visit to San Diego’s Aerospace Museum with Jack was like taxiing a familiar runway. He’d point to a portrait of, for example, Walter Beech of Beech Craft and chat about his flying buddy, Tommy Warner, who married Beech’s daughter. Rueben Fleet bought Jack’s wooded motorboat Daphne in the 1950s. And on Sunday mornings, Claude Ryan gassed up his Fairliner at Jack’s fuel pump on Shelter Island. Old age grounded Jack Davis, that devil who dawdles with eyesight and reflexes. Red Sails Inn has given up its ghost, too. But isn’t it nice to be remembered.