Arts & Entertainment
Aquarium Founders to Speak for Community Interactive Forum
The article discusses the challenges and rewards the founders of the Roundhouse Aquarium had in the 1970s and 1980s.
Aquarium Founders to Speak for Community Interactive Forum
As the Manhattan Beach Roundhouse Aquarium Teaching Center continues on its path to renovation and beautification, its founders will look back at how it all started. The presentation will take place Tuesday, July 24 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM in the Manhattan Beach Library at 1320 Highland Avenue.
Six dedicated people came together in the 1970s to propose that the abandoned, unseemly Roundhouse building at the end of the Manhattan Beach pier be made into a marine studies center where school children could learn about the ocean, its environment, and its animals. They had an uphill battle stalled by politics, red tape, and the desire of some to put a restaurant in the building.
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However, in 1979, they were given permission to use the Roundhouse for a modest marine education program. Their first chore was to scrape the dead fish off the floor and walls of the Roundhouse—fish that had been thrown there by some of the undesirables that roamed the pier in the 1970s. The six formed a tiny non-profit, Oceanographic Teaching Stations (OTS), a group that still operates the Roundhouse today.
It took the founders two years to get their program under way—two years of struggles, persistence, and occasional exhilaration. The four living founders—Evelyn Hannah Roland, Dick Fruin, Lindell Marsh, and Cheryl Marsh—will tell their amazing story at a Community Interactive Forum. They will be joined by Wendy Gault, the first Executive Director, and Roger Gediman, a member of a group of middle school volunteers who helped the facility through its beginning years. Lynne Gross, an author and past OTS Board President will moderate the discussion and biologist and current OTS Board President, John Roberts, will give an update on the current Roundhouse remodel.
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The event will be hosted by the MB Senior Citizens Resources Committee, the County of Los Angeles MB Library, the Roundhouse Aquarium, MB Pioneers, MB Parks & Recreation, MB Conservancy, and the MB Historical Society. It is the seventh in a series of monthly meetings about significant local events. The event is free, and all are welcome. Light refreshments are served, compliments of Friends of the Manhattan Beach Library.
