Why Nobody Wants to Visit Pismo Beach

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store Pismo Beach, California, once produced seven hundred thousand pounds of clams in a single year. The state let each person take two hundred home in a day. Bugs Bunny tunneled across the continent to get there. The town called itself the Clam Capital of the World, started an annual Clam Festival, and put a concrete clam statue at the entrance to Price Street. Then the clams vanished. The commercial fishery was shut down in 1947. The US 101 freeway bypassed downtown in 1961. Sea otters moved south along the Central Coast. And by the early 1990s, not a single legal-size Pismo clam could be found on the beach that bore their name. The town didn’t die. It thrived on hotel taxes and tourism. But for forty years, it celebrated a clam that wasn’t there. This is the story of what happened to the Pismo clam — and what happens to a place that loses the one thing it was. Sources: California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “Pismo Clam Enhanced Status Report,” Marine Species Portal — marinespecies.wildlife.ca.gov California Department of Fish and Game, “Review of the Fishery: Commercial Pismo Clam Fishery,” Fish Bulletin — nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=34413 Ruttenberg, B. et al., Cal Poly Center for Coastal Marine Sciences, Pismo Clam Population Survey (2020–2022) — bailey.calpoly.edu/news/return-pismo-clams “Overture to a Clambake,” Sports Illustrated, November 7, 1955 — vault.si.com “Ali Baba Bunny,” dir. Chuck Jones, Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies, February 9, 1957 Experience Pismo Beach, “Pismo Beach History” — experiencepismobeach.com/plan/history